There’s a fine line that separates a good marketing strategy from a great marketing strategy.
Today, all advertising platforms break down demographics into data sets that make the life of a marketer or business owner significantly easier. With just a few clicks, you can get a high level overview of your audience demographics.
While it’s important to understand your key demographics, you also need to understand purchase intent. Once you have a complete picture of your customer intent, you’ll be able to take your marketing efforts to the next level. Here’s what you need to know.
What is Purchase Intent?
In its simplest form, purchase intent refers to where a customer is along their buyer’s journey. While the ideal customer has their money in hand ready to buy, the majority of the people who interact with your site or brand will likely have a lower purchase intent. Especially if they are only just beginning to get familiarized with your brand.
It’s often hard to measure purchase intent, because it takes many different factors into account. While it may be easy to optimize for your target demographic, tailoring your customer’s experience to where they are relative to their purchase intent can be difficult.
Meeting Your Customer Where They Are
If you’ve never taken purchase intent into account when planning your marketing strategy, you’re leaving a lot on the table. Meeting your customers where they are relative to their buyer’s journey is incredibly important, both in customer experience and their likelihood to convert.
Typically, your customer’s purchase intent can be broken down into two categories:
- Informational intent – Still in the educational phase where they are learning about their problem and discovering solutions.
- Transactional intent – Having gathered the necessary information needed to take the next step and evaluate their decision or purchase.
It’s important to keep the two categories of purchase intent in mind when building out your marketing strategy. Especially when it comes to the content that you’ll be providing your audience. The reason being, each category will align with the different stages of the buyer’s journey.
Stages of the Buyer’s Journey
We’ve mentioned the buyer’s journey in relation to purchase intent a few times now, but what exactly does it mean?
From a marketing standpoint, The buyer’s journey (or customer’s journey) can be broken down into three distinct phases. Starting with awareness, moving into consideration, and ending with the final decision. Let’s dive into how each of these phases relates to purchase intent, and more importantly, how you can develop a marketing plan to meet your customer’s where they are.
Awareness
In the buyer’s journey, the awareness phase can be summed up as the moment a potential customer becomes aware of a problem that your product or service solves.This is also the phase where a customer will begin to research their issues, and first become familiar with your brand.
While the transactional intent during the awareness phase is at its lowest, this phase provides the perfect opportunity to provide valuable information. Informational intent may very well never lead to a conversion, but it definitely sets you up to form a relationship with future customers, and begin to build trust.
Consideration
The consideration phase of the buyer’s journey is incredibly important. By this point, any potential customer has clearly given a name to their problem, and has committed to finding a solution that fits their needs. The purchase intent is still relatively low, but the consideration stage is when a buyer will begin to consider the different solutions.
Most successful marketers understand that the consideration phase is worth investing in heavily. It’s where you can position yourself as an industry leader, and help guide the buyer in their research towards your product or service as a solution.
Decision
Lastly, we’ve reached the decision phase of the buyer’s journey. This is often where most marketing strategies focus the bulk of their efforts. For good reason to. The decision stage is when purchase intent is the highest, and people turn into customers.
Of course, you should always put an emphasis on the decision stage. But the truth is, the majority of customers have already made up their minds about what company or brand they will go with before they even reach the decision stage.
So, while purchase intent is at its highest level, it’s also at its most competitive stage. If the first time a customer interacts with your brand or business is during the final stage, then you’re putting yourself at a severe disadvantage.
Where Web Stories Come Into Play
With purchase intent in mind, how can you go about developing a marketing strategy that puts you in position to win a sale?
Ideally, you want to invest efforts in both informational content and transactional content. A well rounded approach will always help set you apart from the other competitors in your industry. The problem is, while strategies may vary, the approach will most likely be the same.
If your brand is putting out the same written content and creatives as everyone else, you’re not really giving yourself an edge over the competition.
That’s where web stories can come into play.
Firework web stories are helping reach new audiences, and engage users with dynamic content that is both informative and transactional in nature. As attention spans shrink, fewer customers are taking the time to read through comprehensive guides and product descriptions, and more are looking at reviews and functionality in real time.
Web stories offer you the ability to showcase your product or brand in a whole new light that buyers are more likely to gravitate towards. Short, easily digestible video clips have revolutionized how people consume content. And it’s been proven time and time again on social media. So, why not put your business in a position to thrive with an approach that is being underutilized?
