3 Screens Strategic Advisors Limited

Hong Kong Digital Agency / Consultancy

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Do you know your Buyer’s Journey?

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Guys who don’t understand what girls think about will never have a great date.  Brands that don’t understand what their customers think about will never be a great business.

This is essentially the whole point of the Buyer’s Journey: to understand what your customers are thinking about at different stages of the buying process so you can effectively make a sale.

The Buyer’s Journey

The process of buying has changed significantly in the digital age. With consumers having access to information at their fingertips, they no longer rely on traditional advertising or sales pitches to make purchasing decisions. Instead, they do their own research and engage with brands online before deciding to make a purchase. This shift in the buying process has given rise to the concept of the buyer’s journey in the context of digital marketing.

The buyer’s journey is the path that a potential customer takes from their first encounter with a brand to the final purchase decision. Understanding this journey is crucial for businesses to effectively reach and convert their target audience. It is divided into four stages: Awareness, Engagement, Action, and Advocacy.

Stage 1: Awareness

The first stage of the buyer’s journey is awareness. At this stage, the buyer becomes aware of a problem or a need that they have. They start researching potential solutions and begin to explore their options. Businesses need to create awareness about their brand and products through various marketing channels. This can include social media, content marketing, SEO, and paid advertising.

To effectively reach potential customers in the awareness stage, businesses need to understand their target persona. This is a semi-fictional representation of their ideal customer, based on real data and research. By understanding the target persona, businesses can create content that is tailored to their interests and needs.

Stage 2: Engagement

Once a potential customer is aware of a brand, they move into the engagement stage. In this stage, the customer starts to engage with the brand by exploring their content, reading reviews, and comparing products. Businesses need to create engaging and informative content that helps potential customers make an informed decision. This can include blog posts, videos, infographics, and case studies.

By understanding the buyer’s journey, businesses can create content that is specifically designed for the engagement stage. This content should address the customer’s pain points and offer solutions that are relevant to them. By creating engaging content, businesses can keep potential customers interested and moving through the buyer’s journey.

Stage 3: Action

The action stage is where the potential customer decides to make a purchase. At this stage, businesses need to make it easy for the customer to take action. This can include optimizing the website for conversions, providing clear and concise product information, and offering a seamless checkout process.

By understanding the buyer’s journey, businesses can create content that is specifically designed for the action stage. This can include product demos, free trials, and discounts. By making it easy for the customer to take action, businesses can increase the chances of converting potential customers into paying customers.

Stage 4: Advocacy

The final stage of the buyer’s journey is advocacy. At this stage, satisfied customers become advocates for the brand. They leave positive reviews, recommend the brand to their friends and family, and become loyal customers. Businesses need to create a positive customer experience that encourages advocacy.

By understanding the buyer’s journey, businesses can create content that is specifically designed for the advocacy stage. This can include customer testimonials, case studies, and social proof. By creating a positive customer experience, businesses can turn satisfied customers into loyal advocates for the brand.

Target Persona & Buyer’s Journey

Understanding the buyer’s journey is crucial for businesses to effectively reach and convert their target audience. By combining a good understanding of the target persona with the knowledge of their buyer’s journey, businesses can create content that is tailored to their potential customers’ needs and interests.  This is the foundation of great Content Marketing.

To learn more about Target Persona, click here for Do you really know your target audience?

Do you really know your target audience?

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Not knowing enough about your customers is the most common problem we see when working with clients to refine their digital marketing strategy.

A deep understanding of your customers is critical in the highly segmented and personalized nature of digital media.

Knowing their ages and gender is one thing, but do you understand their needs, values, lifestyles, behavior, et cetera?

What is a persona?

A target persona is a fictitious description of a customer profile informed by data. It describes their demographics, purchasing motivation, purchase behaviors, media behavior, lifestyle interest, and values.  

It is a “best-educated guess” informed by keyword analysis, social listening, customer survey, audience analytics from your paid and owned media, and good old anecdotal life experience. 

It is the difference between knowing your customer as “high income, 35 plus male” and “high income, 35 plus male who works in the creative industry with liberal values, who is an avid online shopper, who is really into hip-hop, and treasures mobility in his professional life”.

It is like comparing Lady Gaga and Adele: both are female singers in their 30s, but you can surely appreciate their personas are very different, right?

In digital marketing, you need to understand your customer at a deeper level beyond basic demographics in order to create targeted content that they find useful, packaged with a personality that they can resonate with, thus driving marketing results.

Persona-based messaging increases relevance

In today’s information-overloaded digital world, we need to cut through the noise by being the most relevant, not just the loudest. We must be relevant to our audience’s needs and lifestyle at the right time and place.  

Suppose you sell a baby pram, and your target customers are young parents. Instead of thinking of “young parents” as a homogeneous group, it can be broken down into different personas, like sporty parents, parents who travel, first-time parents, etc, each with a different appreciation of your product. The opportunity here is to message your brand and product benefits in a way that is tailored to the specific needs and language of each persona, making each of them feel like you are speaking specifically to them, not just any parents, thus increasing relevance.

Persona informs paid media targeting

To effectively acquire more engagement with your brand with paid media, you must have your interest-targeting right, which means finding an interest-targeting profile that is not so niche the audience reach is too small and not too broad that the interest profile is too generic.

You do this by telling an ad platform as much as you can about your target persona. The more descriptive you are, the more input the algorithm has to work with to find your ideal audience. This is where a well-thought-out persona is critical.

Persona shapes your content strategy

If you are at a loss to come up with content to fill your content calendar, look at your persona’s purchase motivation for inspiration. What problems are they trying to solve with a purchase? How are they evaluating options? What questions are they asking? Compelling content that your personas will find valuable stems from answering these questions.

Getting everyone on the same page

If you gather all the stakeholders of your business and ask them who the target personas are for your brand, you will most likely be surprised by the different answers you get. By aligning everyone’s understanding of your target customers with a well-defined set of personas, the customer-facing aspect of your brand will come across consistently in a way that is relevant to and resonates with your customers.

A clear understanding of your target personas is critical in creating a digitally savvy brand that customers identify with, and avoids wasting time and resources in digital marketing that does not bring results.

For more digital marketing strategy, click here for 4 Digital Marketing Strategy Foundations You Cannot Miss.

4 Digital Marketing Strategy Foundations You Cannot Miss

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From our years of experience (20+ years, OMG!) advising companies big and small on their digital marketing strategy, there are common “holes” we see that render their strategy incomplete and ineffective.

So ask yourself these questions to self-diagnose your digital marketing strategy. If your answer is “no” to any of them, your digital marketing strategy might need some revising.

1. Do you know your target personas? (Yes/No)

“A buyer persona is an imaginary character based on research and data that represents your ideal buyer or target audience” [1]. It describes your target customers covering their functional, emotional, and behavioral needs in the buyer’s journey. It is far more descriptive than a demographic description of a target “segment”, and it informs your content, ad-targeting, and how you should spend your media dollar. Doing digital marketing without understanding your target customers at the Persona level is like star gazing without an understanding of the constellation: you’ll waste a lot of effort looking around but not finding what you want and start complaining that the telescope doesn’t work. 

2. Do you understand your Buyer’s Journey? (Yes/No)

The marketing funnel, decision funnel, conversion funnel, buyer’s journey, whatever you want to call it, is the journey that a customer will go through as they embark on finding a solution to a problem they have, such as finding a pair of waterproof hiking shoes, or the best video conferencing solution for the boardroom. From not knowing your brand is the solution they are looking for to finally buying your service/product, buyers seek content and information that gets more specific as they learn more about the available options. Understanding this journey is tremendously helpful in generating content ideas for your brand for different stages of the funnel.

3. Do you know what your most relevant keywords are? (Yes/No)

By keywords, we mean the words that people use to describe you. Storytell your brand with terms that your target customers use allows your brand to be more easily discovered and understood. Qipao or cheongsam? Course or class? Online banking or eBanking? Keyword analysis will give you the answer. It also gives you a wealth of customer insights along the buyer’s journey. From the related keywords, you’ll discover trending topics (e.g., STEM learning toys for 5 years old), product preferences (e.g., dark red lipstick), purchase behavior (e.g., where to buy), and competitive landscape (e.g., iPhone 14 vs. Samsung Galaxy S22). The more you use the frequently used keywords in your category, the higher the chance customers will discover you via paid search, SEO, and even social media.

4. Are you articulating your offering in terms of “customer benefits”?  (Yes/No)

Product feature describes your product, often in language that means nothing to your customers, such as “Super Retina XDR Display”. In contrast, customer benefit describes how your customer can benefit from your product feature, such as “Mind-blowing detail”. Speaking in customer benefit makes for effective communications as your audiences have less to think about why they need your product/service.

In a nutshell, if you understand your target personas, their needs along the buyer’s journey, and their choice of words and language, you can effectively tell them how they can benefit from your offerings. Simply put, that’s marketing communications.

Like in life, a good friend understands you, your needs and speaks your language. Be a good friend to your customers.

Reference:

1. Certified Digital Marketing Professional, Module 2: Content Marketing. https://www.bonfiremedia.hk/syllabus

6 Mindset Shifts to embrace Digital Marketing

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When I teach digital marketing, I often begin by teaching what the digital mindset is first. Without updating traditional thinking and undoing the misunderstanding of what digital marketing really is, its hard for anyone to fully embrace all that digital marketing has to offer. So here you go, here are 6 mindset shifts I like you to take in order to fine tune your understanding and appreciation of digital marketing.

6 Mindset Shifts to Properly Embrace Digital Marketing

Digital Marketing is not IT

Digital marketing is about communications, not technology. Too often too many people get too caught up in the technical mumbo jumbo. The objective of communications has always been about generating awareness, creating engagement, driving action, and fostering loyalty.  In a sense, nothing is new, and nothing has changed.  So stop thinking you cannot understand digital marketing but its IT.

Digital marketing is not a cheap substitute

Digital marketing is not a cheaper alternative of traditional marketing.  The cost of entry to start is much cheaper, but your total digital budget is not.  In fact, “Hong Kong digital ad spend surpassed traditional” according to an SCMP article on Feb/2017 (that’s four years ago by the way).  Digital product cost might look cheap as compared to traditional media item-by-item  (e.g. a banner ad vs an OOH ad), but the sheer number of versions due to segmentation and optimisation can push the cost up.  However, digital marketing is cost efficient, because the agility of the medium allows us to test & test and invest in success.

Digital marketing is not a niche channel

If you look at any media usage report from any developed country, the finding is consistent: across all demographics people spend the most time on the internet (google “media usage [your country]”, you’ll see what i mean).  So digital is not an upcoming trend or the next big thing; digital is not a youth channel (though youth are more engaged online), and digital is certainly not a niche channel.  It is actually your primary mass medium, your primary national medium.

Digital marketing is holistic

The cheaper cost of entry of digital allows us to think holistically across the entire buyer’s funnel, integrating all of forms of communications such as advertising (display ad), PR (social media), direct marketing (email marketing), retail marketing (eCommerce) to drive business results.  These channels don’t work in silos and are interlinked, attracting prospects at the top of the funnel and converting them into customers at the bottom of the funnel.  

Digital marketing is about the long-tail

The concept of the long-tail as applied to digital marketing is about targeting a smaller group of highly relevant people, as supposed to a broad audience of less relevance.  We achieve this by paying attention to target audience persona and segmentation (more on this in subsequent newsletter), and by ongoing engagement with your highly relevant following.  This is also why digital marketing is more cost effective, as there is less wastage.

Digital marketing is content marketing

We hear terms like content marketing, story telling, growth hacking, inbound marketing etc, and they are all simply a different way to say digital marketing.  Digital marketing is indeed about creating ongoing evergreen content to engage with your audience, often content that solve some problems in their lives, may it be getting better sleep, or how to take picture of your pets.  After all, search is the first action that people take when they are looking for a solution to a problem, so you want to be there in the search result with relevant content if you want to reach them.

As the first in a series of newsletter on digital marketing, I’ve touched on a broad set topics as I try to remind you of the necessary mindset shifts to properly embrace digital marketing.  I will address big topics such as persona & segmentation, buyer’s journey, or content marketing in upcoming newsletters, so stay tuned.