Understanding the Buyer’s Journey

Search Engine Marketing Strategy: Understanding the Buyer’s Journey

The journey customers take in their buying decisions and how they use products or services has changed exponentially over the past 10 years. Now more than ever before, consumers can take control of what they want, when they want it, and how much they want to spend. This is all thanks to continued advances in digital technology. Before making a purchase, consumers can research online to determine the durability or reliability of a product or service all while searching for the best price. Because of this, companies have had to alter their approach and enlist the help of marketing agencies to implement a search engine marketing strategy to take back control of this process.

A Harvard Business Review article recently outlined four capabilities companies need to master to ensure each customer’s journey leads to a more permanent relationship with that company or brand. These four interconnected capabilities include automation, proactive personalization, contextual interaction, and journey innovation. Considering these four capabilities from the lens of a marketing strategy for search engine results can help enhance your digital presence and upgrade your customer’s buying experience.

An Automated Journey

Automation is done when any steps that were once a manual task, become automated. For example, the need to take checks to the bank or ATM personally to deposit is almost obsolete. Now customers are simply using their mobile devices to snap a photo of their check and deposit it through their bank’s app. Paying close attention to how automation services are evolving can help you adjust your processes and services to better benefit your customers.

Proactive personalization

Proactive personalization is the process of using past experiences with your company to make suggestions for future interactions, and transactions. Amazon does this through an algorithm created to remember such things as the type of ink a customer’s printer uses and when it potentially needs to be re-ordered. Besides algorithm updates, there are other ways to implement proactive personalization as a search engine marketing strategy. Such as introducing interactive elements into your messages or ads to establish relationships and further personalize interactions.

Interact with Your Customer

Contextual interaction allows companies to use a customer’s physical location to determine their needs. For example, this could be an airline app that checks customers into their flight as they enter the airport, followed by a hotel app that checks them into their rooms and even uses the app as the key to the door.

Continue the Journey with Innovation

The final capability is journey innovation, making sure the journey is continually what the customer wants and making changes accordingly along the way. For example, Kraft’s app is no longer just a place to find recipes using their products, customers can now add products to a shopping cart and have them delivered. Just like the continued development of new technology and services, search engine marketing strategies should continue to innovate as well. As we continue to understand more about the buyer’s journey, we can continue to introduce new ways of reaching buyers that excite them.

Related Post: How to Buy an Audience 101

The Buyer’s Journey

These capabilities take your customers from what was once referred to as the “Classic Journey” to the “New Journey.” In the past, even after purchasing and enjoying your brand, there was still the potential that consumers would choose a different company’s product or service when it was time to repurchase. Today, customization, creativity, and attention to detail almost guarantee that customers enter the “loyalty loop” and keep coming back.

Red Crow Marketing

Check out our media buying services for more helpful information on how to strengthen the customer journey and enhance your digital presence. Finding a strong team of designers, developers, marketers, and IT staff will set your search engine marketing strategy apart and place your company on the right path to creating a customer journey that fosters lasting relationships with your brand.