In the previous post in this series on the Digital Buying Process, I discussed finding the beginning of your ideal customer’s buying process. I encouraged you to ask basic quesitons about your business, your customers and your competitors. The answers to this will lead you to the beginnng of your clients buying process. By starting at the beginning, you can develop a strategy to engage all your prospects whatever stage of the buying process they are at.
Start at the Beginning
I will now use an example from HP Group, the leading search engine optimisation company that I work for. We work with a diverse range of businesses ranging from locally focussed SMEs to global brands. This means that our prospects range from one man band SME owners, to marketing directors of global corporations. Therefore the spectrum of the buying process is incredibly broad, as the level of knowledge about our services within our prospects ranges from entry level to expert in some cases.
If we are looking to engage an SME owner, then targeting them with content concerning our response to the latest Google algorithm update will not work.
It will not work because we are not addressing their needs at his particular point in the buying process!
An SME owner often needs to be educated about the value of SEO as a service, so the beginning of the buying process is where an SME owner [such as yourselves] researches SEO as a service.
If HP Group can be responsible for an educational experience at this stage of the buying process, then we have an opportunity to engage the prospect, building a relationship of trust. If developed correctly, this relationship of trust can be nurtured into a lead.
Information Needs to be Informative
Here lies the relevancy of the featured image. Is your business a fish trying to climb a tree? [Bet you didn’t think you would asked that today] Are you investing time/financial resource into digital marketing activities that are not relevant to your business? A lot of marketing time is spent looking at ‘the next hot thing’, the next tech trend that is going to blow things wide open for businesses globally.
Real engagement comes from targeting the right customers/businesses with relevant, informative information in appropriate spheres of engagement.
Mapping the buying process is a way to answer the resultant questions, who-what-where?
Develop Unique Micro Processes
You can build a micro process around key engagement points within your unique buying process. This can be done by defining your buying process in stages. Please refer to the previous infographic on targeting consumer needs, you can see that at each stage of the buying process, the consumer has a different need. The key is to identify where they gather online and engage to fulfill that need.
For example, if your buying process starts with your customer’s a lack of awareness of a need, then you need to employ an outbound marketing campaign to answer the question “why do I need this product/service”. Above is an example of how you can approach providing an answer. Then map out the buying process by building a narrative unique to your business:
- Customer sees a viral video
- Customer visits website/microsite then wiki page
- Customer searches for product info in Google
- Customer reads case study/how-to content
- Customer subscribes to your newsletter/joins social group
- Customer responds to incentivised offer
Every business and market are unique!
There is a general rule within the buying process, the higher value the product/service, the longer and more complex the buying process. So here is a contextual example if you are a local pet shop scratching your head and wondering why this is relevant for you.
The five stages represented here are purely meant as guide, so for a local pet shop, it might begin with an organic search for ‘Dog Toys London’. Because people are already aware of their need for the service, so your buying micro-process around the ‘research stage’ can be built around local search. Therefore if you are investing heavily in local outbound advertising, you can potentially save resource by moving investment into the research stage of the buying process.
If you remember our infographic of the consumer buying process, here we can see what it looks like after microsegmentation:
Target the Areas that are Relevant
You can see that the convoluted marketplace is not so convoluted any more. ASK QUESTIONS:
- Where do people who use your product/service gather online?
- What online publications are relevant?
- What comes up in a Google News search for your keywords?
- Where have competitors got reviews/case studies published?
- How do people reference your product/service socially?
Use some of the market research methods I recommended in my previous post and answer these questions to develop your individual stages of your unique buying process, and build micro processes to engage your prospects. This way you know that when you have news/content relevant to a specific stage in the buying process, you just follow the micro process:
- Post to blog
- Tweet via Twitter
- Integrate in news letter
- Distribute PR content
The next post talks looks at the concept of consumer engagement, so please find us on Twitter and Facebook to keep up to date. As always it is great to hear from you, so please leave comments and contact HP Group if you require more information on any of our services.
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