How to Tailor Your Website to Follow Your Buyer’s Journey

Selling is as much an exercise in marketing as it is in psychology. Buyers all crave different things, even if they all have the same basic need that drives them to your business.

Understanding what brings them to your doorstep (or what turns them away) is vital for creating a high-performing website.

Not all websites will have the same buyers. Making sure your website speaks to?your?specific buyers is critical. That’s where you can tap into the power of the?buyer’s journey?to create a compelling, high-converting website.

What is the Buyer’s Journey??

The buyer’s journey?is exactly what it sounds like: it’s the path a buyer takes from prospect to customer. It’s a three-step process:

1. Awareness Stage:?The buyer realizes they have a problem or need.
2. Consideration Stage:?The buyer researches options to solve their problem.
3. Decision Stage:?The buyer chooses a solution.

To put it in context,?this graphic from Hubspot?breaks down how the buyer’s journey would work for a doctor’s office:

Identifying which stage of the buyer’s journey your prospect is in will let you market to them most effectively.?The questions someone asks at the awareness stage is very different than at the decision stage, and you could be turning away potential customers by coming off as too pushy right out of the gate.

How To Follow Your Buyer’s Journey

1. Create Personas

Before you can map your buyer’s journey, you first need to understand who your buyer is.?A persona?is a detailed, fictionalized version of your ideal customer that you can use in your marketing. For example, a real persona we use here at BizzyWeb is:

• Marketing Leslie,?Aged 35 – 50. She works in a service-based business and wears multiple hats, including marketing. The owner wants to grow the business, but Leslie doesn’t have time to digging into online marketing and build a strategy.

Much of what we do (including this blog!) is aimed at Marketing Leslie and her interests. We know that Leslie may be toying around with the idea of rebuilding her company’s website since it’s not converting leads and is doing research into how best to reach that goal.?

If you need a little help getting started, check out?our pre-built personas?you can use to create your own.??If you want to go even further,?use our free how-to guide?to create new personas from the ground up.

2. Research, Research, Research

Once you have your persona(s) clearly in mind, it’s time to do what most of us dread: gather data.

Speaking with your current customers is invaluable when building a new website. It’s through your current customers that you can learn where they were in their buyer’s journey when they found your website. You might find that a majority of your customers were further along in their decision-making process than you thought.

Depending on what your customers’ answers, you’ll know what stage of the buyer’s journey you’ll want to build your website toward.

Let’s use a plumber as an example:

1. If Plumber Paul finds out from his customers that many of them were searching for terms like “leaking pipes” or “slow toilet” when they found his website in a Google search, Plumber Paul will want to build his website with the?Awareness Stage?in mind.
2. If Plumber Paul finds out from his customers that most of them had a specific issue like needing a toilet installed and took to Google and Facebook for recommendations, Plumber Paul will want to build his website with the?Consideration Stage?in mind.
3. If Plumber Paul finds out from his customers that most of them had already heard of Plumber Paul’s business through recommendations, billboard ads or websites like Facebook and Nextdoor, Plumber Paul will want to build his website with the?Decision Stage?in mind.

In addition to speaking to current customers, you can conduct research by looking at how your current site is performing. What pages are people going to? How long do they stick around?

→Free Template:?Content Tracker

3. Continuously Improve

In order to truly keep pace with the buyer’s journey, you need to constantly monitor and adapt your website. You can’t expect your persona(s) to stay static, and you need to be constantly mold your website to meet them where they are on their journeys.

Using?Growth-Driven Design?will help you always make sure your website is keeping pace.?Growth-Driven Design is a philosophy of web design, where instead of spending months or years on a new site in one hefty chunk of time and money and leaving it stagnant for years, breaking up the work into smaller sprints spread across the course of a year and continuously changing your website based on research.

This approach is significantly better for matching the buyer’s journey because it’s much more adaptable than traditional web design. You may find that as your business grows, your buyer’s journey shifts and changes. Or you may find that despite your initial research, your website would function better if it were targeted at a different stage in the buyer’s journey.

Under a traditional design model, that would mean scrapping your site completely and start from scratch. Under Growth-Driven Design, that just means a shift in strategy.?

Following your buyer’s journey will help ensure that your site is speaking directly to the exact person you want to target. This leads to more quality leads instead of wasting your time chasing down mismatched buyers.

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Get Better Results with Growth-Driven Web Design – Free eBook

Growth-Driven Web Design is not only easier on your team and wallet- continuous updates and improvements to your website will keep your customers coming back for more.?This free eBook goes over Growth-Driven Web Design and what you need to know to get started.

Download Our FREE Growth-Driven Web Design eBook