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While the customer buying cycle will naturally vary from customer to customer, it is usually comprised of seven stages: awareness, interest, consideration, purchase, support, loyalty, and advocacy.

Not surprisingly, you need to tailor your online presence, and the functionality of your website, to support each stage of the customer buying cycle. We’ll take a look at each stage, and the most appropriate way to use your website, in turn.

1. Awareness

As the name suggests, the awareness stage is when potential customers become aware of your brand, your company, your products, and your services. It is also the stage during which they become aware of the problem or pain point that they need to address.

During the awareness stage, you need to use the content on your website to attract the attention of potential customers. Ensure that your content talks directly to their problem, that it addresses their pain points. Make sure that your website content is crafted to encourage potential customers to move forward; it should demonstrate that you can provide exactly the right solution for them. It can often be useful during the awareness stage to use landing pages; smaller, stand-alone pages of content, tailored to specific customer needs.

2. Interest

During the second stage, the interest of your potential customer in your products and services increases. They will want to learn more about what exactly you have on offer, and how exactly it can help them. They will want to understand the features and benefits of your products and services, and perhaps even your pricing structure.

Your website can assist enormously during this stage, by thoroughly educating potential customers. The best way to educate customers through your website is to incorporate a blog, featuring regular articles that demonstrate your authority in your chosen field. You can also offer free, downloadable whitepapers or e-books, in exchange for contact information.

3. Consideration

Depending on the products or services you have on offer, this stage may not be appropriate, or necessary. However, if you can offer your product (or part thereof) on a trial basis, it can often help boost the likelihood of lead conversion. For instance, if you supply some type of product is as promised, this type of offer will often put any lingering customer concerns to rest.

If your product or service is not suited to a trial offer, this stage may be replaced with late opportunity negotiation, or, in the case of a large contract or sale, a smaller product or service may be purchased first.

During this particular stage, it is useful to have content readily available to answer any questions that your potential customers might have. So, a list of regularly asked FAQs can come in handy, as well as a dedicated online help desk or phone number. It is especially important that content during this stage fosters engagement with your product or service, and builds customer habits. It is also important to track customer conversions during this stage. Knowing if, and when, content is being engaged with, and which customer convert, can help you improve your processes for future campaigns.

4. Purchase

Arguably the most important stage, this is when all your hard work and dedication pays dividends. Your potential leads convert into actual, real-life customers. Your website needs to facilitate the purchase process in the easiest, most streamlined way possible. If you have an online checkout system, make sure that it works properly, is user-friendly and intuitive.

5. Support

This stage is all about after-sales care. Your customers should receive support and help so that they get the most out of your products or services. This stage is all about ensuring customer satisfaction. Your website plays a vital role during this stage. Use it to host tutorial blogs and instructional videos, customer forums, and a help desk. Happy customers become repeat customers, and are much more likely to refer your products and services onto others.

6. Loyalty

If you have handled the support stage well, this should naturally flow into the loyalty stage. During this stage, you should be able to build successful, fruitful, long-term relationships with your customers. Relationships that result in repeat business, up-selling, and cross-selling. You might offer annual subscription or maintenance plans, or discounts for bulk expenditure. Again, you can use your website to facilitate this type of up-selling and cross-selling. E-marketing combined with specific, targeted landing pages can often work quite well to further engage loyal customers.

7. Advocacy

Last, but by no means least, we come to advocacy: the stage where your customers refer you to all their friends, family, and colleagues. Your website, and its content, should be designed to make referrals easy. So, make sure you have social media sharing buttons on all your website pages, on your blog posts, on your e-newsletters. It can often be useful to offer discounts for referrals (for either new or existing customers).

In today’s digital age, inbound marketing is arguably the most effective form of marketing available. Some industry experts even go as far as to say that inbound marketing is the most effective method for doing business online. Rather than using the old, out-dated method of outbound marketing (pay for advertisements and then pray for leads), inbound marketing is all about creating high-quality content that pulls people naturally towards your brand, product and services. Align your content with the wants and needs of your audience, and they will naturally be converted over time.

The CEO and Founder of HubSpot, Brian Halligan, coined the term ‘inbound marketing’ in 2005. According to the inbound marketing experts over at HubSpot, this particular digital marketing tactic is especially effective for small businesses that are regularly dealing with high dollar values, knowledge based products and services, and products that have extended research cycles. In these instances, research suggests that potential customers are much more likely to hire someone that demonstrates their expertise, someone who has positioned themselves an industry expert.

Inbound marketing uses mediums such as blogs, e-books, videos, podcasts, e-newsletters, social media marketing, SEO, and a variety of other content to bring customers closer to a company or a brand. In contrast, outbound marketing involves buying the attention of customers, using activities such as cold calling, direct mail, advertisements, sales flyers, and spam.

Inbound marketing can be used to reach customers at various levels of brand awareness, and at various stages within the buying cycle. Interestingly, inbound marketing provides opportunities for both companies and consumers: companies can learn about potential customers, and potential customers can learn about the company.

In a nutshell, inbound marketing is all about pull, not push: pulling your audience towards your brand, rather than pushing your product onto your audience.

The Four Stages of Inbound Marketing

According to the experts at Hubspot, there are four stages within the inbound marketing cycle: Attract, Convert, Close, and Delight.

Attract

The first stage of inbound marketing is all about attracting traffic to your website. But not just any old traffic, the right traffic: your target market. People who are likely to buy your products, contract your services, become leads, and eventually become happy long-term customers. There is any number of tactics that you can use to attract your target market. The most effective combination will depend upon the nature of your business, and the type of product or service that you are selling. Some of the most popular tactics include:

• Blogging: this is the most effective, best way to attract new visitors to your website. Educational, informative, engaging content will keep your website visitors coming back on a regular basis. Not only that, regular blogging activity gives the search engines something new to index and reference when they crawl your site. This can help to push your website further up the search engine rankings.
• Social Media: once you have your educational, informative, engaging blog content, use social media to distribute it. Use social media to engage with potential customers, to give your brand a human element.
• Search Engine Optimisation: you need to make sure that your website is appearing in the top search results for your chosen keywords. So, without using black hat SEO tactics, pick the most relevant keywords for your business, and create content around those keywords.

Convert

So, once you’ve attracted all these new visitors to your website, you then need to convert them into leads. The best way to do this is to collect their contact information, or their email address at the very least. The most effective way to prize contact information from leads is to offer them something for free in return. For example, give visitors a free e-book or a strictly VIP instructional video, in exchange for their email address. In order to convert visitors to your website into leads, you’re going to need a few vital mechanisms in place:

• Call to Action Buttons or Links: these tricky tools encourage visitors to your website to take action. Make them clear. Make them obvious. Make sure that visitors to your website are doing what you want them to. A call to action might be ‘Download Our e-Book’ or ‘Call Us Now’. Just make sure that they are enticing.
• Landing Pages: a landing page should follow a call to action. So, when a visitor clicks on a call to action button or link, they are automatically redirected to a landing page, so that the offer in the call to action can be fulfilled. A landing page will usually include a short form for your visitor to complete (with information like contact details).
• Contacts Database: once you have all your new website visitors handing over their contact details, you’re going to need to store them safely, in a centralised database. There are plenty of software platforms available.

Close

OK. So, you’ve increased website visitors, and locked in some leads. Now, all you need to do is close: convert your leads into customers. This can be quite difficult. It’s one thing to get people to hand over their email address, but quite another to get them to hand over their hard earned cash. Luckily, there are a few handy methods available:

• Email: it is statistical fact that people require multiple points of contact before they are willing to purchase a product or service. So, you need to grow your relationship, and build their trust by reaching out to leads regularly. One of the best, most cost-effective methods to achieve this is by using email. A series of emails providing useful, relevant content can build trust and make a lead more likely to buy. Check out our recent article How to Create a Successful Email Marketing Campaign for some handy hints.
• Marketing Automation: this takes email marketing to a whole other level. It is becoming increasingly simple to automate digital marketing programs. For example, if a visitor downloads a whitepaper on a certain topic, you can send them a particular series of related emails. If they followed you on Twitter, and then visited particular pages on your website, you can send a different series of emails, targeting the content that they viewed.

Delight

Inbound marketing should not cease to exist once you’ve made the sale. It should be a long-term, ongoing two-way conversation. So, you should continue to delight your customers well after you’ve cashed their cheque. Offer after-sales content, such as tips on product care and available accessories. Make owners of your products love your brand even more once they’ve purchased your products. Customers that love your brand will tell their friends and family all about it, and as we all know, word-of-mouth is the single most effective marketing tactic available.