There is a magic formula for turning prospects into customers. It isn’t a well-kept secret, complicated potion, or hard-to-swallow pill. However, even if you are aware of it, it’s unlikely you’ve aligned your marketing efforts to match its insights.
We’re talking about the buyer’s journey.
What is the Buyer’s Journey?
The term may sound mundane, but the buyer’s journey is now fueling the most innovative, data-driven marketing campaigns in the world.
The purpose of the buyer’s journey concept is to model how prospective customers shop. It breaks down the focus, concerns and interests of customers into theoretical stages of the buying process – from awareness of a product to ultimately becoming an advocate.
The buyer’s journey aligns with the rise of the internet as a source of discovery, research, and shopping for products and services. Surprisingly or not, Adweek found in a recent study that 81 percent of shoppers conduct online research before buying.
It should quickly become clear that a binary approach to marketing, with its “buy now or goodbye” mentality is outdated, faulty and detrimental. The result of the binary approach is lost prospects, money, and leads.
The buyer’s journey model also addresses the notion that all leads are created equal (CLICK HERE to read how to get more dealership leads for good).
How to Utilize the Buyer’s Journey
In each stage of their journey, prospecting buyers are focused on different things.
The first stage of the buyer’s journey model is awareness. During this stage, prospects are completely unfamiliar with your offerings. The questions from a completely ignorant prospect are very different from someone ready to purchase, who might be focused on price, service or support.
The maturation of a prospect is a core component of the buyer’s journey. Aligning to, and addressing prospects’ questions, concerns and interests during each stage of the journey is how you become the vendor of choice.
Studying your buyers’ journey sheds new light on their desires and needs. This helps identify what might be holding some customers back, and what you can do through the buying process to help grease the skids, so to speak.
The Many Benefits
Following the buyer’s journey model has the potential to strengthen your entire business across the board.
Here are just a few ways your dealership could see improvement:
- More time on your website – due to increased interest
- Lower bounce rates – due to better content
- Improved lead conversion – due to more compelling calls-to-action (CTA)
- Improved engagement with content – due to better target alignment
- Higher customer satisfaction rates – due to relationship marketing
- Improved prospect to lead conversion – due to content engagement
- More referrals – due to better follow-up and customer valuation
- A sales pipeline – due to improved granularity in prospects engagement
- Messaging and content-tuning – due to monitoring communication and content engagement
- Lower cost of lead acquisition – due to driving content with SEO
- Faster sales closing rates – because questions and concerns have already been addressed by the time that prospects are ready to engage with sales
What Can I Do?
Many dealerships have not adjusted to the realities of how modern shoppers approach a purchase. So how can you align your digital marketing and sales processes to account for the buyer’s journey?
Here are three quick tips to move forward:
Stick to your guns! Supporting the buyer’s journey model is certainly a paradigm shift that takes thought and resources – it can be easy to slip backward and follow the pack. Don’t let old ways of judging and measuring marketing be utilized.
Expand your CTAs and stop driving leads to binary content focused on “buy now or goodbye.” Start with your homepage.
Partner with a marketing agency that focuses on the buyer’s journey as a central component of your marketing strategy and tactics, like NetSource’s REACH program. With your newfound appreciation for the buyer’s journey, you’ll be able to work with the agency to craft a drastically improved prospect experience.
In Review
Frankly, the sun is setting on the “buy now or goodbye” approach. This evolution will become self-evident as more dealerships – including your competition –follow the path of many other industries and align their marketing to the buyer’s journey.
Want to know a little more about how to convert leads to sale by leveraging the buyer’s journey? Our blog article, Leads That Convert to Sales discusses this in more depth.
If you are seeking to align your marketing to the buyer’s journey, we are here to help. Just CLICK HERE to fill out a form and begin aligning your message to your prospects.
