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You might have heard of the Customer Buying Cycle as the Purchase Funnel, or the Marketing Funnel. You may have even heard from researching customer journey that the Customer Funnel is dead, and that the “Consumer Decision Journey” is the new hot model for marketing.
There are so many models and theories, that it can be difficult to truly understand how your marketing funnel works. You may be in the service industry, a B2B business, or a business in which the sales cycle can take months to convert a new client. What works for someone else – will it work for you?
How much of what you read about Marketing can be generalized to *your* specific business?
Here’s our secret: the Awareness, Consideration, Purchase perspective can be applied to virtually any model, applicable to any business.
At Cucumber Marketing, we provide full-service marketing that is tailored to your business in its specific industry, in light of your competitors and industry trends. But, we always use the Awareness, Consideration, Purchase framework in everything we do.
Going through this framework will force you to make a conscious effort in breaking down your website visitors into 3 stages of intent, helping you improve your marketing by “filtering” your message down to its core elements. Here’s how it works:
Awareness
Do your customers know you exist?
Perhaps your competitors own a huge amount of the market share. Or, you’re introducing a product that people don’t even know about. How silly would it be to launch a “Buy One Get One” campaign when people don’t even know you exist yet?
The Awareness Stage works by defining, creating and talking to your core audience. This is where you start the branding process, and usually defines the content on your website.
This is where you build your audience, which can be done through Facebook Ads, Google AdWords, SEO, PR…the list goes on!
Consideration
Would your customers choose you over a competitor?
Let’s say your potential customer has spent a few minutes googling for your product or service, listing out their top 3 choices on a sheet of paper. Would they choose you? Why? What makes you stand out, and how could you improve?
You may need to be more focused with your marketing at this stage, if people already know your brand and are choosing not to go with you. Where are your weaknesses, and what are your strengths?
When in the Consideration Stage, you need to send a message to your potential customers that you are best choice. Sometimes you need to shift the consumer lever in deriving brand value to play to your strengths. This can be done with a remarketing campaign, strategic landing pages, or a combination of both.
Purchase
Would your customers bother to buy your service or product?
Lots of people drop off at the Consideration Stage. Maybe they can’t be bothered to make a purchase. Perhaps they simply forgot about you. They could have been really excited at the start of the search, only to lose interest at the end.
The Purchase Stage is where you have to be proactive in re-engaging your most likely customers. Using an element of urgency, value, or excitement, you want to make the final push to ensure your customers go through with choosing you.
This could be a seasonal sale, a monthly newsletter, an email announcement, or a social media update. You’ve spent so much work on building your brand; it’s time to reap the rewards.
Improving Your Marketing Using Awareness, Consideration, Purchase
It’s easy to get confused with your marketing strategy. Do you promote a sale? Work on a branding campaign? Or, revisit old clients? All are excellent ideas – but need to be considered separately and in line with your overall marketing strategy.
Our first step as your ‘branding police’ will be to create a brand audit that analyzes your business from all angles, in order to create the marketing strategy that works best with your needs. We apply Awareness, Consideration, Purchase to all stages to help define your marketing message and plan your campaigns.
Creating your personalized Brand Audit and marketing strategy is where our digital marketing company comes in. Contact our marketing agency to find out how we’ll help grow your brand. Relax, we’ve got your back – and we always have chocolate 🙂