All You Need To Know About the Buyer’s Journey

Whether you are a business owner looking to demystify marketing or a seasoned marketer wanting to brush up on your strategy, understanding your buyer’s journey is vital to creating an effective digital marketing campaign. At the end of the day, your marketing plan should include strategies that reach buyers at all levels of their journey. 

What is the buyer’s journey? Also known as the customer’s journey, it is the process that buyers go through when deciding to make a purchase. The buyer’s journey is typically broken down into 3-4 stages: Awareness, Consideration, Decision, and Retention. It should also align with your sales cycle, your marketing efforts and the habits of your customers in conjunction with your product. Another way to think of a buyer’s journey is through Buyer Funnels, with Awareness being the Top of the Funnel, Consideration being the Middle of the Funnel, and Decision being the Bottom of the Funnel. 

Awareness (Top of the Funnel)

During the Awareness stage, buyers are either identifying a problem they have or trying to uncover solutions to a particular challenge. They are looking for resourceful and informative content to help them find a solution, paid or unpaid.  They are also looking to understand how much of a priority their problem really is. 

Consideration (Middle of the Funnel)

The second stage in the buyer journey is Consideration. During this stage, buyers have fully articulated their problem/challenge and are wanting to address it. They are now evaluating different solutions and companies to best solve their problem. This stage is where differentiators are important and connections are made between the brand and buyer.  

Decision (Bottom of the Funnel)

In the Decision stage, buyers are typically between the final two companies that are offering solutions to their specific problem. This is the stage in which the buyer might reach out to a sales representative to learn more or schedule a demo. 

Retention

Far too often, businesses don’t include Retention into their buyer’s journey. Why is this a huge mistake? For one, it costs a business 5x more to get a new customer than retain an old one. When a buyer is in the Retention phase, they are already a customer or past customer. They (hopefully) had a great experience with their purchase and you have their attention. 

Next Steps

Now that you have started to research your buyer’s journey, your next step might be a Customer Journey Map or a visual representation of your brand’s touchpoints along a customer’s purchase journey. Additionally, you may always want to review your current marketing strategies to make sure you are reaching users at all stages of the journey and planning out content to correlate with those stages.