Understanding the Buyer's Journey
Insight on your client’s path to “yes” lets you focus on what’s important
There are many reasons why you might be having trouble getting people to sign up for your offer. Sometimes your marketing starting point isn’t as clear as it could be. If this is the case, it can impact the whole foundation of your marketing - making your messaging less clear, your offers less compelling, your content and promotions less effective, and so on.
This is more common than you might expect.
Other times though, if you are clear about who you help and what you help them with, there could be something else. It could well be a case that you don’t yet have enough potential buyers that have walked along with you and your business long enough to buy from you.
In other words, they’ve only just started their relationship with you.
The Buyer's Journey
The buyer (or client) journey is simply this - a marketing term meant to illustrate the road a prospective client walks along toward making a purchase decision. When your clients have something they need to solve, a problem they're wrestling with, there are certain steps they need to move through in relationship with a company in order to be able to buy a solution from them.
It's true that all clients are different - and that each individual client will go through the process at their own speed and in accordance with what's in alignment with their deeper self.
And, there are also universal stages to this journey.
Marketers refer to these steps as Know-Like-Trust. (They are also referred to as Awareness-Consideration-Decision.)
Here's a simple example.
Know
Let’s say I need a new pair of tennis shoes, and your company sells tennis shoes.
In order for me to buy a pair of shoes from you, the first thing that has to happen is that I’m going to have to know that your company exists and that you sell tennis shoes.
Kind of obvious, right?
Your business could make the most amazing shoes in the world, but if I haven’t heard of them, then I’m not going to be able to buy a pair from you.
Like
The second thing that has to happen is I’m going to have to consider whether I actually like the shoes and/or your company - or not. Many things might factor in here – personal taste, design aesthetic, quality, company mission, corporate responsibility, affordability.
And much more.
If I don’t care for either the product or the company in some way, it's highly unlikely that I will buy them.
But if I do, the possibility exists.
Trust
Finally, assuming I do like the product and/or company, I have to decide if I want to get them, right now, from your company. Making this decision could come down to a variety of factors, such as past experiences I’ve had, reviews, recommendations.
Underlying this decision is always this - trust.
The question I’m asking myself (and the question that any buyer asks at this stage is) Do I believe that if I get these shoes from your company right now, I’m going to feel good?
Many factors figure into this phase as well.
Know-Like-Trust for Your Business
I spent time detailing this pretty simple buying decision because your clients also move through this process before they decide to buy from you.
Your ideal clients have to be aware of your business, have spent enough time reading, watching or otherwise consuming your content to decide that they like and trust you enough to help them. That needs to happen before they will say ‘yes’ to becoming a client.
That decision to yes, as I outlined above, could take mere minutes to go through. For example, say I’ve decided I need those new shoes and later that day, I see a friend for lunch. She's wearing a pair of shoes I really love, so I ask her about them. She tells me an amazing experience she had with the company (who'd I'd only just heard of now through her). She tells me how much she loves the shoes and how much she likes their corporate giving program.
I pull out my phone, go online and find the shoes. They're in my budget, and size, so I put them in the cart and click "Buy."
Done.
Simple and fast, right?
This, however, is not how it always goes in buying decisions and it doesn’t happen often like this with buyers in coaching, healing or other creative transformation businesses.
If you have a lower cost - or no cost offering, a buy decision from one of your potential clients might happen this quickly.
And yet again, it might not.
Some people might still not sign up for something "free" if they don't know anything else about you. Their time is still an investment. And, if they don’t know you, or haven’t known you long enough to trust you, they might not be ready to sign up.
If what you're offering has a longer commitment, a higher price tag, on a sensitive topic that might bring up negative emotions like shame or fear or some combination of all three of these factors, it will almost surely take your ideal clients longer to say ‘yes.’
What This Means for the Bigger Picture
What I am saying here might seem discouraging, and I get that. However, I’d invite you to see the freedom in facing this.
Once you understand that it takes time - time for your future clients to know your business exists, to decide if they like you and your approach and to feel like they can trust you to help them solve the problem they are struggling with – things can change. Instead of focusing on why it’s not working as fast as you’d hoped, you can set about targeting your efforts on what matters most.
You can make sure your message is clear. You can concentrate on being visible and showing up. You can practice consistency and being your authentic self in your business and marketing.
And that’s important because those are the very things that will help your ideal clients journey toward you and your business.