In a traditional customer journey, there are a number of stages: awareness, consideration, evaluation and choice, purchase and initial engagement and then the process of satisfaction, repeat business and brand advocacy or loyalty.
In the awareness phase, the person is triggered by something on the radio or a friend having great success and referring them to this product or service.
The next thing that happens to that individual is they are in a consideration phase and they’re going to gather some information. So, let’s say – a client of mine has a chain of health clubs – if there’s a person who sees an old friend they haven’t seen in awhile and they look great. The person asks, “how did you do that?” The friend says, “I’m working out with a personal trainer at this great club”.
There we go! We’re creating awareness that person is considering and saying, “hey, maybe I can also go see that personal trainer”. They do a little research, they look at the gyms in their area online or maybe they’ve gotten some mailers from local gyms, and then they move to the next stage, which is the evaluation and choice phase.
Maybe they go and visit some personal trainers and visit some gyms, see where they feel comfortable and then make their buying decision, which is the purchase phase. Then they start using it, and they receive marketing emails that say, “hey, congratulations, thanks for being part of the team, we’re here for you”. Or they’re getting strokes from their personal trainer, and that person is sending them text messages. They’re using the product, in this case the personal training, and they are getting success themselves, and they have a great deal of satisfaction or they’re feeling complete from that purchase.
Then their loyalty leads them to recommend it to other people who are just having that awareness that they should be participating in it as well.
So, that’s the customer buying cycle:
- Awareness
- Consideration
- Evaluation
- Purchase and satisfaction
My recommendation to you is the same that I make to my clients – we go through each phase and assess what materials we have to support each of those phases for each of the personas that we’re targeting.
And then if there are gaps in the content and gaps in our campaigns, we fill those gaps with new content. If we have content already, we make an evaluation of that content to see how well it’s performing and continue to innovate.