
The buyer’s journey is the process of any given potential customer going from not knowing of your brand at all, to evolving into a loyal buyer of your brand.
For the most part, analytical programs (such as Google Analytics, Facebook Analytics, etc.) exist precisely to reveal data to you about where in the buyer’s journey each lead is.
It’s a great concept to base the foundation of your small business’s Internet marketing strategy off of. It is also a great diagnostic tool when troubleshooting why you’re not making as many sales as you would like to.
There are three stages to the buyer’s journey:
They’re pretty self-explanatory. The awareness stage is when the audience:
The consideration stage is when the audience is:
The decision stage is when the audience has:
There are three major hurdles that small businesses must overcome in order to have a successful content marketing strategy and gain traction in the market:
Once you’ve established your target audience, you have to assess the level of awareness your audience doesn’t have for your brand. (Keyword: “doesn’t”, pertaining to whether or not you are a tiny or big fish in the proverbial pond.)
You also need to assess the competition you’re going to have to overcome. By using the word “competition”, I’m referring to other websites producing similar content in order to market similar products or services that compete with your own in the same industry.
Simply because you’re a small business doesn’t mean that you’re a tiny fish in the pond. If the pond itself is the geographically designated market, then you’re really only as tiny as what would be inversely proportional to the size of your market.
For instance, if you were trying to sell solar products to the locals in your town, the chances are that you won’t have much competition. You’d be one of the biggest, if not the biggest fish in your pond. Therefore, it wouldn’t take too much of an investment to get the town aware of your presence with clever use of social media.
But the moment you try to become an international business is the moment you’d have to compete with brands like Tesla. This changes the entirety of the ballgame, so to speak. That is going to require both knowledge and a ton of resources to stay afloat. Being a small business, you may not necessarily have that.
Time and attention is a finite resource. And it’s precisely the time and attention of your potential customers that you’re competing for with your content over other websites/companies.
Conventional thinking may lead one to fear competition and to think that competition is a bad thing. However, all it really means is that there is actually money to be made in the niche or industry that you’re appealing to.
If there is no competition, none, zero…then that’s a major indicator of one of two things:
The more likely answer is the former, not the latter. Though, either one is possible. It’s up to you to be truly honest with yourself about that.
Everyone wants to believe that they have the next revolutionary product. But the reality is that that usually only comes once in a generation for each industry. Out of hundreds, thousands, or even millions of entrepreneurs (depending upon what it is).
Thus, humility is the name of the game here, and the strength it takes to view the world market as it is. Rather than as you wish it was or fantasize it to be.
Else, your mind will fall victim to confirmation bias (seeing what you want to see in otherwise neutral occurrences/data). This will lead you into making bad business decisions that may cost you the irrecoverable failure of your business.
Thus, all three stages of the buyer’s journey should be considered when designing your marketing plan. However, you should be realistic about the limitation of your business’s resources. They make the third major hurdle for small businesses/sole-proprietors like you.
If you’re selling a product or service that is not a brand new revolutionary invention, it’s wiser to design content mainly for the consideration stage while sparing resources from the awareness stage.
This is because you have competition and the market already has a pulse. People are already searching for what you’re offering. So, you mainly just need to make sure that:
If you’re selling a product or service that is a brand new revolutionary invention that no one’s ever heard of (and thus searching the Internet for), then it’s wiser to design content mainly for the awareness stage, while sparing resources from the consideration stage.
This is because you don’t have competition and the market doesn’t have a pulse. People aren’t already searching for what you’re offering. And that means that you mainly just need to make sure that your content is able to establish the pulse of the market.
You don’t have many, if any, competitors. You’re the first of your kind, which means that your UVP doesn’t have anyone to compete with. As a result, you don’t have to work as hard in the decision stage of the buyer’s journey.
And if you have medium competition with a moderately innovative product/service, then you should put an equal amount into producing content for both the awareness and consideration stage of the buyer’s journey.
You see how that works?
It’s up to you to use honesty with yourself, your gut instincts, combined with market research to be able to tell exactly how to structure your Internet marketing strategy and utilize your resources to produce content according to what will maximize your chances of success.
You should continuously monitor your analytics programs. They will provide the data on whether your targeted traffic is making it to the decision stage of the journey. When that happens, it’s up to you to merely present a strong enough UVP to win over the customer.
Your UVP is essentially your company’s offer in a nutshell. OMI’s UVP is prototypically “Contract with us at x-price to receive x-boost in your company’s marketing results.”
McDonald’s UVP would be something like: “Pay $0.99 for a great tasting burger,” which may be cheaper than Burger King’s UVP. In response to that, Burger King’s UVP would be something like “Pay $1.99 for a great tasting burger that’s guaranteed to be fresh off the grill with real meat.”
McDonald’s may compete in price, but Burger King may compete in quality. At which point, it’s up to the buyer to consider and decide which brand’s product (food) is best for them based upon their competing UVP. The market will then split into segments based on their preferences.
The less competition you have, the more beneficial for you your UVP can be. For example, you can charge a higher price. The more competition you have, the harder you’re going to have to work and the more you’re going to have to be willing to sacrifice to win your customers over. For instance, you may need to lower your price and/or offer higher quality.
Therefore, your Internet marketing strategy should be about creating content that:
How to go about doing that is unique for every business, dependent upon a multitude of variables.
Having a product or service is one thing; marketing it is another. Learn how to drive the sales you want through building your brand by following us on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, as well as our YouTube Channel.
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