Before making a purchase, there must always be a process in which the customer has a need and discovers that it can be covered by the brand. Nobody buys without a prior acceptance process.
This is what encompasses all those phases that a person goes through until the sales process arrives, from the point at which the customer discovers that they have a need. This process does not have an established duration, it can last minutes or even months or years, depending on the customer and the need they have to cover. It is not the same to think about buying a pair of trousers as it is to buy a car, the decisions you have to make are different, it is not the same expense nor is it of the same importance to take the same amount of time.
In conclusion, it is a buying process through which the customer discovers a need and decides to cover it through the products or services of a particular brand. Previously it was believed that the buying process of a customer coincided with the sales process, but there is much more before that, a consumer who discovers a need, first researches and informs himself before embarking on any purchase process. And without this part of the process, we will not understand the consumer journey or what their needs are.
The customer journey also helps us to better define our buyer persona, which is the centre of our strategy as we focus our entire content strategy on it, apart from the fact that all the actions we carry out in our marketing strategy are designed around the buyer persona.
The buyer persona has a series of pain points that are those that make them perform one action or another:
This list and other pain points are what move buyer personas, what make them take certain actions or not. For example, if a person gets a good job far from their place of residence and does not have a car to travel there, this will create a need and they will end up looking for where to buy a car and will compare different places before deciding on one brand or another.
There are three phases within the customer journey, let's look at what happens in each of these.
The first thing to clarify before starting this point is that there is no specific model that is applicable to all companies, as each product or service has a different life cycle for each customer. But let's look at a generic way of creating a customer journey step by step.
The best way to make a customer journey is through research, depending on the type of company, there will be information of various types, online and offline.
All this data can offer us a lot of information about our potential customers that help us to improve and optimise our strategy. And to obtain this data there are hundreds of tools, including free tools such as Google Analytics. If, according to the data you have obtained, most of the users stop filling in thelanding page form in question number 6, it may mean that they do not want to provide this information or that it is taking too long.
Here is a list of the most common phases that customers usually go through in the buying process.
In short, you have to take your customers into account and analyse their behaviour in the different purchase phases. Don't wait any longer and start creating your customer journey.