The Buyer’s Journey, Simplified

Being a customer is simple. You need something, so you go and buy it. Job done! Okay, it’s usually not so simple, is it? Especially not for big purchases. When you’re spending a few week’s worth of pay on a product, you make sure that it’s exactly what you want. It’s a good price, it’s highly reviewed, it looks cool, whatever it is you care about. In this case, the destination is the destination, or making a purchase. The path to making a purchase is complex. We cover it more in our article What is the Buyer’s Journey, but we’ve simplified the process here.

The simplified buyer’s journey

What are the steps a buyer takes, and what do they need to make that decision? Well, they need some dollars of course. But everyone goes through a series of steps when they’re considering a major purchase. To keep it easy, we’ll call them 1, 2, 3, because most of us can at least count that high. And to make sure everyone can understand the steps, we’ll use a product we all use, know, and love. Pizza. Again.

Step 1: Awareness

The first step is admitting you have a problem. And that problem is that it’s been far too long since you’ve had pizza. It might have even been a full week! You’ve identified the problem, and you know that it’s an emergency that needs to be solved as soon as possible. But where do you get it from? Bring on step 2!

Step 2: Consideration

Meat Lovers with BBQ swirl vs Meat Lovers without BBQ swirl. Meat Lovers with extra bacon vs Meat Lovers with double extra bacon. There’s so many choices, which one do you pick? At this point, you’re doing research to decide what pizza is the best option.

Do you choose one of the pre-made specialities, or do you add extra sauce so you can classify it as a vegetable like the American school lunch program does? (It’s true!) By this point, you know you’re eating pizza and narrow down the choices to which Meat Lovers is best for tonight.

Step 3: Decision

For the final step, you’re looking over your cart to make sure you have the maximum number of free toppings and are about to choose delivery or take away. All you need to do now is check to see if you have a promo code for free delivery and you’re good to go. And then finally, you can put that pizza in your oven. Your mouth oven that is.

Why do these steps matter?

Any sales process should recognise the buyer’s journey and salespeople especially should understand it too! When you build a website – your website should be your best salesperson, after all it is working 24/7.  That being said, it’s important that you have the buyer’s journey in mind right from the initial design, which is why you should build custom. Not doing this can be confusing or off-putting and can make your customers look elsewhere. For example, when you first go to the site to order your pizza, you don’t want a popup that asks if you want to go to your cart, because you haven’t put anything in there yet. Likewise, you don’t want an ad that asks “Have you thought about pizza for dinner?” right before you push the button to confirm your purchase. And you don’t want them to go when they’re so close!

A well-designed website employing an inbound strategy guides buyers through these steps so that they can make the decision you want. That might mean calling you and setting up an appointment or coming into your store or buying a product directly from the website. This means that your site needs do more than have pretty pictures. Careful consideration needs to go into design, word choice, usability and more in order to be effective. Sound like a lot to do? Then let us do it for you! Get in touch or give us a call and we’ll be happy to make you an awesome custom website where the buyer’s journey ends in adding funds to your wallet – so you can buy more pizza!