Digital marketing reaches nearly every consumer in your company's target. Social media ads, display ads, and content marketing all play a role in consumers' understanding of your brand. Even traditional advertising, such as radio ads, help by funneling customers to your website or increasing searches. Done properly, digital ads shape the consumer journey during every step of researching, comparing, buying, and enjoying products because they empower customers to have more control over their process.
Understanding the consumer journey is a crucial part of developing your ad campaigns. Here we’ll go through the consumer journey to help illustrate digital marketing’s impact on it.
The Consumer Journey Explained
This five-stage journey illustrates consumers’ process of learning about products through to specifically buying them. The consumer journey includes:
Awareness
Consumers become aware of your brand through touchpoints or interactions with your organization and products. These can occur through display ads online, radio ads, or other measures, like referrals from friends or family. Sometimes they’ll learn about you first, then find a later need in which they’ll follow through with a purchase. Other times, they’ll find you while searching for a solution to a problem.
Research
Consumers have determined their solution, but they’re exploring and researching different options to resolve their issues optimally. They’re not quite sure what they want to purchase, but they’re actively reading about different products.
Consideration
In this stage, the consumer narrowed down their choices but hasn’t decided. They research more thoroughly to weigh their options. Here, reviews and testimonials make a huge difference. Prospects will be considering the smallest details, whether it’s customer service, social media engagement, or quality reports.
Conversion
Conversion occurs at the point of purchase. Your interested prospect converted to a customer by purchasing from you.
Re-Purchase
Business retention is essential for virtually every company. Delight and wow your customers with excellent services to secure future purchases and positive referrals. You’ll want to send follow-up emails or ask them for feedback about their purchase. Reaching out can also help you discover any potential issues they may have had, which your customer service team can resolve to secure further loyalty.
Digital Ads Reach People Better
Digital means are a huge shopping component, 81% of retail shoppers research online prior to purchasing. Without digital ads shaping that research and the online research experience, you will likely lose out on becoming a key option for consideration and purchase.
Digital ads and online content help consumers understand more about your products and feel more confident purchasing from you. You can pave the way to your store through easy research and consideration stages.
Your online presence and website work for you at all hours and at any time of the year. Making it helpful and accessible provides you with similar resources as a salesperson who never sleeps. Take advantage of this opportunity by earning sales or informing customers because if you don’t, you rely on your competitors to do it for you.
Optimize Your Marketing Around the Consumer Journey
To learn more about how digital marketing has evolved the consumer journey, check out this post from our digital wing, Federated Digital Solutions. It provides an in-depth look on this topic and many more.
