Your Guide to Consumer Decisions

Now that consumers can easily access all the information they want with a single click, the power is in their hands.  

This is why pushy sales tactics no longer work. Helping prospects make the best purchase decision is what you’ll need to do to win them over.

Typically, businesses invest their time and efforts at the bottom of the sales funnel to try and reach customers when they’re ready to buy. But, earning your prospect’s trust early on, like while they’re still doing basic research to understand their options, is a more effective way to present yourself as a solution to their problems and convince them to purchase from you.  

By understanding the buyer’s journey, you can get insights into what your ideal customers are curious to know, how you can meet their needs, and what factors influence their decisions.  

As a result, you can develop content that satisfies what they want at each stage, provide what they need to help them make a decision faster, and convert them into sales!

As your go-to SEO services provider in Florida, we are going to discuss the anatomy of consumer decisions in this post.  

Let’s get started!

What Is the Buyer’s Journey?

The buyer’s journey is the process your customers go through until they make a purchase. It begins with becoming aware of a need, then they go on the internet or talk to their friends and family to find different solutions and try to fulfill that need until they finally choose one solution and make a decision.  

Why the Buyer’s Journey Plays a Crucial Role in Consumer Decisions

The buyer’s journey is everything that your ideal customers do before deciding to buy and which business to buy from. This includes activities like searching the web, going to social media business pages, reading reviews, and so on.  

The buyer's journey is vital in consumer decisions because 67% of the time, consumers have already made a final purchase decision before reaching out to a business. This means that a vast majority of your prospects are navigating the web right now and finding the information they need to decide on their own.  

By studying how your target audience behaves as they travel the customer journey, you can get information on the kinds of questions they usually ask when trying to look for a solution to the problem you want to solve.  

Then, based on this information, you can create content that answers their questions and is tailored to their needs.

With the right content that’s optimized for SEO at the same time, your ideal customers can find you naturally as they look up the web for information. You no longer have to invest time and money finding where they are.  

If your ideal customers can’t find you where they’re searching for information, and if you’re not there to provide them with valuable content that helps in their decision process, there’s a huge chance that they’ll end up buying from those that make it seem like they’re giving them everything they need to make a decision faster.

Creating Content for Every Stage of the Consumer Decision Process

At each stage of the customer decision process, your target audience will have different questions and pain points. Your goal is to provide them with content that will help them move smoothly across each stage, delight them, and meet their expectations.  

The consumer decision process consists of the following stages:

Awareness Stage

In this stage, your prospects recognize that they have a problem but they’re not interested in finding a solution just yet. They are searching the internet to simply find general information about their pain points.  

For example, if a prospect sees a mold on their leather designer bag, they may search for the term “Why do leather bags get moldy?”

This is where you step in and try to help your prospect move in the right direction. Let's say you offer handbag cleaning services that will help this solve this particular prospect's problem. What you need to do is put information about your bag spa services in front of this prospect.  

How exactly can you do that? The answer is simple: Create informative blog articles.

You can write educational blog posts such as “Top 5 Reasons Why Handbags Get Moldy” or “5 Ways You Can Remove Mold from Your Designer Bags”.  These articles are meant to teach, entertain, and inspire your prospects about their problem and softly suggest a solution.  

Include plenty of helpful information the designer handbag lovers' community would be interested to read and share. After all, your content is meant to cater to every potential customer out there looking to get their designer handbags cleaned and restored to their former glory.  

Make sure you don’t brag about your services and how good you are at what you do at this stage because it can be off-putting and may prevent your prospects from moving to the next stage.  

As the top SEO services provider in Florida, we recommend that you focus on creating content that will generate leads. You can do this through the following:

• Answer questions

• Clarify any confusion
• Get your brand in front of potential customers and optimize brand awareness

Consideration Stage

Here, your prospects are starting to look at potential solutions to their problem but they are not ready to be sold on a particular solution just yet. They’re more concerned about the different products or services available on the market that can address their pain points, as well as their pros and cons.  

Your prospects may search for the term “how to clean mold from designer leather bags” or “bag spa in Florida”, after which they’ll see a list of solutions or businesses they can explore further.  

By this stage, your prospect is already aware of your company and the services you offer. However, she also knows that there are other bag spa services out there. So, before making a decision, she will first do her research and look at other options before deliberating which solution is the best way to solve her problem.  

Your job is to make more content that will address your prospect’s question at this stage. Most likely, she’ll be interested in knowing the benefits of bag spa and the different products that are used in the process. She’ll also compare the benefits of cleaning her handbag on her own vs. letting the experts do the work.  

Aside from articles, it’s also a good idea to make videos that show your prospects how you clean their designer handbags with the utmost care, comparison of results, and many more. Engage them on social media by actively posting relevant articles and engaging before and after images of bags that underwent bag spa.  

The information your prospect will gain from your content will help build trust and bring her closer to making a final purchase decision.  

During the consideration stage, your goals are to:

• Establish trust.
• Nurture prospects and buyers.
• Build relationships.
• Convert visitors into leads.

Decision Stage

Once your potential customers have explored all possible solutions to their problem, they probably already have a particular product or service that they think can best address their needs.  

They will research more about the product or service provider they’re interested in by reading testimonials, checking reviews, looking at their social media page, watching videos, going to their website, and whatnot.  

Modern consumers want to make informed decisions, so they will spend a lot of time doing their research before making a purchase. This is your chance to show them what you’re offering and why they should buy from you.  

During the decision stage, your prospect already knows what to look for when choosing a handbag cleaning service and has a list of potential bag spa service providers to choose from.  

They may search for the term “X Company Bag Spa in Florida reviews”, and your job is to get your content production engine up and running again.  

Publish testimonial videos of previous and current clients, expert review videos, before and after pictures of treated and restored designer bags, positive customer reviews on your social media page or Google My Business profile, and many more.  

As your go-to SEO services in Florida, we’d like to remind you that you must optimize your content for SEO to make sure you appear in front of your target audience when they search the web for your products or services.  

As you help prospects make a final purchase decision, remember to do the following:

• Convert leads into customers.  
• Identify any leak in your sales funnel or any friction that stops prospects from buying. Find a solution so you can convert as many leads that have made it this far.  

• Upsell and cross-sell if possible so you can maximize your prospect’s initial conversion value.  

Post-Purchase Stage

Just because the prospect you worked so hard for to convert finally made a purchase doesn’t mean your job is done.  

For your business to achieve sustainable growth, you should keep delighting your customer even after they bought from you.  

So, what do you need to do?

Provide them with post-purchase content and keep interacting with them. For example, you can create a video or a blog post on “Post Bag Spa Care Tips” or “5 Steps to Properly Care for Newly Cleaned Designer Bag.”.  

Another tactic to entice customers into coming back is to offer a discount or a loyalty card they can use to earn points and save money the next time they avail of your services. Hosting events for charity and organizing designer bag bazaars also work.

Put your business at the top of your customers' minds by keeping your brand fresh, creating a community, providing value, and constantly interacting with them. If you do this, you can:

• Turn your customers into repeat customers.  

• Keep them loyal to your brand.  
• Prevent them from switching to a competitor.  
• Improve your brand value or the way your customers and prospects perceive your brand.  
• Get them to advocate your business on social media and convince their friends and family to buy from you.  

Are You Publishing Content That Will Move Prospects to the Right Direction?

Presenting the most relevant content and answering the right questions at each stage of the customer’s journey is the key to influencing consumer decisions.  

Make sure you apply the buyer’s journey to your content and implement it into your marketing plan as well so you can direct your prospects in the right direction and move them smoothly across each stage until they decide to buy from you.  

Always remember that you don’t need to wait until your audience is ready to purchase before you make yourself known to your audience and establish trust.  As much as possible, meet them at the awareness stage and wherever else they're looking for information with helpful and valuable content.  

Digital Resource is your go-to SEO services provider in Florida. Our team of digital marketers and SEO experts can help you craft a customer content marketing plan that will not only put your company at the forefront, but also convert leads into sales and achieve business goals.  

Wondering how to make content that converts at every stage of the buyer’s journey? Fill out this form to know how!

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