An organizational ecosystem is a dynamic system that brings together customers, employees, teams, data, and other touchpoints. The buyer’s journey is one element of this organizational environment. Buyer’s Journey is the story of the customer’s experience from initial contact through engagement and into a long-term relationship. It depicts the stages (awareness, consideration, and decision) customers go through when interacting with a company, from buying products online or in-store to accessing customer services on the phone to airing grievances on social media. B as a tool for creating marketing concepts, customer service ideas, and other projects.

Digital consumers

The increased mobile devices and digital connectivity have drastically altered the traditional buyer journey. Consumers are bombarded with the sheer volume of content, which spawns incredible confusion and indecision. They can shop where and when they choose. The wealth of available information and the ability to access it at any time has given consumers extraordinary power. As a result, buyers no longer follow a specific buying process. With information overload from blogs, websites, social media, emails, and ads, people engage in a complicated purchasing process that has them spinning in circles, unable to make a quick and confident decision. This fragmentation of the purchase process makes mapping out customer journeys more important than ever.

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Mapping across all touchpoints and channels is imperative to fully understand a brand’s customer journey. A key benefit to digital retail is that consumers leave many footprints when researching, buying, and reviewing their purchases. It is significant to study customer behavior when mapping out the customer journey. Marketers and planners should understand insights, keyword analysis, and market mix modeling. Digital footprints are valuable in addressing consumer barriers and fueling programmatic buying.

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Business models and the buyer’s journey

Every business model is unique. These business models can be clustered into different types, such as business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C). There is a different buyer’s journey for each of these business types. To develop a buyer’s journey, businesses must clearly understand their target audience’s industry and where the product lies in the product life cycle (launch, mature, or growth stage). The following process can help with identifying a brand’s actual buyer’s journey:

• Choosing the correct journey framework
• Identifying points on the decision path that can be influenced
• Understanding the relevant touchpoints and how they interplay with each other
• Defining the ideal customer journey to find any gaps and pain points
• Establishing buyer personas
• Considering the partnerships
• Evaluating the strategy for voice

The challenge with the B2B business model

In business–to–business, products and services are involved as they include everything from high-value construction equipment to commercial real estate, jet and cruise liners, large quantities of office supplies to cloud-based document storage software consultations, etc. A single customer can account for a considerable amount of business. Thus, many stakeholders within the organization are involved in the buying process, which makes it complicated.

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As you are selling the product or service to an entire group of people who have input in the purchase decision process right from the awareness stage, the decision-making process is longer and more tedious. Hence, the B2B buyer’s journey follows a complex process within awareness, consideration, and decision stages.

In the business-to-consumer (B2C) business model, the buyer is often an individual, and the purchase decisions are faster. According to SiriusDecisions, 70% of the buyer’s journey is complete before a buyer reaches out to sales.

Product life cycle & the buyer’s journey

There are several ways to map the buyer’s journey. But today, we will discuss the buyer’s drive from the product perspective. With the ever-existing complexities and challenges in today’s market scenario, it is difficult for businesses to assess the e and profitability of their product. As we saw earlier, one of the critical factors to consider in mapping the buyer’s journey is to know where your product lies in the product life cycle.

The product life cycle is a concept that provides a way to trace the stages of the product’s acceptance from its introduction to its decline. However, concerning the buyer’s journey, this PLC has no decline stage. Each step has its significance, incurred costs, and specific activities for promoting the product or service in that stage. The product life cycle and the buyer’s journey, in a way, coincide with each other.

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Launch Stage

In this stage, you and your buyers are unaware of each other. You are creating the need for your product, and the buyers realize they need it. Thus, the entire focus is on building the brand and generating awareness about the product in the market. With Digital Marketing, one can easily create brand awareness within the targeted groups. Digital marketing tools like content marketing, social media promotions, paid banner ads, and several other SEO activities help to create brand awareness. This stage is the early stage of the buyer’s journey, as they are just getting to know your product.

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Mature Stage

At this stage, there is a substantial profit improvement, and product acceptance is visible in the market. The buyers know your product and that it exists in the market. They might consider your product/service along with other well-known brands. Buyers will dive deep to invest time to explore your product/service. During this stage, demand for the product rises, and the focus of the marketers is to reap the benefit from the rising product. Promote products and services via banner ads, video feeds, blogging, informative articles, PPC campaigns, social media optimization through Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, and other digital avenues.

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Growth Stage

This stage is a little different than the other two phases. The product is well established. The buyer will go through the awareness and consideration stage but will not spend much researching as your product is already well-established. They are already aware of your product, considering their options according to their requirements, and quickly decide to continue to use it or purchase a higher-level variation. There is a battle to retain current customers and attract new ones.

It is vital to introduce new features for the product or release vastly different versions in the market at this stage to prevent the product from a sharp decline. Implement highly effective digital marketing strategies by offering value-added services such as free trials, free consultation, free shipping, free samples, and high-frequency flash banner ads on the website and mobile apps.

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Impact of economic downturns on Buyer’s Journey

As we learned how COVID-19 became a global pandemic and consumers changed their buying habits, it’s more important than ever to understand how economic downturns affect the buyer’s journey.

Irrespective of the reason for the economic downturn, there is usually no change in the decision-making process while purchasing the consumers. Buyers are still aware of their needs, consider and evaluate their options, and decide to buy the product. What has changed is the way they buy and where they buy. As we know, consumers are turning their heads toward online purchases. Now more than ever, consumers spend more time on their mobile phones. It is in the business owner’s interest to gauge this situation and take their products to the customer. This can be done by:

• Channelizing your business online
• Learning the shopping habits of their customer (where are they shopping, what are they buying, and when)
• Use digital marketing techniques to create awareness about their products.
• Create a personalized online shopping experience
• Increase your presence on social media
• If you are a service provider, then give free subscriptions to the premium account for a limited time so that customers get to know your product even better.

This period of isolation and uncertainty brought massive overnight changes to their shopping behaviors. From bulk-buying to online shopping, people change what they’re buying, when, and how. According to Statista, online transactions increased by 32.9 percent.

Conclusion

In conclusion, there are several lenses through which you can understand and map the buyer’s journey. Two parties are involved in this journey: the customer and the seller. The customer’s decision process will never change, be it for a pencil or a plane. They will go through awareness, consideration, and decision stages. In psychological language, “it is human nature.” It is the seller (businesses) who is the dynamic component here.

It is up to the brands/businesses/seller/PMs how they want to attract, retain, grow, and map their customer’s journey. At designial, we help map the buyer’s journey and develop buyer personas and overall digital marketing strategy. We also help implement the multi-channel strategy via mobile or web applications with the best-in-class user experience. Contact us now.

Editor’s note: This post was originally published in July 2020 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.