Want to Create Better Consumer Engagement With Your Brand? Crafting Content That Supports Every Stage of the Buyer Journey Is How You Do It

One of the most critical things to understand about modern-day buyers is that they’re far less “emotional” than a lot of businesses give them credit for. They’re not making decisions in a split-second based on instinct — the 21st-century buyer’s journey is one that is filled with a tremendous amount of research and education before someone feels confident enough to pick one product or service over another.

In order to take full advantage of this, you need to create content that supports EVERY STAGE of the buyer’s journey — not just the one at the end where a purchase is made, which you consider to be the most important. Not only does this approach allow you to “warm someone up” to the idea of making a purchase on their own terms, but you also do your part to help create an almost unprecedented level of consumer engagement with your brand as well.

Leveraging the Buyer’s Journey to Your Advantage: Breaking Things Down

Though it may be your instinct to try to turn a potential customer from a “prospect” and into a “buyer” as quickly as possible, you need to understand that people don’t actually think this way. They work hard for their money and want to make absolutely certain that it’s going to the right place before they ever even think about pulling out their credit card.

Creating content that supports every stage of the buyer’s journey — regardless of how many stages there are — is your best chance at doing exactly that.

When it comes to actually leveraging the full power of the buyer’s journey to your advantage, you first need to understand the intention behind each individual stage. Consider ones like:

• The Awareness Stage. This is when a prospect is experiencing some type of problem (or is looking for some type of opportunity) and has begun to search for a product or service to help them meet their needs. To take advantage of this, you could create content that expresses sympathy. You understand what they’re going through and you understand what they want. You’re not necessarily trying to “sell” to them at this point, but are merely showing them that you understand their plight better than anyone else.
• The Consideration Stage. This is when your prospects have clearly defined (and given a name) to their problem and are now researching and trying to understand all available approaches and methods for solving it. In this stage, you would craft content that not only reaffirms that you understand the problem in question, but that also outlines how you and you alone can solve it.
• The Decision Stage. This is when a prospect has decided on exactly how they want to solve a problem or capitalize on an opportunity, and now they’re just looking for the right solution to meet those needs. Here, they’re comparing and contrasting different products and services and the content you create to capitalize on this should now make your own offerings look as enticing as possible.

For the Awareness Stage, create educational content to help people answer some questions and address many of the concerns that they have. For the Consideration Stage, create content that positions you as an expert in your industry — think things like videos, case studies and even FAQ articles.

For the ever-critical Decision Stage, provide people with as much content as you can like free trials, consultations and articles that further their education.

If you have content for every stage of the buyer’s journey, you therefore control the pace at which that journey unfolds. You remain at the top of someone’s mind all during their decision process and, at the end of the day, you go an incredibly long way towards guaranteeing that the partner they choose to meet their needs and exceed their expectations is YOU.

When the Journey Is Just as Important as the Destination

But in the end, the most important thing for you to remember is that content alone isn’t going to be enough to get this particular job done. You could create custom content for every last stage of the buyer’s journey but if it isn’t professionally designed and thoughtfully constructed — and if it doesn’t represent your business in exactly the right way — it’s only going to push people away from your brand instead of drawing them in.

This is particularly important in terms of video collateral, where a poorly designed video could create exactly the wrong impression at the worst possible moment. It’s also why, if you don’t feel like you have the infrastructure in-house to take care of these content needs yourself, you should never be afraid to enlist the services of someone who can.

At Eaton Creative Group, for example, we have years of experience in creating professional, custom videos for organizations just like yours. Success in terms of marketing is always about delivering exactly the right value at exactly the right time. More than anything else, we’d love to take full advantage of the opportunity to help you do precisely that.

So if you’d like to find out more information about creating better customer engagement for your brand through content that supports every stage of the buyer’s journey, or if you just have any additional questions that you’d like to discuss with someone in a bit more detail, please don’t delay — contact Eaton Creative Group today.