Alright, tough love here. You’re alienating potential clients and you don’t even know it. In today’s blog, we’re going to talk about why that is and how you can prevent it.
So let’s dive in. Nobody intentionally tries to alienate their clients. We don’t do that, but it happens.
I want to show you a slide that Andy Crestodina from Orbit Media did about two years ago in a webinar that I really enjoyed.
You can see here in this slide that he makes it painfully simple that our job as marketers is to build a bridge from a traffic source to a thank you page. That’s it. That’s the game.
However, this is what we’re doing:
You see this? We have holes in our content, and we have holes in our messaging. Transparently, we think that our clients do something like this:
We think that they come to our website, fall in love, and then they just buy. You know what, the stats say that less than 2% of your target audience are in a position to buy.
The Buyer’s Journey Approach
If you don’t have a systematic approach to generate leads, nurture those leads through the sales funnel, and then make a really important argument in the Decision Model phase, you’re going to find that your clients simply just don’t convert like they should.
The number one way to do this is to understand how the principle of the buyer’s journey works. Let’s dive in.
Keep in mind, the buyer’s journey can often be complex, but for this example, what we’re going to try to do is try to talk about a classic journey that we all know about; buying a new car.
The first thing you got to know is that there’s three phases to the classic buyer’s journey:
- Awareness Stage
- Consideration Stage
- Decision Stage
Buyer’s Journey Examples
Now, if we’re going to be talking about a new car, commonly, we’re going to be talking about someone who is going to be buying a new one because either their car broke down, or they wanted something new.
Then maybe in the consideration level stage, they say, “Hey, you know what, if I’m gonna buy a new car, what kind of car do I want to buy? Do I want to buy a sedan, an SUV, or maybe a sports car.” Then once you decided, “Hey, you know what, I’m gonna get an SUV,” that’s when I start to figure out what make, model and color that I want to choose from when I ultimately make my decision.
Now all of this happens in your subliminal. That is how you decide on the car or the choice that you want, but the same exact thing happens whenever we buy anything.
What I mean by that is whether it’s a purchase on Amazon, or something even as sophisticated as spine surgery.
Now, talking about spine surgery, in the awareness stage, we might have nagging back pain that just won’t go away. We’re going to decide to do something about it.
In the consideration level stage, we’re going to research our options online. We’re also going to research which provider carries your insurance.
Then finally, we might choose a provider based upon their reviews, or based upon something like “Are they close to my home? Do they allow for online scheduling? Will this approach be more effective for what I’m looking to do in my recovery phase?”
So all of that happens in the same three phases as the car buying experience.
The Buyer’s Journey’s 3 Stages: In-Depth
So you might be thinking, “this is not cutting edge marketing here.” But you know what, this is where you’re wrong. This is where companies get lazy and they make mistakes. This is where they alienate clients. Let me show you how.
So let’s pretend like this is your website:
You see, the average client that we deal with usually has valuable content in the awareness stage. This is the homepage, the about us page, maybe some product pages, etc, etc, etc.
What they rarely have are consideration level pages and decision level pages. At best, they might have some awareness stage pages and a contact us form. You see, that approach happens all the time.
That is where we alienate clients. Let me walk you through this a little bit farther.
What I want to be able to do is I want to be able to create awareness stage content, consideration stage content, and decision stage content, all while baking that into my sitemap itself.
In fact, in the planning phase, I actually color code these pages to make sure that I know how to nurture our clients from the awareness stage, through the consideration stage, to the decision stage content.
To take it one step further, what I do is that I say if a user goes to a specific page on my website, what I’m going to do is after that individual leaves, assuming they got a cookie on their computer, our technology is going to shoot them out what we call a targeted page email and what you’re going to notice here is that this targeted page is green:
What I mean by that is that an individual came to a page that’s in the consideration level phase, which was yellow, and now we’re pushing out an email to them that is pushing them down the funnel to decision level pieces of content.
The best part about this approach is that when we send this content via email, the chances of the user reading it is way higher because the data shows that people actually read emails, but they only skim websites.
You see, all of these tactics are specifically designed to get the right message, to the right client, at the right time.
So that is the buyer’s journey and that explains where we’re alienating clients.
What we see from time to time is that we want to create a buyer’s journey and what happens is we create content for individuals and we alienate them because they are probably too early in the phase to be getting advanced content. Sometimes, they’re in a buying decision, and your system is sending them 101 information. They are usually past that.
What happens here is that we find ourselves alienating our clients. I’ve seen this time and time again.
If you don’t get scientific on your approach to get the right message, to the right client, at the right time, your conversion rates really suffer.
Buyer’s Journey: Summary and Conclusion
So what did we learn today?
One, we’re probably alienating our clients because we’re not using a buyer’s journey approach.
Two, our websites should match our buyer’s journey and we should color code those pages to map out exactly how to nurture them from awareness, to consideration, to decision.
Finally, you have to develop a systematic approach to get the right message, to the right client, at the right time.
So there it is. So here’s my question for you: What tactics are you using to get the most out of your potential clients’ buyer’s journey?
I hope that you learned something and I hope that you’ll come back often. In fact, we’re trying to bring as much value as possible.
If there’s some kind of content that you would like to hear from us, please leave us a message! You can always email us at [email protected].
We want to make sure that we’re answering your questions and that we’re bringing content like this to our supporters so that they can figure out how to develop systems for themselves on how to generate leads, nurture leads, and convert leads.
Finally, I wanted to share something special with you. Over the last 21 years, my team has developed something we call our Farotech Unique Process. Essentially, it’s a systematic approach that helps our clients generate leads, nurture leads into clients, and convert those clients into raving fans of your brand, your products and your services.
If you’d like to see that we’ve put it all in one place at https://farotech.com/digital-marketing-process/.
What you’re going to find there is that we have put exhaustive work into that page. It’s all of the lessons that we’ve learned in video format, but we put it in text and images and everything that we could possibly put into that process, we put it all on one page. That is our gift to you. Please let me know what you think! Take care!
