Purchasing a SaaS or any other digital product is neither the beginning nor the end of a consumer’s relationship with a company. It’s one in a series of four stages that follow a consumer from the moment they become aware of your company to the moment they make a purchase – and beyond. Marketers refer to these stages collectively as the buyer’s journey.
To help a customer progress through their buyer’s journey, you must shape your content to fit each stage. In this article, we’ll define all four stages and provide content strategies to help you leverage the buyer’s journey for increased sales and scalability.
Let’s get started!
Understanding the Buyer’s Journey
To begin, we have to understand why the buyer’s journey is important.
Consumers don’t make purchases in a vacuum. They must learn that a certain product or brand exists, see that it meets a specific want or need they have, and only then make the decision to buy it.
But their journey doesn’t end there. With the right strategies, companies can retain buyers and keep them coming back. Thus, they create a base of loyal customers whom they can always count on for sales.
Knowing how this journey works is critical to helping marketers and business owners build a sustainable business model that they can profit from and scale.
What Are the 4 Stages of the Buyer’s Journey?
The four stages of the buyer’s journey are:
- Awareness
- Consideration
- Decision
- Retention
These steps will be your roadmap when you’re creating digital content. It’s important to align that content with the buyer’s journey, as we explain below.
The Importance of Aligning Content with the Buyer’s Journey
The goal of aligning your content with the buyer’s journey is to usher your customers from stage one (awareness) to stage four (retention). You don’t want them to stop at the second or third stage because that doesn’t provide you with long-term value. You want them to be loyal followers who like your products and want to use them repeatedly.
In the rest of the article, we’ll follow the buyer’s journey step by step, explaining each one thoroughly and offering practical content strategies.
Section 1: Awareness Stage
The start of the buyer’s journey is always awareness. Let’s explore this phase and how to generate it in your target audience.
What Is the Awareness Stage?
The awareness stage starts when a potential customer becomes aware of your product, service, or brand.
Identifying Your Audience’s Pain Points
Making your target audience aware of you is easier when you can identify their pain points. Put simply, these are the problems that your product can solve.
Craft your awareness stage content around pain points, so that your most desirable consumers will take a personal interest in the solutions you’re offering.
Content Strategies for the Awareness Stage
As you read our content strategies for the awareness stage, remember that the purpose behind each one is to help you get your foot in the door.
Here, we’ll focus on positioning your brand as valuable, trustworthy, and easily discoverable.
Educational Articles: Providing Value and Building Trust
There are a lot of disreputable companies out there, and consumers crave authenticity. Providing value and building trust with your audience is an effective way to get their attention. Educational articles can accomplish both these ends, as long as you can back your claims up with reliable sources.
Infographics and Visual Content: Simplifying Complex Information
Sometimes the reasons that your audience needs your product can’t be easily explained in words.
In this scenario, infographics and other visual content will simplify complex information (such as case study data), making it easily digestible for the average consumer. They’re also eye-catching when scrolling through a social media feed.
Source: Setupad
Social Media Posts: Expanding Your Reach
With the right strategies, you can leverage the global use of social media to expand your reach to thousands of buyers on platforms like Facebook, X, and Instagram.
SEO Best Practices: Ensuring Discoverability
Search engine optimization (SEO) is a strategy that digital marketers use to ensure the discoverability of their content via search engines like Google. Use techniques like incorporating relevant keywords and Google’s E-E-A-T rule (Experience, Expertise, Authenticity, and Trustworthiness) into all your digital content.
Section 2: Consideration Stage
After the awareness stage comes another critical phase: consideration.
What Is the Consideration Stage?
The consideration stage is the point at which a consumer has moved from becoming aware of your product to considering its potential for fixing their pain points. Their mindset is currently open to you, and what you do next will affect whether or not they make a purchase.
Content Strategies for the Consideration Stage
The following strategies will help you convince your target customers that you offer the best solution for their problems.
Comparison Guides and How-to Articles
Comparison guides and how-to articles put the power of choice into the hands of the consumer. In reading them, consumers will feel that they’re getting a lot of valuable information from you, which they can use to objectively evaluate your product.
Source: Forbes
Expert Webinars and Workshops
Webinars and workshops demonstrate your expertise in your industry, as well as your willingness and ability to teach and share insightful information. This will raise your credibility and reputation within your industry.
Case Studies and Customer Testimonials
No one can persuade someone to commit to a product like fellow consumers. Case studies and customer testimonials prove to potential buyers that other people have used your product and are satisfied with their results.
Email Marketing: Nurturing Leads with Targeted Content
With email marketing, you can nurture leads by sending them content targeted to their demographics, content preferences, pain points, etc. Think of it like following up and giving the consumer a personalized nudge toward deciding in favor of your product.
Section 3: Decision Stage
The buyer has almost arrived at the buying point in their journey. But first, we have to make it through the decision stage.
What Is the Decision Stage?
Stage three – the decision stage – is the point at which the buyer decides to buy your product.
This is a great moment, but it doesn’t mark the end of the journey: we still need to get them to actually finalize their purchase.
Content Strategies for the Decision Stage
With decision stage content, we want to make it as easy as possible for the buyer to make their final decision. Here are some ideas for achieving that goal.
Free Trials and Live Demonstrations
Free trials and live demonstrations will prove that your product produces great results and give the buyer enough confidence to invest money in it.
Source: Surfshark
Detailed Product Descriptions and Feature Lists
Buyers want to know as much about a product as they can before they buy it. So, indulge them with detailed product descriptions and easily scannable lists of features.
Pricing Guides and Financing Options
Not all your customers will have the same budget, but you can still persuade those with lower budgets to purchase by providing a clear guide to your pricing and financing options.
Strong Calls-to-Action: Encouraging the Final Step
Lastly, you can encourage the final step with strong calls to action. These can be as simple as putting an “Order Now” button at the top of every webpage in bold lettering or linking to your product in all your digital content.
Section 4: Retention Stage
Some marketers place the end of the buyer’s journey at the decision stage, but we believe it ends at a fourth stage: retention.
What Is the Retention Stage?
The retention stage is the point at which your buyer becomes a loyal customer. They trust your brand and the quality of your product, and they have no desire to replace your product with someone else’s. They may also be interested in other products that you have to offer.
Content Strategies for the Retention Stage
Encourage repeat buying and loyalty in your customer base with these content strategies.
Customer Support and Help Guides
No matter how great a product is, customers will always need support. You can provide that in the form of customer support and help guides which are free to access.
However, as your customer base grows, it can become difficult to provide timely support to every customer.
This is where implementing a customer success automation strategy can be a game-changer. By automating repetitive tasks and workflows, you can free up your customer success team to focus on high-value activities, such as building relationships.
This can lead to increased customer satisfaction, reduced churn, and improved customer lifetime value.
Exclusive Offers and Membership Benefits
Exclusive offers and membership benefits make a customer feel special and like they’re getting a lot of value back from their purchase.
Feedback Surveys and Customer Engagement
Engaging with customers and asking them to fill out feedback surveys makes them feel important and valued. More importantly, it makes them feel heard, and that their opinions of your product and your brand matter.
Community Building: Forums and Social Media Groups
Another way to make customers feel important and heard is to build communities for them. Use forums and social media groups as spaces for your buyers to connect, receive technical support, and solicit advice for getting the most out of your product.
Conclusion
The buyer’s journey is not one that the customer takes alone. You, the marketer or business owner, are there with them every step of the way. You’re providing them with valuable and persuasive content, inviting them through the four stages of the buyer’s journey to a conclusion that benefits everyone. The buyer receives a quality product and incredible customer support and attention. Meanwhile, you get loyal customers who will help you grow, profit, and scale. That’s a happy ending worth journeying toward.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
What is the best way to identify the stage of the buyer’s journey?
Identify the buyer’s journey by the actions that the buyer is taking. For example, if they are clicking on your website and spending time there, they are most likely in the consideration phase. If they put an item in their cart, they are in the decision phase.
How often should content be updated to remain relevant for each stage?
Content should be updated whenever changes are made to the product or if there is new information to share.
Can the same content work for different stages of the buyer’s journey?
Yes. Educational articles, for example, can help buyers in the awareness, consideration, and decision stages all at once.
How do metrics differ between the stages of measuring content success?
In the awareness stage, the most important metrics are impressions and views. In the consideration stage, look at clicks, engagement, and email sign-ups. For the decision phase, the conversion rate and number of sales are more relevant. And finally, in the retention stage, look at the number of repeat purchases and membership renewals to evaluate success.
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