The 3 Stages of a Typical Buying Process (i.e., the Buyer’s Journey) (2024)

By Amanda Hurd

What is the Buyer’s Journey? It is the journey or buying process that consumers go through to become aware of, evaluate, and purchase a new product or service, and it consists of three stages that make up the inbound marketing framework: awareness, consideration, and decision.

Analyzing the Buyer’s Journey through the inbound marketing lens allows marketers to conceptualize the path of a prospect as a framework. The result? Persona-targeted content for each stage of the Buyer’s Journey. (Of course, this means you need to have buyer personas in place to begin. Click here if you haven’t defined your buyer personas.)

To start, let’s review what you as a marketer can include in each of the three stages to move potential buyers closer to a potential purchase:

Awareness

In the awareness stage of the Buyer’s Journey, a potential buyer is just realizing a want or need for a product and/or service. They are most likely entering search terms in Google to understand more about what they are looking for. This is where an effective SEO strategy plays a key role in your marketing plan. If you can answer questions for your personas and position your awareness content appropriately, you’re putting your organization’s content in a great position to convert. Ask yourself about where your buyers go to educate themselves and what questions they typically ask.

Most potential buyers in the awareness stage are seeking information to answer questions or resolve pain points. It is important to note that at this stage of the journey, the information should be fairly neutral with limited (if any) sales jargon or positioning of the specific organization.

To be an effective marketer, it is important to recognize this type of consumer mentality and cater your marketing communications to provide solutions, ideas, and purpose related to what they’re interested in. A few top-of-the-funnel, awareness stage content offers to consider include:

• Educational content in blog posts
• E-guides and e-books
• White papers
• Industry research/analyst reports

Additionally, you should consider using keywords such as prevent, troubleshoot, or improve within your awareness stage content. This will help attract more leads by providing valuable content that is positioned to address their specific pain point.

Consideration

With a clearly defined goal or challenge and a commitment to address it, the consideration phase is about a buyer’s evaluation of different methods that are available to them. At this stage, you are still delivering critical information to help your buyer make the best possible decision. Here are some examples of consideration content offers you should provide to qualify your lead for the decision stage:

• Product comparison guides
• Expert guides
• Live interactions (podcast or video)

Decision

At this point in the journey, a buyer has decided on a solution category. They have a strategy in place to address their pain point, but are still deciding on a specific tool to purchase or vendor to work with. A buyer may spend significant time researching documentation, data, vendor reviews, and other materials to gain confidence in their decision.

Don’t Overcomplicate Things

Understanding the buying process that your various personas go through is critical for any marketer. However, overcomplicating your B2B or B2C content offers is a mistake that I see a lot of organizations making. Put yourself in the position of the consumer you want to speak to and ask yourself if the content is truly a resource or if it is a hard sales pitch. If the content doesn’t offer value and help them reach a potential resolution, you’re putting yourself in a difficult position to succeed.

With proper inbound marketing tactics applied to each of the three Buyer’s Journey stages, you’ll be able to make content available through the appropriate channels and map each piece of content to the right stage in the funnel. When you are building your Buyer’s Journey, make a point to speak to your sales team. They have a unique perspective because they are speaking to prospects and customers every single day.

Remember: The main goal of the Buyer’s Journey is to take advantage of a more customer-centric philosophy to better position your company for addressing the needs of your target audience.

This blog was originally written on June 10, 2016 and has been updates since.

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