Inbound marketing makes use of buyer journeys
In essence, a buyer journey is the process that a customer goes through from the moment they realise that they have a challenge to the point of purchasing a product to satisfy that challenge. The buyer journey is based on the consumer decision-making process and each product or service has a unique buyer journey.
To create a buyer journey for a product, marketers sit down and think about how the consumer decision-making process plays out in relation to their particular product. But before they can map out the series of decisions a particular consumer makes before buying their product, marketers first need to know who the consumer is.
There's likely to be more than one distinct consumer profile - or persona - for each product or service. For example, a jewellery store is likely to target both young, single women and older, married men. Although both of these personas might buy the same piece of jewellery, their buyer journeys would look very different. Because of this, marketers often need to create multiple buyer journeys for each product or service.
In order to pull off an inbound marketing strategy, marketers need to have a well-developed understanding of the various personas they're targeting. Only once you know all about the opinions, needs, challenges and preferences of the young, single women who are likely to want to buy your silver charm bracelets can you begin to understand the questions she's going to ask herself when deciding where to buy her jewellery.
Drawing on their understanding of each persona in their market, marketers come up with a series of email communications that answer each question as and when they are likely to occur in the consumer decision making process. This is how an inbound marketing strategy leads a consumer down the path to purchase.
What marketing message you need to send and which media channel you need to use will depend on the particular stage of the buyer journey that the consumer is currently in. Typically, the buyer journey consists of six distinct stages. For more information on the different stages of the buyer journey, check out this in-depth analysis: 'Six ways to influence deals in your sales funnel'.
Understanding customer personas and creating buyer journeys furnishes marketers and sales teams alike with an effective sales strategy, as it provides invaluable insights into buyers' particular needs at each stage of the consumer decision making process. This enables marketers and sales teams to create a sales strategy based on the needs, challenges and preferences of each customer.
