Inbound Marketing Blog

You’re insanely busy. Like, really about to go off the deep end if something in your calendar doesn’t disappear. Maybe eight somethings. But you’ve dialed it in, and you’re also insanely efficient. You’ve read all of the advice books out there, and you’ve outsourced everything from getting groceries to signing your emails to petting your cat. You drove to work with navigation guidance on just in case there was traffic and you needed a different route.

Throughout my school career, I must have taken about a dozen quizzes, tests, and assessments providing information on how I personally learn best. In fact, this topic fascinated me so much, I actually completed my college senior thesis on visual-spatial learning. But why is it so important to know how you learn best? Or have some insight into how your colleagues, clients, family, or friends learn? Your understanding of how you learn can impact your efficiency, motivation, attention span, memory, and more. It can also heavily affect the way you speak, read, and write throughout your personal and professional life.

Providing valuable content to users has become the new standard for marketing. But if you're only focusing on the awareness stage of the buyer's journey, you're missing out on connecting with prospects as they make their way through the sales funnel. It's time to leave no stone unturned by aligning your content with the entire buyer's journey and getting your potential customers closer and closer to making a purchase. Let’s start by taking a look at the different types of content for each stage.

There are two ways to look at the sales process—a new way and an old way. The old way involves looking at sales as a way to make money or increase revenue. The new way is all about solving a problem on the buyer’s behalf. The new way to look at sales—as a problem solver— means disarming the consumer and earning their trust enough to let them realize your product or service is something they need. This necessarily requires a good deal of empathy. That’s why the most effective, holistic sales processes are rooted in an understanding of and alignment with the buyer’s journey.

If buyer personas are the first step of inbound marketing, then understanding the Buyer's Journey is a very close second. Made up of three stages—Awareness, Consideration and Decision—the Buyer’s Journey is based on the fact that today’s consumers are online and more informed than ever, which puts them on a track to make an educated decision on their purchase before they ever contact you. The Buyer’s Journey is essentially doing a ton of Internet research before making a purchase—and we’ve all been there before.

Guess what I was doing at 11:15 p.m., last night? I wasn’t asleep or Netflix-binging like a normal human being. Instead, I was curled up in bed with my husband, Patrick, snoring quietly beside me as I basked in the glow of my iPhone screen. I know, I know. There’s this whole nutso movement out there telling me I should be screen-free at bedtime, but I can’t help myself. When it’s sleep-o-clock at our apartment, my Type A creative brain doesn’t want to turn off. It screams for inspiration. So, that last hour of the day is my time to scroll through my LinkedIn feed, trolling for interesting articles that pertain to my professional passions. But last night was different.

In business, many like to think purchase decisions are all about dollars and cents, but in reality, it's just as much about emotions and senses.  In this week's episode of The IMPACT Show, Bob and Nick ask the question "do you know what makes your buyer's buy?" and chat about role of pain points and emotion in buyer behavior. They also reflect on YouTube's Studio update, the iPhone's 10th birthday, and what you should know IMPACT Live 2017. 

Regardless of your industry, service offering, or goals, all great marketing strategies center around one key driver: Knowing your audience! Without knowing who you’re targeting, it’s impossible to effectively craft messaging, capture attention, and push the right leads down the funnel to ultimately gain more business.