The buyer’s, or user’s, journey has long been a useful framework in understanding how customers go from not even knowing about a brand to becoming loyal (and hopefully repeat) customers. It’s the thing that every marketer wants to figure out about their business and customers, but it’s far from easy to understand.
According to an Invoca survey, 72% of businesses aren’t highly confident in their understanding of the user journey, and 70% of leaders mention a buyer journey with no clear owner. Understanding the buyer journey is necessary for scaling your marketing and making the right budget decisions. In this blog, we’ll walk through the stages of the buying journey, the relationship between it and MTA, and pointers for how to analyze the performance of all the channels in the buyer’s journey and make data-backed optimizations.
The Three Stages of the Buying Journey
Let’s start by going back to the basics and looking at the different stages that make up the buyer journey: Awareness, Consideration, and Decision. Over time, different marketers have suggested additional stages in the buyer journey that fall after the first conversion, but for these purposes, we’ll focus on the simplest iteration of the buyer journey. Understanding these stages can help you tailor your marketing strategies to better meet the needs and expectations of your customers, and an understanding of how each stage functions can help you know whether your channels are performing correctly and playing the right toles.
Awareness
The awareness stage is the first step in the buying journey. At this stage, potential customers realize they have a need or problem that requires a solution. They may not yet know about your product or service, but they’re just starting to seek information. This is where content marketing, social media, and SEO play a critical role. By creating informative and engaging content that addresses common pain points and solutions, you can attract potential customers to your brand. For instance, blog posts, infographics, and videos that highlight the benefits of your product can help raise awareness and position your brand as a trusted resource.
At this point in the journey, your best bet is to stay away from the hard sell and instead just introduce potential customers to your brand. The channels that fall into this stage might not show up as your top-converting channels, but that’s to be expected. The job of these channels is to cement your brand in a potential customer’s mind as they research their options.
Consideration
Once potential customers are aware of their needs and the available solutions, they enter the consideration stage. Here, they evaluate different products or services to find the best fit. They may compare features, read reviews, and seek recommendations. It’s essential to provide detailed information and demonstrate the value of your offering. Case studies, comparison guides, and testimonials can be particularly effective in this stage. By showcasing how your product meets their needs better than the competition, you can build trust and move potential buyers closer to making a decision.
Decision
The decision stage is the final step in the buying journey. At this point, potential customers are ready to make a purchase. They’ve narrowed down their options and are looking for reasons to choose your product. This is where your sales efforts should focus on removing any last-minute doubts and facilitating a smooth transaction. Offering incentives such as discounts, free trials, or easy return policies can help tip the scales in your favor. Additionally, ensuring a seamless checkout process and excellent customer support can enhance the buying experience and encourage repeat business.
MTA and the Buyer Journey
So what’s the best method to analyze the user journey? If you’re attempting to piece together a buyer journey by looking at siloed platform metrics, you may be seeing an inaccurate and inflated view of each channel’s impact, when what you really need is a centralized source of marketing truth that shows you the fractional impact of each of your marketing tactics and where they fall in the buyer journey.
We recommend leveraging Multi-Touch Attribution for this. MTA is a crucial analytical approach that allows businesses to understand how different marketing efforts contribute to a consumer’s decision-making process throughout the buyer journey. In the context of the buying journey—Awareness, Consideration, and Decision—MTA can help provide insights into which channels and touchpoints are most effective at each stage. By accurately tracking and assigning value to various interactions, such as social media engagements, email clicks, and website visits, MTA helps marketers identify the impact of their campaigns on guiding consumers through the buyer journey.
MTA is much more fitting than a last-touch or first-touch approach to assign conversion credit to your channels because it fits with the picture of the buyer journey as being multi-step and complex. As a marketer, you know that channels have value even if they’re not directly converting users, and MTA helps you show this with data.
The Buyer Journey vs. The Marketing Funnel
Before we move into concrete tips for understanding and improving your buyer journeys, let’s make an important distinction. You’ve probably heard both the terms “buyer’s journey” and “marketing funnel” used somewhat interchangeably. There are key differences between them, even if they fall in a similar area, and it’s important to gain insights about both. Both terms are ways to understand and organize the steps that a buyer takes from initial interest to purchase—the buyer’s journey could be looked at as the buyer’s POV of the process, while the marketing funnel would be marketing’s way of looking at the process.
The stages of awareness, consideration, and decision are generally used interchangeably with both terms, but it’s an important distinction to make. It may be helpful to sort touchpoints into distinct categories, but the buyer’s journey itself is often much more complex than that.
Ways to Evaluate Effectiveness Across the User Journey
Now that we’ve discussed what the buyer journey is and the best method for tracking its effectiveness, we can get into the weeds and share the actual approaches you can take to exploring your user journey—and how to use Rockerbox to do it.
Understand What Role a Channel Plays
You might have an idea about where a channel falls in the buyer journey based on industry research and gut feeling, but it’s important to use data to get the real answer. In Rockerbox’s Funnel Position view, you can dig into the job that each of your channels does in the funnel, from first-touch to middle-touch to last-touch.
A view like this can help you make changes like:
- Focusing more on high-level brand awareness messaging for channels that have a higher percentage of first touchpoints
- Leaning into conversion-focused messaging for last-touch channels
Discover Your Most Impactful Marketing Paths
What’s the best buying journey? Is it the fastest? The highest value? Rockerbox lets you dig into all of these things and more in our Marketing Paths view. You can use this view to understand what your marketing paths look like on a granular level, including insights like average touchpoints and revenue from purchases. The filters on this view allow you to gauge the impact of different channels on the overall effectiveness of your marketing.
For example, if you find out that having a TikTok touchpoint on a user’s path to conversion means users have a shorter time to convert compared to other social channels, you can use that information to make more targeted budgeting decisions.
Identify Leaks in the Funnel
A leaky funnel means that somewhere in your defined sales process, buyers are dropping off. Data can help you identify where the dropoff is happening and make changes. For example: your funnel that you set up in Rockerbox might include the following stages: View Product, Add to Cart, and Purchase. The Conversion Funnel view would show your performance across these steps and allow you to pinpoint places where you’re seeing a lower conversion rate than normal. This would allow you to make changes like:
- Decreasing the investment on certain ads (consider CPA or ROAS performance as well)
- Considering landing page optimizations (why are we failing to convert these customers once they’re on-site?)
- Inspecting the audience quality (is this audience too broad where we’re not reaching quality prospects)
Buyer Journey Data to Help You Optimize
The best marketers know that data is the way to smarter, more targeted strategies. Rockerbox is the marketing measurement and data platform that provides that necessary clarity, and Rockerbox Journey gives you an understanding of the buyer journey like never before.
Learn more about Rockerbox here.
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