A “traditional” buyer journey is generally made up of three stages through which all your customers go, and which involve different pieces of content. But this content having to be adapted to each of your buyer personas, it is essential to start your process of inbound marketing by identifying them.
Identifying your buyer personas
This work is essential, iterative and requires the participation of all functions that impact on a customer (sales reps, technicians, project managers etc.) in order to have a 360° view.
The aim is triple:
Getting a clear idea of who your customer groups are, their characteristics, motivations, desires and obstacles;
Understanding their challenges and what interests them;
Studying their information-consumption habits.
This has the unique goal of attracting them to your website and blog by tackling the right subjects at the right time.
Here's an article to help you to identify your buyers' personas.
The three stages of the buyer journey
The three “traditional” stages are:
Awareness: the phase during which the prospect identifies and qualifies their own need, carrying out research on the internet. This is the phase during which you develop your position as an expert and dig the foundations of a relationship of trust with your prospect.
--> During this phase, the available content must be linked to the pain points, tools and services to which it may respond. This content is not designed to sell you... patience! This phase allows your prospects to choose their selection criteria. They thereby eliminate certain companies that don’t respond to these.
--> Prospects generally search for educational content: white papers, analytical reports, sector reports etc.
Consideration: this phase is one in which your prospect compares different possibilities. It is a phase during which you position yourself as a “champion” to worthy of the prize!
--> During this phase, the content sent must enable your prospect to understand what differentiates you from your competitors: your value added Your contacts also need to reassure their managers concerning the financial and organisational impacts etc.
--> Visitors generally look for comparison tools, cost estimates, information on your products etc.
Decision: this phase is the decision-making phase. Your prospects will think about practical implementation, launch costs and customer service. This is the time to reassure. To demonstrate to your prospects that they are making the right choice and that they won’t regret it.
--> During this phase, it’s time to sell yourself, to prove that your other clients are delighted & have achieved great results with you.
--> Prospects generally look for case studies, demonstrations of your products or services, customer testimonials etc.
Here’s a great article on this subject: how do I choose the ideal content?
The link with scoring in Plezi
Plezi scoring allows you to identify where a given contact is on the buyer journey. This way Plezi can automatically send the right content (identified by its tags) to the right people, at the right time, thanks to matching with tags and the buyers journey.
It’s up to you to play around with it!
Tips and Tricks!
All your articles need to be sent to specific people, so take the time to define who they are.
If you have a piece of content that could correspond to several personas or several stages of the journey... there may be a problem!