Consumer Buying Process

A friend of mine sent me a link to this video. I gotta tell you this might be the single best video I've seen on the human condition. Straight from…

Does your site have flow? I’m not talking about the Shopping Cart. I mean do you understand the typical consumer buying process for your product or service? Do you get it, can you recite it, can you prove it?

Before we get to your website, let’s talk about something concrete that we both understand. Candy bars and BMW’s.

What is the process of buying a candy bar? How much research is done? How much risk does it involve? Does it require asking friends their opinion, checking for testimonials, reading the ingredients, calculating calories or searching for recall alerts? What does it really take to sell a candy bar to a consumer? (more…)

Getting customer feedback is sometimes hard. People are busy, they forget, they don’t want to or they just don’t care enough to take the :30 seconds to do it. But it is oh so important to get customer feedback.

Customer feedback makes me think of index cards on a bulletin board, doesn’t it?  Or comment cards attached to the bill at a restaurant. Sometimes companies solicit feedback in an email survey. For the most part those don’t really give you the kind of information you need.  They’re great for graphs in the newsletter though, aren’t they? (more…)

Using customer feedback is critical to your success. I recently wrote a guest blog post on Savvyblogging.net about making sure you know what actions you’re going to take BEFORE you survey your audience. That kind of customer feedback can help you make changes and take action immediately.

But there are more important reasons to be using customer feedback.

Interviewing Customers

Nothing can take the place of interviewing your customers. What you really want to understand is the process your customers went through to get to you. And then what happened to get them to pull their wallet out and pay you money. Once you understand where they were mentally, you can craft your web copy, headlines and email subject lines. (more…)

I once read a post on SavvyBlogging.net titled “Ditch the Pitch”, which made me wonder more about the role of the sales pitch in the consumer buying process?  I wouldn’t ever advise getting rid of the pitch because the pitch generates the sale. But I would say the author makes some valid points about the sophistication of consumers.

Crystal Collins, the author of “Ditch the Pitch” insists that we’re now so socially savvy we can see a sales pitch from a mile away. I totally agree with that, in fact I use that to my advantage and try to look at everything from the view point of the other side. I’m always wondering “what is their motivation in this arrangement” thus when is the pitch?

While I’m sort of against being victim to the hard sell pitch, I know first hand that it works very well a great deal of the time. Having spent the last 8 years in the infomercial world, I’ve seen up-to-the-second tracking on our TV infomercials and can compare that to the incoming sales call log. We can track at what second during the show a person calls and compare that to what they just heard. 9 times out of 10 it’s the sales pitch that starts the phone ringing. (more…)

Kenny Brooks is the funny door to door salesman that everyone is watching on YouTube. He says that 2 years of door to door sales is like a college education in sales communication. And that line probably does help him make sales . . . but . . . has he learned enough to be successful selling something else?

On his blog, Marty Fancke commented that Kenny was doing lots of things right. He appreciated Kenny’s ability to make the customer smile, his use of product demo’s, leveraging social proof and asking for the sale several times. I believe his buyer’s would agree. (more…)

Creating a marketing plan that matches the consumer buying process strategy is crucial to the overall conversion rate of the campaign. And the key is understanding that marketing plans don’t have to be difficult – the framework itself can be very easy.

In reviewing where we are on a client’s site, I detailed the basic framework we’re using for this site here in this video. Making a plan like this makes it somewhat easy to determine from day to day what part of the strategy you’re working on and how it fits into the overall plan. (more…)

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