The importance of the Buyer Journey in the Sales Process

In order to have Buyer Personas or "ideal customers" is necessary to have certain content marketing actions with valuable content for each stage of the purchase cycle.

For starters, you must understand what is the Buyer Journey about. This is one of the inbound marketing good practices that has became a fundamental pillar of this methodology. It is an active search process that a potential customer performs before making a decision and purchasing a product or service. This is why is very important to know who we are going to talk to and in which stage their purchase process is.
Let's see the stages that the potential customer goes through before finishing the purchase process: Discovery, Consideration and Decision

Related Article: Buyer's Journey: An Inbound Marketing Key

Discovery Stage

This is the initial phase of the process in which the potential client is facing a problem or a need. That moment is when the prospect searches for relevant information to be able to solve said need. In this stage, the product or service must not be named; instead, the prospects must be educated about their issue or need.

Consideration Stage

In this stage the prospect has already identified well the problem and is considering the possible solutions for it. This is the time when valuable content gets to play a very important role that lets the prospect to choose the best solution to the problem, but this content needs to be free and informative, such as ebooks, videos, podcasts, among others.

The reason why we must provide valuable content in this case is to encourage the prospects to provide us their data in exchange of the content so we can continue giving feedback during the next stages. Remember that it is important to link the content to a landing page and a call to action (CTA) that converts visitors, which means that they must be specific, with the right content and attractive for the prospect.

Learn: How to attract more clients with the content of your website

Decision Stage

This is the final stage of the Buyer Journey and here we must offer a tangible solution, something that is exactly what the prospect is looking for and that is persuasive enough to make them purchase our product or service. In this stage is recommended to offer a free consultation, a demo, or a success case study so you support your prospect in their purchase process and achieve the final goal which is earn their trust and ensure a conversion. In other words, close a sale.

As we can see, the Buyer Journey allows us to analyze the needs of our potential clients during each stage of the process, which helps us to include relevant and appealing information on each one of them. It is extremely important to not to offer anticipatedly the product or service because that may spoil their interest in the process.