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Various stages of buyers journey make it easier to create personalized marketing campaigns. Instead of wondering what the prospect's next move could be, understanding every stage of the buyer’s journey allows for delivering a seamless brand experience.
However, the absence of a mapped-out buyer journey can result in inconsistent consumer experiences, eroding trust and brand loyalty. Without a clear understanding of the target customer’s path, businesses find it difficult to measure their performance, leaving them blind to critical areas of improvement.
Different stages of the buyer’s journey allow businesses to gain valuable insights that drive continuous business growth.
In this blog post, we will discuss the three critical stages of the buyer’s journey for boosting conversions.
What is a Buyers Journey?
A buyer's journey visualizes how a prospect will become aware of a product and eventually become a paying customer. By understanding how a lead might find a brand, consider its services, and evaluate its buying decision, marketers can create an efficient brand experience.
As marketing pivots towards personalization, it becomes crucial to understand the target audience's pain points, research style, and purchasing nature to create better marketing campaigns.
As Rand Fishkin says,
“Best way to sell something: don’t sell anything. Earn the awareness, respect, and trust of those who might buy.”
To achieve the prospects’ attention, businesses must create buyer personas and what probable brand journey will turn them into clients. Various touchpoints, blogs, social media, ads, videos, etc., anything can be used to create a comfortable buyer's journey.
Relation Between Stages of Buyers Journey and Leads
Every lead's pain point is different. As a marketer, you must group leads based on intent and where they are in their buying journey.
In B2B marketing, the leads are divided into three types:
1. Information Qualified Lead (IQL)
2. Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL)
3. Sales Qualified Lead (SQL)
In a typical B2B setting, you can see marketers complaining that the sales team is not following up with leads, and the sales team could complain that the leads are weak. We need to score or prioritize leads to match expectations on both sides.
Through lead scoring, leads get ranked through various points or by implementation rankings like hot, warm, cold, etc.
But lead scoring deserves a blog on its own, which I have here: How to Create a Lead Scoring Model.
To build a good lead scoring system, marketers first need to understand various buyer journey stages and should be able to connect them with different B2B leads. Below I have done it for you:
Stage 1: Awareness Stage- IQL
Stage 2: Consideration Stage- MQL
Stage 3: Decision Stage- SQL
What are The Three Stages of the Buyer’s Journey?
Here are the three stages of the buyer’s journey funnel looks are.
1. Awareness Stage: Information Qualified Lead (IQL)
In the awareness stage, a prospective customer is researching a problem they might have. At this stage, they are looking for a solution to their problem with the help of search engines.
So your aim should be to educate them and tell them there is a solution that exists. Here, the prospect is looking for information you can provide them, which is why leads at this stage are called IQLs.
You can do this in a couple of ways: create a blog post, share a summary of the solution, and offer an ebook that goes into the solution in depth. Also, offer this ebook in exchange for a name and email.
If your prospect downloads the ebook, they are qualified information leads. Hootsuite has done something similar; the only difference is that instead of an ebook, they are giving out a free template.
Using a marketing automation tool like ActiveCampaign, you can follow up with these IQLs and educate them on how your company can help solve their problem. This will be related to whatever they downloaded in the first stage.
2. Consideration Stage: Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL)
The consideration stage aims to educate the qualified information lead about your product or service and how it can address their problems. Such leads have enough information about your brand and are ready for direct marketing. So, at this buyer journey stage, we target MQLs.
You can convert IQLs to MQLs by inviting them to a webinar, sending them case studies, offering them free consultations, etc. Many IQLs won’t engage, and you don’t need to worry them too much as you can always send them marketing email newsletters.
For example, Andy Crestodina cleverly structures his newsletter by delivering essential information upfront and concluding with a compelling CTA to join a webinar.
However, those who have shown interest in how you might solve their problem might reach out to you by giving more information about themselves like phone number, company information, and the exact problem they are facing.
3. Decision Stage: Sales Qualified Lead (SQL)
Now, it’s time for the sales team to take over the MQL and become a customer. Studies have shown that the faster the sales team follows up with an SQL, the higher the closing rate.
As the sales team talks to prospects who have shown interest, the salesmen can roll out their sales pitch and share case studies that complement the prospects' industry or problem.
What Type of Content You Should Share At Various Stages of the Buyers Journey?
All the different stages of buyers journey are designed for various leads at different buying positions. While some prospects are aware of their problem, some are aware of its solution. Here, it becomes essential for a brand to determine what different types of content cater to the current needs of a lead.
Marketers should utilise user behaviour tracking with tools like a lead scoring model and get deeper website insights with heatmaps. It allows them to determine and segregate leads according to their buyer journey stage.
Through this exercise, marketers can get ideas for content and will be able to create targeted content assets. Different forms of content can then get distributed according to the stages and buying intent of the lead to create more impactful marketing efforts.
To make it easier to understand stage, content, and lead relation, I have created a table; let’s look at it:
Quality content is essential for creating the best buyer journey for your business and potential clients. The content for different buying stages should include relevant information, proper SEO, clear visuals, and a smooth user experience.
With Google’s EEAT guideline, sharing content infused with expertise and experience gets rewarded. That’s why, based on the latest guidelines and my personal experience, I have created a framework called “The Authority Edge.”
It is a holistic approach to SEO, content, website authenticity, AI, and much more that enables me to share amazing content with the right audience.
Below is a little sneak peek into how I implement the “Authority Edge Framework” on blog posts. We have complemented quality content with expert quotes, case studies, relevant article links, etc.
Check out the Authority Edge Framework Here.
How Can You Best Lead Your Audience Through Their Buyer’s Journey?
A good buyer journey is made up of three elements that lead your audience to conversion:
(i) Deep Understanding of Your Buyer Persona
Create detailed buyer personas covering your dream buyer’s demographics, pain points, goals, and decision-making behaviors. Understanding who they are and what drives them is essential to guiding them effectively through their journey.
(ii) Deliver Personalized Content for Each Stage
Every stage should have dedicated content to deliver valuable information to prospects. Creating multiple assets that target different personas increases your chances of winning the potential audience’s trust and conversion.
(iii) Implement Targeted CTAs to Drive Action
Use tailored CTAs at each stage to guide the buyer toward the next step, from low-commitment actions like subscribing or downloading content in the awareness stage to more decisive actions like signing up for a demo or making a purchase in the decision stage.
What is the Difference Between the Buyer's Journey and Customer's Journey?
The buyer journey and customer journey are often considered one and the same, which is not true. It is crucial to recognize the goals of the buyer journey vs customer journey and grasp their differences.
Here are the three main differences between the buyer journey and customer journey:
- The buyer's journey is centered on the decision-making process leading up to a purchase, while the customer journey encompasses the entire experience a customer has with a brand, from initial interaction to post-purchase.
- A buyer's journey typically includes three stages: awareness, consideration, and decision, whereas the customer journey includes stages such as onboarding, usage, support, renewal, and advocacy.
- The primary goal of the buyer's journey is to convert prospects into customers, while the customer journey aims to ensure customer satisfaction, retention, repeat purchases, and long-term loyalty.
Customer journey is what happens after your prospect has completed their buyer journey and become a client. Both journeys ensure your business establishes a long-term relationship with the targeted audience and builds a reputed brand image.
How to Create a Buyer Journey Map?
After knowing what is a buyer’s journey, it is time to organise all your thoughts, ideas, and types of content. The best way to assemble your buyer journey is by creating a map. Understanding the stages of the buyer’s journey is only fruitful when you know how to execute it.
Through a buyer journey map, marketers can create a blueprint of how their ideal customers will move from one sale funnel stage to the other through different content types.
Here is a whole blog post discussing how to create a buyer journey map step by step.
FAQ
Q.1: What is the buyer doing during the decision stage of their buying journey?
The buyer evaluates and selects the best solution to meet their needs, often comparing options, reading reviews, and finalizing their purchase decision.
Q.2: True or false? the buyer’s journey is only used by your marketing team.
False. The buyer's journey is relevant for both marketing and sales teams, as it helps align strategies across both departments to effectively guide prospects through the buying process.
Q.3: Which stage of the buyer’s journey are leads usually in?
Leads are usually in the consideration stage of the buyer’s journey. But it can differ for business to business. Hence, a proper analysis of how website traffic is behaving can help understand lead’s buyer journey stage better.
Q.4: Why is it important that you understand the buyer journey?
Understanding the buyer journey is crucial for creating targeted content, optimizing customer interactions, and improving strategies to effectively guide prospects and increase conversions.
Ready to Create Robust Stages of Buyers Journey
Now, by creating and analysing various buyer journey stages for your leads based on their engagement with your website, you can ensure that the sales team is following up with the warmest leads. And spending less time with cold leads will turn to make your sales team super happy and make the sales process easier.
Download the sales funnel mind map, which shows various examples of content you can use at each stage and how leads flow through each stage one by one.
I hope you found this article helpful in understanding the different buyer journey stages. Check out my other blogs on lead generation through landing pages to generate high-quality leads for your sales process.
Related blogs to read:
Top Of Funnel Marketing: Best Practices to follow
How to Nurture Leads With Middle of the Funnel Lead Generation
Nurture Bottom of the Funnel Leads With These Strategies
How to Do Heat Map Analysis: Guide to Better Conversions
5 Proven Techniques for Generating Inbound Leads
