The Buyer's Journey Explained Stage By Stage

The Buyer’s Journey Explained Stage By Stage

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As technology advances, the amount of research done prior to making a purchase increases. Because it is so convenient to search for questions and concerns on a smartphone, tablet, or computer, people are becoming more cautious in their purchase decisions and want to be absolutely sure that they make the right choice. That’s why it is a marketer’s job to help this consumer and lead them through the “Buyer’s Journey”.

The Buyer’s Journey is the 3 step process that someone goes through leading up to a purchase decision, comprised of an awareness stage, consideration stage, and decision stage. In simpler terms, the Buyer’s Journey is the consumer’s procedure before buying a product or service.

No matter what stage your audience is in, including perfect CTAs that lead to a relevant and beneficial content offering is essential. Also read  3 Helpful Tips To Improve Your CTAs.

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homebuyer persona template

How to create a buyer persona template for the homebuilder market

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When it comes to marketing to your target audience, using basic demographics, such as age, married status, income, and geography is no longer enough. That kind of information, while helpful, is still too general. Your home building services are going to appeal to certain types of buyers, which means you’re going to need to pinpoint who those buyers are in order to market your brand effectively. To do this, you’ll want to develop a customer persona (also known as a buyer persona).

A customer persona is a representation of everything that makes up your ideal customer. This persona does include some of the information that businesses typically use, such as basic demographics. However, an effective customer persona needs to go beyond just age and geography. The following is a customer persona template to help you better identify who your target audience is:

1. Collect Customer Data

The best way to put together your customer personas is by turning to your actual customers for information. Speak with 5 to 10 of your previous and existing customers. Don’t just speak with customers for whom you built homes. Speak with customers who you may not have completed a deal with, but who you had a good relationship with despite that. In fact, it might be easier to just ask previous and existing customers if they would fill out a survey for you. This way, you can create a survey that asks questions that will provide you with the information you need. Some of the information you should ask these customers include:

  • How old they are
  • Why they are (or were) looking to build a new home
  • What kind of features they were looking for (such as an open floor plan or a garage) and why they needed those features
  • Whether they’ve owned homes in their past
  • What they do for a living
  • What income level they belong to
  • How often they use social media (and what platforms they typically use)
  • How they found out about your company (this allows you to identify what channels to target)

In addition to gathering information from your current and previous clients, you can also find a lot of helpful data through your social media channels by studying the behavior of your followers. What kind of questions are they asking? Who else are they following? What kind of content do they share?

2. Create a Personality for Your Customer Persona

Once you’ve collected your customer data, you’ll want to organize it, merging the information you have into distinctive personalities. While you’re going to find that some information is similar (for example, you could find out that the income levels of your customers happen to be very similar), some of it will be different. Because of this, you’ll need to create multiple customer personas.

With multiple customer personas, you’ll be able to personalize your marketing to more effectively target the different parts of your audience. Each customer persona that you create in essence represents a different group of people. Because they’ll potentially have different backgrounds, different goals and different needs, you’ll need to adjust your marketing strategy for each one. Give your buyer personas names to help shape their personality, thereby making a stronger customer persona template.

Some customer persona templates also recommend going beyond demographics and personal background to develop a personality for each persona. For example, some homebuyers may carefully think over every decision they make, while others make more impulsive decisions.

Last, but not least, you should give each persona a name, an age range and a picture. This helps make it easier to figure out ways to reach this persona since it will make you feel like you’re trying to reach an actual individual and not just targeting demographics. This alone should allow you to be more effective at personalizing your marketing efforts.

How does one use buyer persona’s in senior living marketing? Click here!

3. Define the Goals and Needs of Your Customer Persona

As a homebuilder, one of your main priorities should be to position yourself to meet the specific goals and needs of your customers. The goals and needs of your customers are a big part of your customer persona template. Different buyers are going to have different needs. For example, some buyers may be looking to build a home to raise a family in, while others may be looking at the home building process as a short-term investment.

What’s important to understand about your audience is that goals and needs are going to vary depending on certain factors. These factors are often found in the demographics of each customer. For example, different generations tend to have different goals and needs. Someone in their mid-30s that’s just starting a family is likely looking for a house that they can raise their children in. Someone in their 60’s is likely to look for a home that they can age in place in, meaning that it’s designed for convenience and accessibility.

4. Identify the Challenges of Your Customers

Knowing what the challenges of your audience are will allow you to more effectively present your services as a solution. This means understanding what customers didn’t like about previous homes they lived in, what changes they want to make and what their personal preferences are. For example, maybe their last home had a yard that was too big for them to maintain, but they still want to be able to spend time outside on their property. Or maybe the challenge is financial — they have a limited budget to work with, but are expecting to expand their family in the future when their careers are further along. Realizing what these challenges are will make it easier for you to craft a clear and concise brand message to your audience

Understand that a customer persona template isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution — it’s meant to help you better understand who your customers are so that you can identify the homebuyers that would benefit most from the types of services you can provide as a homebuilder. Real estate marketing, after all, is about connecting the right customer to the right property.

How To Nurture Your Leads With Email Marketing

How To Nurture Your Leads With Email Marketing

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Despite some claims that email is dead, it is still a highly effective way for marketers to connect with consumers. It is an integral part of inbound marketing as well as attraction marketing, and is a great way to send nurture leads throughout the buying process. Here are a few email best practices that will help nurture your leads.

Segmentation

The segmentation of your contacts database will help define your audience into categories. If you are unfamiliar with buyer personas, read about them here, as they will be extremely useful in segmenting your contacts. Segmenting be done in terms of geographic location, company type, role within that company, behavior, marketing intelligence, or any other category that could be valuable to your company. Use segmenting to your advantage by targeting those different groups with useful content based on their specific needs.

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How To Develop A Solid Inbound Marketing Strategy

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Do you have a favorite sport? Maybe it’s something popular like football or hockey. Perhaps a more dignified pastime such as golf or horse racing better suits your style. Whatever your preference may be, do you ever wonder how your favorite athletes (hopefully!) win more than they lose? Most likely they are playing with a strategy. It may seem obvious, but strategy – even in a sport like racing – is essential to victory.

The same is true for your business website. Without a strategy, your website will fall behind the competition. Don’t let this happen! Many companies fall into the trap of creating a website for nothing more than an “online presence.” With inbound marketing, websites can do so much more than they could 20 years ago. With inbound marketing, businesses are seeing more online traffic that results in more customers and sales. But without a strategy, even inbound marketing has its limits.

Read More About The Benefits Of Inbound Marketing

Inbound marketing benefits from a well-developed strategy. There are three aspects to creating a well-developed inbound marketing strategy.

1. Create website goals

What do you want your website to do for your customer? That’s the main question that should be asked before a website is developed. Without a clear goal, a website could be published without having any significant benefit to the owner or the visitor. If a website generates most of its sales after visitors view a product information page, the goal of the website should be to create more product information pages, increase traffic to these pages, and streamline the ability to go from product information to product purchase. Inbound marketing benefits from having a website with clearly defined goals. If you are wondering about your website, try having a friend or colleague take a look at it. Ask them if they felt your website had clearly defined goals. Once you’ve determined you have the right goals in mind, it’s time you ask yourself if you have the right person in mind.

2. Create a Persona

Creating a persona is a powerful way for a business to better understand its customers. Without a persona, businesses have an incomplete idea of who to market to. So what is a persona? A Persona is the ‘ideal’ customer that a business wants to reach out to. Personas are defined by many things – ethnicity, location, motivation – but what they all have in common is that they help shape the strategy used by a company to achieve its goal.

Read more on Why Buyer Personas Are So Important

By creating a strategy with a specific end-user in mind, we are better able to understand what their problems are and how we can help make their lives easier. Don’t get too attached to your persona though! You will likely find that you may need to update them as you gain more insights on your customers. You may even considering adding an additional persona. Once you have your persona or personas created, you can move on to the next step.

 3. Get to know your persona

Now that you have a persona, ask yourself, how well do you know him or her? It may seem like knowing a pretend person’s upbringing and background is a little silly, but it can go a long way with customer satisfaction. By constructing your persona’s life story, you are better able to understand their motivation, needs, and desired outcome in life. If your persona is looking for a product that satisfies a long-term need but your business only sells products for immediate use, you’ve just gained valuable insight. You’ve recognized a need your typical customer has as well as an opportunity for your company to grow. By using information gathered from our personas, we can update and adapt our company strategy to best fit our customer needs.

Download A Free Template For Developing Personas

Just like in all sports, strategies continue to adapt as they encounter new problems and opportunities. You will likely find that a strategy created today might not work for you a year from now. That’s okay! Revisiting your goals, updating your persona’s attributes, changing their background and desired outcomes; these are all essential to a successful business. Just remember, inbound marketing benefits strongly from a well thought out strategy. How do you think your company’s online strategy is? If you’d like a free consultation, please check out the link below.

4 tips to keep sales & marketing on the same track

4 Tips To Keep Sales & Marketing On The Same Track

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Sales and marketing are usually thought of as being separate. However, with inbound marketing, both departments or teams need to work together to achieve their common goal: revenue. Inbound marketing is all about helping and informing the consumer throughout the various stages of the buying process, so they ultimately decide to purchase from you. This type of nurturing cannot happen unless sales and marketing work seamlessly. Here are 4 tips to keep your sales and marketing teams on the same page.

Keep constant communication

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video storytelling

Video Marketing Ideas: Using Storytelling In Social Media

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Storytelling is one of the most important aspects when it comes of successfully conveying your message to your audience and giving them an idea of who your brand is and what you stand for. While storytelling is something that can be done via all types of content across all platforms, it’s particularly effective in video content on social media. However, coming up with different video marketing ideas that help strengthen your brand’s storytelling can be challenging. The following are a few video marketing ideas that you may want to implement on your social media channels to aid your storytelling efforts:

1. Film Your Customers’ Stories

Telling the stories of your customers is an easy way to get viewers to relate on a more personal level to your brand. When you film the story of your customer, they become the main character, which allows you to demonstrate through their story how you were able to provide a solution to their problems or needs.

2. Tell Personal Stories

Tell your brand’s story by showcasing how your company came to be. For example, you can focus on your owner as the main character and show how they started the business. This is a great way to put a face behind your brand and to make your company more relatable to your audience.

3. Create Fictional Stories

In addition to using the stories of your customers, make up some of your stories. Fictional stories often give you the opportunity to add humor and excitement that real stories don’t always have. For example, you could make the main character a superhero but keep the problem or need the same. If you’re selling a carpet stain removal product, it might be humorous to show a superhero having trouble removing a carpet stain even though you just showed them having no issue at all taking down a bad guy. Just make sure the message is clear and that you end with a strong call-to-action.

4. Film Documentary-Style Videos

Documentary videos give audiences a look into the process behind your company, whether it’s showing the process of working with a client or showing what a typical day at the office is like. It’s a good way to showcase how hard your company is working to help your customers.

5. Provide Behind-The-Scenes Videos

Behind-the-scenes videos give audiences a glimpse into what it’s like to work for your company and into what you and your company are trying to achieve. These types of videos make your brand feel more human as opposed to just being a faceless corporate entity.

The Power of First-Person Experience Videos

6. Perform Product Walkthroughs

Showing how a product works will be a lot more engaging if you film it in the form of a story. You can do this by establishing a character, showing what their problem is, demonstrating how to use your product or service, and, finally, revealing the result.

Storytelling is an essential part of marketing your brand effectively, and there are few better ways to do it than through video marketing. Use some of these video marketing ideas to enhance your storytelling abilities on social media.

earned media vs paid media

Creative Marketing Solutions

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There are many creative marketing strategies that you can implement in order to increase outreach to customers and improve your bottom line. While many businesses are going above and beyond in their search for creative marketing solutions, you can simply seek to be creative within the 4 basic components of an online marketing approach (i.e. brand development, inbound marketing, content marketing and email marketing).

By seeking creative solutions within these 4 tactics, you can develop a successful creative marketing strategy. Here’s how:

Creativity in Brand Development

A creative way of increasing the relevance of your brand is by making your brand tell a story. Story-banding is an effective way to connect emotionally to your customers so they can see your products as having a greater purpose. You can achieve story-branding for your company by highlighting the inspiration behind your products and services.

Emphasize what motivates your company to achieve its goals (for example creativity, self-fulfillment, better health etc.), and incorporate your operations as a means towards achieving this goal. That way you can make your brand the hero of its own story, one which customers will relate to.

Read more on Defining Your True Brand Story and Bringing it to Life Online.

Creativity in Inbound marketing

A creative way to generate leads to your website is by having unique, yet appropriate content across all your channels. One approach you can use is to dedicate a portion of your site for product education.

If you are selling a well-known product, you could come up with creative ways on how the product can be used, how to make it last longer, behind the scenes details on how it works, etc.

One company that uses product education as a tool for its inbound marketing strategy is Gonesh Incense. The company produces incense products and has a DIY blog that contains videos on how their products can be used in many different ways; from re-using flowers after Valentine’s Day to making bath salts using their fragrance oils.

Such content is not only useful and appropriate to potential leads, but it also helps their brand establish trust and stronger relationships with customers.

Read more on The Benefits Of Inbound Marketing.

Creativity in Email Marketing

When you send out emails, incorporate interactive elements such as GIFS, rotating banners and menus. You could display an enticing sales discount or a new product launch by using a GIF. You could also categorize information about your product under different headings within a menu in the email.

This gives your customers the independence to browse product information and select whichever section they would like to read more about, right within the email.

Read more on Interactive Email Trends.

Creativity in Social Media Marketing

One way that you can utilize social media creatively is by developing targeted messages that appeal to common groups of people online, who you can bring together in relevant social media groups.

For example, a company specializing in manufacturing bicycles can create a fan page for cyclists and bring them together through targeted messages that contain useful information that applies to cycling. The more cyclists the company is able to attract to join the group, the more they can incorporate their branding into the fan page and begin to nurture their leads.

Read more on 8 Tips on Social Media Best Practices For Your Business.

Creative marketing solutions are the future of online marketing. By simply rethinking and refocusing the conventional ways through which you carry out your online marketing, you can be able to achieve creative marketing solutions and grow your bottom line.

Closed Loop Marketing

How Closed-Loop Marketing Helps Convert Leads To Customers

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Closed-loop marketing sounds like a fancy way to reel in customers, but it’s far from being the new-fangled way of doing business and attracting new customers to your brand. In fact closed-loop online marketing has been used and refined for over a decade by some of the world’s top companies. But what makes it so different?

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mql vs sql

How to Use Personal Selling During the Decision Making Stage

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The final article in this series, focuses on the final stage of the buyer’s journey: the decision making stage. Previously our view of inbound marketing was from a marketing heavy stance. Here, we’ll shift to sales and how to use personal selling during the decision making stage. Your prospective buyers have finally made it to the bottom of the funnel. All of your hard work with content, landing pages, social media and marketing has paid off.  Your leads are now ready for sales.

At the decision making stage, your buyer is already 60% of the way towards their decision and you can attribute that virtually all to marketing. You’ve heard the adage, “You can bring a horse to the water, but you can’t make it drink,” and this couldn’t be any more true in inbound marketing. And in all likelihood, despite some cleverly crafted and personalized lead nurturing campaigns, the personal aspect of your buyer’s journey with your company’s sales team is just beginning.

Deliverable Content

A more traditional approach to getting buyers to make a decision was to draft bottom of the funnel content. This used a “Speak to Sales” or “Request a Consultation” button to get sales involved in the buying process. Many buyers roll their eyes at the prospect of speaking to a sales person, so the new approach deals more with deliverable, downloadable content.

While marketing does close to 60% of the work in getting your leads sales ready, content’s job isn’t quite done. Your buyers are looking for the final piece of your content puzzle to help them know that going with your brand is the best thing for them. Offering deliverable content with personal selling is an excellent way to optimize your brand’s efforts during the decision making stage.

Content at this stage of the buyer’s journey is generally geared towards giving the buyer added value. Offers can include case studies, free assessments, service comparison, or product literature. Of course, the content you tailor to your buyer all goes back to your buyer personas.

Personal Selling in the Decision Making Stage 

Once marketing has done their job, qualified their leads for sales, and your leads have shown the behaviors associated with sales readiness it’s time to bring in the sales team.

For your sales team, personal selling will deal  with getting inside your buyer’s head and asking questions they’re asking themselves. Some of the fundamental questions a buyer will likely be asking as they vet potential sellers are:

  1. What specifics of your product or service do the buyers typically evaluate?
  2. How do buyers evaluate those products or services?
  3. What sets your brand apart for buyers?
  4. Who is involved in the decision and how to their perspectives differ when making the decision?

By answering those basic questions for your buyer before a sales call is even made will make a huge difference for how well prepared your sales team is. Also, it’s critical for marketing to communicate with sales and pinpoint exactly what your buyer’s journey look like. This way, sales and marketing are on the same page and your buyer isn’t left with redundancy during their personal interactions.

How do you  drive website conversions throughout the buyer’s journey? Find out by clicking here. 

Tailoring Sales to the Buyer

Finally, let’s focus on tailoring a sales presentation to your buyer. Inbound salespeople are tasked with advising a prospective buyer on how your brand’s unique position fits the context of the buyer’s need, but that is the bottom of the four step inbound sales process. The four step inbound sales process includes identifying the buyers problem, connecting with prospective buyers, and exploring solutions. Smarketing helps align those stages of the buyer’s journey to the inbound sales processes.

The presentation your sales team give to a sales-ready lead should be 100% tailored to your buyer. Hopefully, you’re already leveraging every possible avenue to identify your buyer on a personal level and create a sales presentation that hits home. Those types of presentations may include consultations, demos, or guided case studies where sales takes a buyer through the information.

Just the Beginning of Smarketing

The decision making stage is only the beginning of your sales and marketing efforts for your brand and personal selling is the cornerstone to your sales-marketing marriage. Hopefully through this series of articles, you’ve been able to see with your own eyes the value of smarketing. Inbound is only the beginning of how your sales and marketing come together. The fruits sales and marketing produce will be immeasurable over time.

 

 

Reason To Hire A Digital Marketing Agency 2

The Difference Between Lead Generation vs Demand Generation

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When it comes to building your audience and increasing your sales, there are two strategies that are vital to your success:  demand generation and lead generation. However, there are a lot of misconceptions about both. For instance, many people confuse one for the other. Some people think that demand generation is part of lead generation, while others think that lead generation is a part of demand generation. In reality, they are two different strategies that are critical to your ability to convert more customers.

Demand Generation vs. Lead Generation

The question for many is, “what is the difference between demand generation vs. lead generation?” Think of them as steps that must be taken to eventually close a sale. The first thing that you must do is to generate demand. Once you have achieved demand, you must then capture leads. The following is a more thorough breakdown of demand generation vs. lead generation:

  • Demand Generation – Demand generation is a strategy that includes numerous marketing tactics aimed at building awareness. Another misconception many have about demand generation is that it’s only about increasing brand awareness. However, it’s also about educating your audience about their needs and how your brand can solve them. As such, you’re also building brand authority during this stage. The ultimate goal of a demand generation strategy is to put your audience into the position to be converted into leads.
  • Lead Generation – Lead generation is the strategy of converting visitors to leads by capturing their personal information, such as their name and email address. It’s through the generation of leads that you will be able to nurture your leads through the sales funnel and eventually close the sale. When it comes down to it, lead generation is the act of taking advantage of the demand you’ve generated to collect contact information. Using that contact information, you can then engage leads directly.

Implementing A Demand Generation Strategy

Since demand generation consists of generating brand awareness as well as educating your audience, there are many tactics you can use. The following are just a few examples of demand generation that you can use:

  • Blogging – A blog allows you to regularly publish content to your website that is educational and informative. Blog content can also help people become aware of your business, if you promote it properly. For instance, by earning backlinks, optimizing it for SEO, and sharing it on social media.
  • SEO – Optimizing your website and all of its content for SEO, helps increase your presence on Google’s search engine. As a result, you can attract more organic traffic to your site.
  • Paid Advertising – Paid advertising, whether on Google or on social channels, can help expose your brand to specific segments of your target audience.

One thing to keep in mind when creating a demand generation strategy is to know who your audience is. Your demand generation efforts won’t have much of an impact if you’re targeting the wrong audience. Because of this, it’s critical that you develop your buyer personas.

Like this article ? Also read A Brief Guide to Sales Lead Generation

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Implementing A Lead Generation Strategy

If you have a constructive demand generation strategy, you should be in an excellent position to capture your leads. At this point, your audience should not only know who you are, but they should be interested in your brand due to the influence that you showcase. However, the majority of them won’t be quite ready to take the leap, which is why you need a lead generation strategy. Such a strategy involves providing something of value in return for their contact information.

With that in mind, the following are a few examples of value that businesses commonly offer to drive lead generation:

 

  • Gated content – Offering more in-depth content in the form of ebooks, whitepapers, and more, is an excellent incentive for providing you with their personal information. Businesses include links to gated content in the CTAs of their free-to-read blog content. Doing so allows them to capitalize on the authority they’ve just built.
  • Email newsletter – For anyone who is reading your blog on a regular basis, a periodic email newsletter filled with relevant and unique content is a great incentive to convert to a lead. Not to mention that they will have to provide their email to receive email content.
  • Free trials – Interested audience members are more likely to convert if you give them a free sample of your service. Offering a free trial in return for their personal information is generally accepted as a more than fair trade.
  • Webinars – Webinars are live stream of presentations, such as panel discussions, lectures, or interviews. They can run for a longer period of time and tend to dive in topics in great detail. Not to mention that viewers can often engage during the webinar by asking questions. Webinars are a great way to generate leads because you can acquire viewers to register in order to get access.

Understanding The Difference Between Demand Generation vs. Lead Generation Is Critical

To achieve success, you need to focus on both demand generation and lead generation. However, not understanding the difference can make it difficult to meet your goals. Not to mention, it will be difficult to monitor on how your marketing efforts are performing.