The Four Steps of Consumer Buying Process
The internet is a source of great opportunities, millions of people access the internet, night and day. With this volume of people surfing the net, we have endless opportunities to create business, relationships for your company to sell more and better, so it is essential to understand about the buying process.
Today there are two types of search on Google: Searching for information and searching for products.
Information search is when the consumer is far from the buying process which is divided into 4 steps of the consumer buying process:
4 STEPS OF THE BUYING PROCESS
As we can see in the table above, the consumer’s purchase need is divided, and this division directly influences the time each consumer will buy your product or service. The more time it takes for consumers to go through each of these processes, the more difficult their conversion becomes.
So let’s detail what each step is:
Presentation
This step is the beginning of the buying process is where your future customer will find your site. At this stage it is very important that your website objectively and quality conveys everything your company does or sells.
Consequently we indicate that you have a Long Page or a Host Site, this page is intended to present the company as a whole, focusing more on capturing emails from visitors. It is this customer base that will help us in the resulting processes that we will see later on.
Understanding
This buying process is where your site visitor begins to relate to your business, showing visitors that your company has mastered a particular subject and that the company has enough know-how to meet their needs. Then we began to generate in our visitors a sense of credibility, authority according to the visitor’s search on Google.
By this stage your site has already eliminated over 50% of the competition by delivering to the visitor what they are looking for. It is at this stage that you defend the idea of the company, its methodology, and its price.
Because you have been able to bring enough information to the visitor to significantly reduce your insecurity and have shown them that you master what you do with excellence, this is critical to increasing the added value perceived by the visitor.
Need
This step of the buying process is the main one, as this is where you go or not win the customer. Many consumers don’t know what they want, or haven’t realized the need they need for your product or service.
So you should introduce this to your visitors, make them realize how much they are missing out on, not buying with your business.
This perception is built throughout the process, so when the visitor gets to this stage, it will be much easier to create this need in him, because he will already be provided with information and surely he will have already done a research evaluating those concerned. And he felt safer with his information.
Decision / Purchase
This is the last phase of the buying process is what will make leads become customers, is the last step of the sales funnel, many companies sell and stop there, and this is a big mistake. This step is the beginning of a relationship that might be interesting to the consumer or a nightmare.
Now is where the after sales begins, and where the company will need to create new campaigns to sell back to that customer, going through the processes again, this process of presentation is started through email marketing, the blog with new content, with management of social networks, realize that this process is a cycle that begins and does not end. And the company in this end process will gradually increase its number of leads, which then turn into qualified leads (hot, cold and warm), until it becomes a customer.
It is very important that you have a broad view of the entire process in order to ensure that your sales strategies are performing at their best, working with those strategies within the concept of consumer buying behavior, respecting their needs and exceeding their expectations.