One of marketing’s golden rules is ensuring your message is relevant to your customers.
To do this, you need to know where they are at in the buyer journey.
Advertising and marketing messages are everywhere we go; it is almost impossible to escape them. From traditional offline ads on billboards and television to Facebook promoted posts and Google’s paid search online.
Very few of us are impulse buyers, we have our moments of weakness, but most of us control how and when we spend. Aside from this, not everybody is going to be ready to purchase your product or use your service, most of us will do our research first.
Research
Research starts the buyer’s journey, taking them from awareness to consideration and finally to purchase. It should also form the beginning of your understanding of your target audience.
You will need to identify their thought processes and what information they are seeking at each stage. It is your job to provide them with this information, without pushing a sale on to them but gently nudging them along closer to purchase.
Timing
Essentially, the role of your social media content is to help consumers make the right decision. If your social media posts are always aimed at making a sale, you are doing it wrong. In fact, you could be losing potential customers.
Your potential customers want to know why they should choose your brand, what makes you a better choice than the alternative brand. While the customers who have already purchased will tire of constantly receiving sales messages; unfollow.
Key to a successful social media strategy is delivering the right message to the right person at the right time.
Listen and learn
‘I’m not a mind reader!’ you say, ‘How the heck am I meant to know what they are thinking?’
Indeed you aren’t, but you can employ different techniques to gain insight into their problems and to identify the stage in the buyer journey they are at.
First of all, listen to what they are saying. What problems are they talking about online? Use this insight to inform the content you create and share, offering solutions and bringing them into the awareness stage.
The path to purchase
Continue to educate and inform your audience as they enter into the consideration stage, but remember they are gathering information, they are not ready to purchase. The more you can tell them about your product and your points of difference the greater your chance of retaining them and converting them into a customer.
In the purchase (decision) stage, the messaging of your content needs to reinforce the value your product or service will provide. If they are unsure, your audience will return to the previous consideration stage and re-evaluate their choices.
As you develop your brand’s social media strategy make sure you have the buyer journey stages mapped out. For each stage, you will need to identify and create content that is aimed at the audience and their thought processes.
If you plan your content in this way, you are going to have a better chance of delivering the right message to the right audience at the right time. It is possible.
