By Patrick Obando, Bayshore Solutions Digital Marketing Team
Your potential customers now have even less time in their daily lives than ever to decide whether or not to buy your goods or services. With what seems like a continuous bombardment of marketing messaging from the competition, how do you get your message heard and understood at that critical time during the buying process?
Let’s first begin to understand a little bit about today’s consumer purchasing method. The customer buying process has long since moved from a linear model and is even more complex, given the current level of information literally at their fingertips.
According to Matt Hertig, presenter at the Digital Summit Denver 2015, the marketing challenges aligned to the different phases in customers’ decision journey include:
- Create Awareness
- Stimulate Engagement,
- Drive Impact, and finally
- Build Loyalty
So what can you do to best address your customers in each of these phases?
(They need to) Care to Be Aware
Today’s consumers don’t want to buy feature rich products and frankly, could care less about you or your company. Today’s consumers want to see themselves better off for having fused your product. If you can help navigate them to this better place, then you are more likely to move from being thought of as “just another company”, but rather as a loyal friend, thus gaining a customer for life.
One way to avoid getting lost in the crowd during your customers’ initial discovery and research phases is to talk less at your potential customers. Show them a new and better version of themselves with your product in hand and you’ll move further down the decision making process.
For example: do I really care that my lawn mower has a 193cc engine with a 22” cutting width and automatic blah, blah, blah? No; what I care about is the fact that my grass is thicker, greener and looks way better than the Jones’ down the street. And that’s what I get by using your lawn mower.
Creating emotionally-driven awareness about your product drives consumer research. Whether or not your potential customer sees an ad online, or on television you have to make life with your product better than their current situation.
Serve Info-Snacks in a Smorgasbord of Channels
So now that they care, the next challenge is to stimulate engagement. This is where information has to be available on demand, whether through a twitter feed, additional online advertisements, your website or other relevant channels. A quality digital marketing strategy provides research and analysis information in consumable forms appropriate to each medium.
Feeding their information needs moves your customer into considering using your product or service. Examples of marketing that encourages consideration are quality reviews, twitter conversations and nurturing this type of bi-directional communication.
You must make it easy for your potential customer to make an educated decision. Will your consumer call to get more info, subscribe to an email list, or begin to follow your brand on social media? Whichever action or combination of actions they take, winning marketing facilitates the customers’ choices at their best convenience.
“Easy” Does It
Correctly activated engagement drives impact in the form of a purchase. The most important thing to do here is to make purchasing as painless and rewarding as possible. An excellent eCommerce example is a one page checkout process lessening the chance of cart abandonment. Or, estimate a conservative shipping window, and deliver much faster to create unexpected delight.
Build Customer Fandom
After your customer makes purchase your job isn’t done. During post-purchase experience and evaluation, your customers can become brand advocates. This all hinges on your customers’ satisfaction of how your product lives up to its advertised job, to their researched expectations – and to their emotional anticipation.
Some post-purchase relationship building considerations: Can you make it as easy as possible to download additional resources on using your product, or upgrades? Were they aware of potential scenario’s where you product may not have been the very best choice? How are you reinforcing how the product makes their lives easier, faster, better than the Joneses down the street?
Navigating the best course through your consumers’ purchasing process is specific and complex. Bayshore Solutions can help you connect with your potential customers and create more meaningful relationships.
Contact us today to differentiate your business and drive success!