In my last two blogs I’ve been taking you through the buyer’s journey, looking at how excellent marketing needs to support our buyers at every step.
If you missed part 1 and part 2, read them here:

• Part 1
• Part 2

In this final blog of the series I’ll explain how we can help our customers step over the line and continue onwards to become long-term, loyal customers and referrers.

Encouraging the first purchase

To reduce the perceived risk at this point in the buyer journey, your customer needs to feel what it’s like to be a customer before they buy.

A product ladder is a series of offers and products that lead from one to the next so people can build a relationship with you and get a sense for what it’d be like to be a customer before they commit to something big. It’s all about reducing perceived risk.

For example:

In my previous blog I explained how we all go through a number of stages when we make a buying decision.

Excellent marketing supports our buyers at every stage of their decision-making process so they can move forward.

To do this, you need to have mapped out your customer’s buying journey because it’ll be different for different markets and products. Once you’ve mapped out your customer’s buying journey, you can then look at how you can reduce the perceived risk at every stage and build trust throughout the journey. By reducing risk and building trust at every stage, it becomes easy for customers to decide to choose you. And if it’s easy for people to buy from you then sales will inevitably increase.

If you haven’t read part 1 yet, where we covered the first stages of the buying journey, click here: Part 1

Building buyer’s interest

Once your buyer is aware of you, you need to let them get to know you in their own time. Build trust by providing regular, quality, short-form content such as;

The aim of marketing and sales is to take people on a journey from never having heard of you to being raving fans who buy loyally and tell all their friends. So if you want to understand what marketing excellence looks like then you need to understand how your customers make that journey. And the journey will be different depending on your business, your product and your market.

Some buying journeys are quite short and buyers make their decision quite quickly. Others are longer, involve more stages, and require more support from marketing and sales.

Marketing excellence supports buyers at every stage of their buying decision, all the while building trust and reducing the perceived risk of moving forward.

Most people jump to this stage of the process first. This is the equivalent of placing a first order of 100,000 widgets based on a design on the back of a napkin. Yes, there's a chance they might do the job but you're risking losing a lot of money in the process. (Read 'Turning your marketing upside down' for a more detailed explanation)

First, you need a robust marketing function in your business that leads your customers comfortably through their buying process. You need to make sure you've designed your marketing to be effective and you've tested it out and are confident that it is converting customers with a good return on investment.

The process of doing this will almost always result in an upturn in sales, but if your sights are set higher and you want to grow your business more, you have two choices:

1. Increase the marketing activities you're already doing that are proven to work
2. Add new traffic sources

The order of these is important: it is far easier and more efficient to increase sales from existing, proven marketing activities. People often shy away from doing this because they're not confident their activities are delivering ROI. If that's the case, go back and put measures in place so you know whether they're working or not. 

The aim of marketing is to support customers through their buying journey. Therefore every single piece of marketing should have a call to action that leads your customers on to the next step. If you're not clear on why, read my previous blog, "Have you planned your customer's next step?"
 
Crafting an effective call to action is easier said than done. Here are the three things to keep in mind:

I’m often asked, “what can I do to speed up my customers in their buying decision?”
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In very considered purchases it might take 6 months or more from when your company first appears in front of a prospective customer to them actually buying from you. In a small business, it can be excruciating to wait patiently while your perfect customer considers whether they want to buy from you.

It’s tempting to want to try and rush them when you know they’d get so much value from what you have to offer, but it’s crucial that your customer is allowed to buy in their own time.
Here’s why: