The Traditional Funnel and Buyer’s Journey

Digital Marketing - Study Notes:

What is the Buyer’s Journey?

When developing your digital marketing strategy, it’s important to develop a good understanding of the Buyer’s Journey. In simple terms, this is the process – or journey – that a buyer goes through to become aware of, evaluate, and purchase a new product or service.

Originally visualized as a funnel, the Buyer’s Journey outlines the buyer’s path towards ultimately purchasing a product or service. This journey can look different, depending on the industry or product you are associated with. However, the funnel usually has five main stages:

• Awareness
• Interest
• Consideration
• Conversion, and
• Retention

The changing journey

Throughout the years, the Buyer’s Journey has evolved from a more traditional funnel to a non-linear model, both of which will be detailed in this section.

You should aim to create a version of your own Buyer’s Journey based on research, especially psychographic research. This will add more precision to the general models available and give you a view of your own customers as they engage with your digital marketing material. You’ll gain insights into their lifestyle preferences, beliefs, ideas, and opinions, and how these factors influence them along their journey.

Example: Adidas

For example, Adidas wanted to ensure that more relevant people got to see the brand’s message. By delivering the right message at the right point in the funnel, Adidas could improve its marketing effectiveness. This meant delivering aspirational brand lifestyle messages at the top of the funnel to raise awareness and interest, but giving specific product information, such as shoe ranges, lower in the funnel when buyers were likely to convert.

Adidas also wanted to boost the relevancy by incredibly fast campaign delivery. It partnered with Google’s data insights team to build a system that would automate the delivery of programmatic display ads to users, based on their position in the funnel.

It also tied this to real-time data from cultural events. For example, if a player wearing Adidas shoes performed well in an NBA game, customers would see ads featuring this player. That sense of timeliness had a significant impact on campaign performance: the ROI of these creative assets outperformed those that did not contain ‘hyper-relevant’ content.

Stages of the Buyer’s Journey

Let’s now explore each stage of the Buyer’s Journey in a bit more detail.

Awareness

The Awareness stage represents the moment when the consumer becomes aware of a problem they want to solve in their life, and they now see your product ad as a potential solution.

At this stage, it’s important to communicate a benefit, and tell them about a brand, product, event, or offer.

Interest

The Interest stage is a little more involved than when they are simply aware of both their problem and your product. In this stage, they are genuinely interested and begin to look for options, including your product, that will help solve their problem.

At this stage, you need to increase the emotional engagement with the customer.

Consideration

At the Consideration stage, the consumer is a bit more knowledgeable about your business and your competitors, and they are evaluating their options before committing to buying or converting.

At this stage, you should aim to bring your company to the forefront of the choice.

Conversion

The Conversion stage occurs when the consumer is ready to buy your product or take a valuable action on your site or app. Bear in mind that a conversion doesn’t just refer to a sale. It is when a website visitor or app user does something valuable for your business such as buying your product or filling out a lead form. Generally it is something that will have a real commercial value to your business. Basically, the consumer has converted from being just a normal visitor to being a customer (as in ecommerce) or potential customer (as in lead generation).

In the Conversion stage, the consumer has done their research and, based on their needs and motivations, has decided that your product is the best solution to their problem, so they go ahead and take action. For many businesses, this is the most important stage because this is where they can drive sales and leads, and impact the business in a commercial way.

At this stage, you’re hoping to convert consumer intent into action.

Retention

The Retention stage is often overlooked, but it is a key stage for driving recurring revenue and creating a group of active brand advocates. Once the consumer has used the product and is satisfied, it is crucial to continue to engage with them, provide added value, and create a real relationship which can lead to repeat purchases or recommendations to others to do business with you.

At this stage, you need to make the consumer feel special, in order to increase the chances of recommendations.