In order to be effective, agile marketing teams need to measure the buyers journey, which is how prospects move from knowing nothing about you, to ultimately purchasing your product or solution.
What is the buyers journey?
The buyers journey gives you a simple lens through which to view the journey of a prospect or customer when they interact with your business.
“The buyer’s journey describes a buyer’s path to purchase. In other words, buyers don’t wake up and decide to buy on a whim. They go through a process to become aware of, consider and evaluate, and decide to purchase a new product or service.”
A visual representation of the journey enables marketers and growth teams to both understand, and communicate, the typical path to purchase. Building familiarity and trust over time is critical—a principle also emphasized by the Rule of 7 in marketing. Maintaining internal alignment across teams is also vital—learn more in our guide to Ending the War Between Sales and Marketing.
Why you need to understand the buyers journey?
In addition to providing a useful visual aid, the buyers journey provides a constant reminder of the importance in building a relationship and trust with customers over time. Using the marriage analogy, too many marketing teams try to force a customer to marry them on the first date.
Here are some additional advantages in clearly defining your buyers journey:
-
Identify where prospects are in the journey and market to them appropriately
-
Identify and prioritise where growth efforts can have the biggest impact at any point in time
-
Improve internal alignment across marketing and sales teams
-
Understand core metrics and KPIs for each stage in the journey
-
Map content and key assets to relevant funnel stages
-
Identify moments of customer influence and customer goals for each stage
-
Understand the impact of higher-level funnel activity on lower funnel stages
-
Ensure focus is given to both demand creation and demand conversion activities
A funnel gives you a logical way to track and analyse the performance of key stages of your user journey so you can determine what’s working and what’s not, allowing you to prioritise efforts on things that have the greatest chance of driving growth. It helps you turn data into insight, and insight into action.
Buying journey terminology
There are literally hundreds of terms, phrases and visuals for describing the same - relatively simple - buying process. We’ve included a number of these below for completeness.
-
Journey: Customer decision journey, Buyers journey, Customer journey
-
Funnel: Marketing funnel, Conversion funnel, Sales funnel
-
Moments: Buyer journey moments
-
Loop: The customer loop, The purchase loop, Buying journey loop
-
Map: Customer journey map, Customer journey mapping
-
Ladder / Stages: Ladder of awareness, Stages of awareness
Buying journey examples
TOFU, MOFU & BOFU
Top of funnel, middle of funnel and bottom of funnel is one of the oldest frameworks for mapping the customer journey.
-
TOFU (Top of funnel): Unaware or Problem aware - How to get better results from marketing spend
-
MOFU (Middle of funnel): Solution aware - How agile marketing platforms can increase marketing effectiveness
-
BOFU (Bottom of funnel): Product aware - Why choose the Growth Method agile marketing platform
The AIDA Model
AIDA was by American advertising pioneer Elias St. Elmos Lewis in 1898. The four stages are:
-
Awareness
-
Interest
-
Desire
-
Action
Chartered Institute of Marketing Buying Journey
Below are the five stages of the customers’ buying journey according to the Chartered Institute of Marketing:
-
Awareness
-
Consideration
-
Purchase
-
Retention
-
Advocacy
Using buying journey stages in Growth Method
We advise all marketing and growth teams to map their funnel stages and ensure growth goals and activity are focused on a single funnel stage at any point in time.
This singular focus and prioritisation is critical to ensuring teams don’t get distracted and work in the most efficient way possible.
This enables us to build a basic visual of funnel stages and to calculate conversion rates at each stage, in order to compare to industry benchmarks and discuss where to focus improvement efforts.
Look for big drop-offs in your buyers journey - where are you below industry benchmarks? Segmenting by growth channel and campaign can also reveal interesting data. Tools such as Google Analytics 4 (conversion funnels, behaviour flow report and goal flow report) as well as MixPanel and Google Data Studio can assist with this analysis.
For most growth teams, the solution to growth then comes down to 1 of 3 problems:
-
Improve conversion rates - is there enough of the right people in the funnel but we need to improve conversion rates, perhaps through better education or improved sales efficiency.
-
Improve quality - do we have lots of prospects at the top of the funnel that aren’t converting? This may be a lack of alignment between marketing and product.
-
Increase volume - do we just need to grow the size of our audience and get more people coming to the website
Final thoughts
Here are some general tips and best practises to help when thinking about how to use your buyers journey:
-
Focus on the bottom of the funnel stages first
-
Understand conversion rates across your funnel, and by acquisition channel
-
Pick ONE area to focus on at a time
-
The is no “one size fits all” when it comes to funnels
-
As a general rule, simple is better than perfect
Remember there is no such thing as the perfect funnel. Aim to be helpful, educational and informative for prospective buyers and use funnel analysis to make data-informed decisions and improve your marketing effectiveness.
Got questions? Ping me on LinkedIn or on Twitter.
Additional resources
Recommended additional reading on marketing funnels and journey.