Looking Into Your Customer's Mind - What Happens Between Deciding To Buy Something And Buying It?
Dec 24, 2020
10 min read
Customer behavior is always out of the blue regardless of the industry and chances are that it can be influenced by the slightest change in the service you render. Marketers must know what do you think about their brand, the way your thoughts are aligned, and what affects your purchasing decisions in the present. It is because with this information they create a personalized way of communicating with you and present their products to make you take a firm purchasing decision. Realizing your customer’s behavior and offering them as per their desires is what is considered necessary to sustain as a credible brand in this competitive market. Many companies strive to know about their target audience’s habits and preferences over a certain product line by investing a lot of money in customer relations and behavioral researches.
By getting to know what kind of products or features your customer is fascinated by, your brand can make use of the search advertising methods to connect with them and display relevant information related to their recent searches. The websites they have visited on search engines like Google, Yahoo! help your business to obtain data from cookies and pull up those ads that match with their search queries. In this way, companies showcase the real information that their customers want to have, like discount coupons, special offers, etc, and increase the overall engagement. Looking into your customer’s mind allows a business to fully understand the factors basis which he or she makes a rational purchasing decision. These factors can be personal like price value and choice of product, situational factors such as the supply and demand in the market, and social factors like community fondness towards a particular product/service.
Stages Of Customer Purchasing Decisions
Consumer purchasing decisions are affected by numerous factors and the overall process comprises a handful of steps that are essential to go through. A standard purchasing decision includes realizing the actual wants, searching for it over the internet, opting for suitable sellers, evaluating the cost benefits, and then finally making an offer. The following is the detailed information on each step of the process:
Realization Of Needs
The primary step of making a buying decision is to contemplate the wants that require a purchase of a product. These consumer wants come from a problem, for instance, a customer will buy a new pen if he loses his old pen. The problem here is the loss of a pen, which leads to the creation of a need to buy a new pen. Needs also arise due to other factors such as captivating discounts, attractive offers, and advertisements. Therefore, a business must understand the needs of a consumer from your product and how they can be fulfilled by a consumer’s purchasing decision.
Search Analysis
Once the purchase needs are identified and jotted down, the next step is to get over the internet to find suitable searches for the product. In general terms, they shall try to find possible solutions for their problems. Searches could be from online sources like search engines, social media platforms, and offline sources could be from flyers, advertisements, and word of mouth. Here, marketers have to portray the products’ information in a way that is easy to understand and feasible for every potential customer. Product data ought to be mentioned so the customer can make an informed decision, it may include a descriptive feature list, blog posts, customer reviews, etc.
Assessment Of Alternatives
After a customer has considered several product options, the next step comes of evaluating those options basis the needs it will satisfy. However, apart from the needs, the ultimate product option that a customer will choose depends upon its qualitative attributes, such as relevant features, cost, durability, brand image, etc. Since the market is flourished with a variety of products and its alternatives, a customer has a lot of options to choose from, and as a marketer, you need to ensure that your product stays unmatched by the rest of your competitors. If you want their choices to be in your brand’s favor, match your product’s features with the customer’s needs.
Ultimate Purchase Decision
After inspecting a set of options and matching your desires as per the product features, as a customer you have arrived at the final stage that involves the purchase decision. Now, the process includes the role of both the customer and the marketer. As a marketer, the role would include reminding the target audience about the product’s features and business offers. Targetting and retargeting the customers impose the need to make a purchase.
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How To Understand A Customer’s Mind?
Relevant consumer purchase-decisions studies show that even before a customer acknowledges a particular product, he or she explores its market availability and reviews from previous customers. As a customer, you can explore and evaluate the available options to find the right kind of product for you. The information related to these products is subject to resemble your needs and anticipations, thus remaining product-focussed.
Apart from the marketing techniques and distinctive advertising approaches, it is also perceived that customer behavior is affected by the shop’s ambiance, the expertise offered while indoor shopping, and the overall time it takes to make the payment for the purchase. If the complete process runs smoothly, it counts as an added advantage to the brand’s image. However, these factors exist only in offline stores, since E-commerce platforms govern via enormous choices of products and options that attract the masses. With the introduction of numerous online platforms, the power is now in the hands of the customer to decide at the earliest. Online shopping allows them to get benefits such as a saved-cart facility, express delivery, item comparison, etc.
Inspect other’s liking and fondness related to a product, often it is observed that customer decision is majorly influenced by what others think about a product and their observations. It is important to generate genuine and useful customer reviews from your target audience to increase your recommendation rate. Eventually, a customer will most likely choose a product if it already has a couple of good ratings. That is why marketers strive to gain five-star reviews from their customers in the initial stages of shopping to ensure that the future shopping experience is positively affected.
Time and again marketers make use of content blogs and expert how-to reviews on the business website to gain a professional edge over its competitors. Saffron Edge helps to influence such customers who rely on our expert recommendations and consider your opinions as to quality benchmarks. If you want to know more about the same, please click here.
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Creating Content for Customers at Different Stages of the Buying Cycle
The buyer’s journey is not too hard to understand in a thoughtfully designed sales funnel. A sales funnel is step-by-step progress taken by the customer in the entire life cycle. Traditionally, it’s been split up into three areas: Awareness: Right from the start when the customer becomes aware of his need of a product in your industry category, searches for options over the web- hopefully, finding your business in the process. Consideration: By now the customer has narrowed down his choice to 2-3 options and is looking deeper into the choices by directly comparing the pros/cons, processes, etc.). This usually happens for smaller or directly beneficial individuals, but for larger B2B transactions, this is also the stage when the person doing the research may have to present his findings to higher-ups for decision making. Decision/Purchase: After much of the effort by the sales team and interactions with the customer via email, phones, or social media, this would be the stage where the customer decides to buy from you or not. A study supports the fact that a customer is already 57% through the sales process before they even contact a sales representative, it’s obvious to have useful content in place on your site. But if you’re basing your content marketing strategy only on that three-step journey, you could be leaving a big hole in your strategy-making process. Ahead in the article, we are going to list out how content can be made and optimized along with the various stages of the buyer’s journey: Developing content for customers in the pre-purchase stage, content for current customers, and content for long term/advanced customers. Businesses also need to understand the fact that a customer journey does not end when they become customers. If you stop creating content for people after they became customers, you could be ruining your retention rates or making customers feel that they you left them in cold as soon as you got their money. Developing Content For Prospects in The Pre-Purchase Stage To get it all started you must have the data from your previous or current customers that let you know that: What questions did they have in mind before they purchased your products? How did they skim through your competitors and make a choice of buying from you? Was there any hiccup or a second thought while making the purchase decision? Did you have a hard time finding answers to any specific questions about the product/service? Such case studies could prove to be helpful at any stage of the process. Answers to these questions will let you jump-start right into creating on-site content, whether it is blogs, or FAQ/knowledge base entries. But, to warn you, nobody wants to hard sell or get obsessed with selling and differentiating their product/service in every blog post on their website. Content marketing institute lists some suggestions for types of content that work well for B2B businesses in the pre-purchase stage. Developing Content For Current Customers After the sale has happened, there is the vital step of “keeping your commitments” and “maintaining customer loyalty”. So how do you plan to keep your customers happy? Did you guarantee that your product could solve a specific problem faced by the customers? Then it had better deliver. In addition to all this, there are natural emotions or hiccups along the way after making a purchase: Buyer’s remorse New influencers and decision-makers Resentment or aggression Distrust Failure to build value Every customer is bound to go through a post-sale evaluation of the decision they made to purchase the product. Failure on your part to keep commitments and drive home value and you’ll be opening doors for your competitions to make the next sale. For many businesses, this means tailoring content for mainly two departments in charge of project delivery, and customer service. Content regarding project delivery: Building trust with customers Addressing customer inquiries Does your customer understand the features? Pointing out new needs Content regarding customer service: Addressing customer emergencies Solving common product issues Continuing to build trust Explaining sensitive issues These are some of the key areas where businesses focus on creating content. There are many other issues that might be addressed by content marketing and are unique to your industry. Hence you need to look out for those issues in coordination with the sales team or the customer service team. Developing Content For Long Term/Advanced Customers Here you are creating content that helps customers get past the “my product is good enough, but it could be better” area. Now is the time to create customer loyalty or customer advocacy. Within your client base, there will be a small percentage of people who truly love what you sell. In such cases, word-of-mouth still reigns supreme and hence you should create content to encourage these customers to speak about you. Some of the key points that need to be addressed during this stage: Go the extra mile to provide your customers extra from what they have already purchased. You should always be the next choice of making a purchase whenever the time comes. Repurposing content for the current customers so that it is easily shareable, enables you to create a sales team outside your business venture. This also lets your business open up to new communities related to your current customers. These communities might not have heard about your business before but may have the need that your products can meet. Conclusion Content marketing can fit any size of the business. You just need to answer the common questions or hurdles that your prospects face before making a purchase decision from you, even if they have bought it- are they satisfied with it, what steps is your company taking to ensure that it maintains long-term relationships with the existing clients. ...
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Are Inbound Marketers Better Advertisers Than Their Industry Counterparts
Internet marketing has been evolving with a neckbreak speed and so are the approaches, perceptions, audiences and technology. And it’s a marketer’s job not anyone else’s to keep up. B2B marketers tend to be focused on Return on Investment(ROI) rather than lead conversion as is the case in the B2C market. But even then, many fail to lead to a conclusion that there calculation of ROI is correct across all the marketing channels, with only 53% thinking they are rightly doing it. Having a short sighted strategy is all too common in the industry. Email marketing appears to be the most successful channel for a one-to-one communication, but often its success is generated with the help of other digital channels, but many fail to understand this. So how do you pick between the two - Outbound or Inbound which one is performed better by the marketers over the past few years. Let’s find out on both sides. The Outbound Way The definition says that the outbound marketing is based on a hard sales approach where you convince your client that they need your products or services. Using traditional marketing tactics such as cold calling or BTL/ATL advertisements. The two most commonly used Outbound digital marketing techniques are PPC(Google Adwords) and Affiliate marketing. PPC Technique Pros: You’ll get as instant results as you want depending on your target audience. Brand visibility, and segmented targeting one of its features and let’s you be as aggressive or conservative based on your limit/budget. Cons: People have become sceptical towards paid-for-advertising and most of the times paid-clicks don’t result into conversions. Your ad expires as your budget spend ends and the click costs can soar very quickly. You need a lot of time to understand PPC or you’ll hire an agency to do it so that’s another extra budget spend. What’s more is that unethical competitors can click on your ads until your budget has been depleted and your ad disappears. You’ll pay for accidental click costs too- very pricey. Affiliate Marketing It is a network based advertising via affiliate or co-operative platforms. It’s a cooperative effort between the publisher, the advertiser, and the prospective customer who clicks on the ad. The publisher advertises via the banner ads on his website and closes the sales in return for a commission from the advertiser. Pros: It’s a win-win situation for both advertisers and publishers- like having a 24/7 salesman but only paid on performance. It’s easy to setup- just select your platform and program and signup. Cons: This approach is not foolproof, and may not generate as many sales on a regular basis. It has also been known that link hijackers or spammers have taken commission from publishers. The Inbound Way Inbound marketing is comprised of many sub-categories of marketing channels- Content marketing, that relies on organic search traffic and attracts genuine leads, Search Engine Optimization, based on serving content according to the keywords in the search query, and Social Media Marketing, which we all know is popular for bringing traffic to websites by enticing customers with posts on social media business page. The focus of this type of marketing relies on the principle of attracting potential customers by serving them with content about the products and services that can solve their needs. The focus here is on earning your client’s attention and not buying it. The leads that are generated are genuine and are more likely to convert. It is very gradual process and requires a lot of effort on the forefront of all the channels. Pros: You’ll gain a better brand recognition by providing and the right content and solving the materialistic/information needs of your customers. You’ll also position yourself as the industry expert to consumers. Cons: You need a website with specific functionality like blog page, email subscription signups, etc. but these are fairly simple and are very commonly used by businesses online. It takes a lot of patience and hardwork to make your web pages to rank on top in the search rankings. You’ll also need to establish a decent following on social media for your content to be shared widely. All of this takes time and effort. Weighing It All Up Outbound marketing campaigns are undeniably successful in the short period of time. But when you stop funding your outbound campaigns, you are likely to disappear from the hearts and minds of your potential customers very quickly. It has been shown and is fact that Outbound marketers spend 40-70% more than their counterparts in the inbound marketing segment, and has lower and harder to measure ROI. The reasons are logical: people are sick of clicking on bombarded adverts and messages and they right away move away from them- they would want to get engaged in conversations just like Inbound Marketers employ. If you use outbound marketing then you must prepare yourself for facing ad blocking techniques, which by the way many people all over the world have enrolled for. Inbound marketers prove their much worth while advertising for their firm and are better advertisers than Outbound Marketers. ...
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Increase SaaS Revenue with Detailed SaaS Marketing Audits
Partnering with SaaS Marketing Experts Keeping ahead of the curve in the constantly shifting Software as a Service (SaaS) market is essential for optimizing revenue and surpassing rivals. One of the best methods to accomplish this is to perform thorough SaaS marketing audits. These audits offer a thorough examination of your present marketing tactics, pointing out opportunities for development and opening doors. The Importance of SaaS Marketing Audits SaaS businesses operate in a dynamic environment where customer expectations, market trends, and technological advancements are continually shifting. Failing to adapt and optimize your marketing strategies can lead to stagnation, decreased customer acquisition, and ultimately, a decline in revenue. SaaS marketing audits offer a systematic approach to evaluating the effectiveness of your marketing efforts, ensuring that your strategies align with your business goals and target audience. By conducting regular audits, you can: 1. Identify Gaps and Opportunities: Uncover areas where your marketing efforts are falling short or where new opportunities exist to reach potential customers more effectively. 2. Optimize Resource Allocation: Assess the efficiency of your marketing budget allocation and redirect resources towards channels that deliver the highest return on investment (ROI). 3. Enhance Customer Acquisition and Retention: Gain insights into your target audience’s preferences and behavior, enabling you to refine your messaging and tactics to improve customer acquisition and retention rates. 4. Stay Ahead of the Competition: Monitor your competitors’ marketing strategies and tactics, which will allow you to adapt and differentiate your approach to maintain a competitive edge. 5. Align with Industry Best Practices: Ensure that your marketing efforts are aligned with the latest industry best practices, leveraging proven techniques and emerging trends to maximize their impact. Components of a Comprehensive SaaS Marketing Audit --> A thorough SaaS marketing audit should encompass various aspects of your marketing strategy, including but not limited to: Brand Positioning and Messaging Evaluate the clarity and consistency of your brand positioning and messaging across all marketing channels. Assess whether your messaging resonates with your target audience and effectively communicates your unique value proposition. Website and User Experience Analyze your website’s design, layout, and user experience to ensure that it aligns with best practices for conversion optimization. Identify areas for improvement, such as navigation, content organization, and call-to-action placement. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Conduct a comprehensive SEO audit to assess your website’s visibility in search engine results. Identify opportunities for improvement in areas such as keyword research, on-page optimization, and link-building strategies. Content Marketing Review your content marketing strategy, assessing the quality, relevance, and effectiveness of your content in attracting and engaging your target audience. Identify gaps in your content calendar and opportunities for repurposing or refreshing existing content. Social Media Presence Evaluate your social media presence across various platforms, analyzing your engagement rates, follower growth, and the effectiveness of your social media campaigns in driving traffic and conversions. Email Marketing Assess the performance of your email marketing campaigns, including open rates, click-through rates, and conversion rates. Identify opportunities for improvement in areas such as segmentation, personalization, and automation. Paid Advertising Analyze the effectiveness of your paid advertising campaigns across various channels, such as search engines, social media, and display networks. Evaluate the performance of your ad creatives, targeting strategies, and overall return on ad spend (ROAS). Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) Conduct a thorough analysis of your conversion funnel, identifying areas where potential customers are dropping off or encountering friction. Implement A/B testing and other CRO techniques to optimize your landing pages, forms, and checkout processes. Analytics and Reporting Evaluate the robustness of your analytics and reporting systems, ensuring that you are tracking the right metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure the success of your marketing efforts accurately. Customer Feedback and Satisfaction Gather and analyze customer feedback and satisfaction data, using insights to inform your marketing strategy and identify areas for improvement in your product or service offerings. Want to reduce your CAC to half? Book a strategy call Conducting a Comprehensive SaaS Marketing Audit While the components of a SaaS marketing audit may seem extensive, the process can be streamlined by following a structured approach: 1. Define Your Goals and Objectives: Clearly outline the objectives of your SaaS marketing audit, aligning them with your overall business goals and priorities. 2. Gather Data and Insights: Collect data from various sources, including analytics platforms, customer feedback surveys, competitor research, and industry reports. 3. Analyze and Interpret: Analyze the collected data, identifying patterns, trends, and opportunities for improvement. Interpret the findings within the context of your business and industry. 4. Prioritize and Plan: Prioritize the areas that require immediate attention and develop a comprehensive plan to address the identified gaps and opportunities. 5. Implement and Monitor: Execute the proposed changes and enhancements to your marketing strategies, continuously monitoring their impact and making adjustments as needed. 6. Repeat and Refine: Establish a regular cadence for conducting SaaS marketing audits, ensuring that your strategies remain relevant and effective in the ever-changing SaaS landscape. Partnering with SaaS Marketing Experts --> While conducting a SaaS marketing audit can be a complex and time-consuming endeavor, partnering with experienced SaaS marketing experts can streamline the process and provide valuable insights. These experts bring a wealth of knowledge and industry-specific expertise, enabling them to: Identify blind spots and overlooked opportunities within your marketing strategies. Leverage proven methodologies and best practices tailored to the SaaS industry Stay up-to-date with the latest marketing trends and technological advancements. Provide an objective, unbiased perspective on your marketing efforts. Offer actionable recommendations and implementation guidance. By collaborating with SaaS marketing experts, you can benefit from their specialized knowledge, ensuring that your marketing audit is comprehensive, insightful, and aligned with industry best practices. Conclusion In the dynamic world of SaaS, conducting regular and comprehensive marketing audits is essential for staying ahead of the competition and maximizing revenue growth. By thoroughly evaluating your marketing strategies, identifying gaps and opportunities, and implementing data-driven enhancements, you can optimize your customer acquisition and retention efforts, ensuring the long-term success of your SaaS business. Embrace the power of SaaS marketing audits and partner with experienced experts to unlock the full potential of your marketing efforts, driving sustainable growth and maintaining a competitive edge in the ever-evolving SaaS landscape. ...
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