No matter what product or service you offer to your potential customers, you must know who they are. But is that enough?

Not quite… If you want to sell a lot and especially if you want to sell to the same person multiple times, you must ensure that you have a flawless Buyer Journey. In other words, the journey a customer goes through from the moment they first hear about your brand until they become a loyal customer needs to be well-planned.

Today, we will discuss the importance of a well-executed Buyer Journey and the main

6 mistakes you need to avoid when planning the customer journey

First of all, what exactly is a Buyer Journey?

As I mentioned earlier, the Buyer Journey refers to the entire path a person takes regarding your brand. From the first time they hear about you, through an advertisement, a recommendation, or a Google search, up to the point where they become a loyal customer or even an ambassador for your brand.

A complete Buyer Journey consists of several stages, and it by no means stops at the purchasing stage.

Because retention provides a much higher ROI for certain business models and is often much more profitable than acquisition. After we convert a potential customer into a customer, the journey continues towards the customer retention stage and converting them into ambassadors of our brand.

This meticulously mapped route will help you create strong and personalized marketing messages. This way, you will know exactly who your customer is and at what stage they are.

“If everyone is your customer, then no one is your customer.”

Therefore, if you’ve decided to start building a correct Buyer Journey for your business, let’s see what mistakes to avoid in its creation.

More specifically, what are the 6 most common mistakes entrepreneurs make when it comes to building a Buyer Journey?

They confuse the Buyer Journey with the Sales Funnel

A sales funnel is usually much simpler than a Buyer Journey and stops at the acquisition stage. If the conversion has been made, the Sales Funnel was of good quality.

A Buyer Journey goes beyond this stage and focuses on retention and turning the customer into a brand ambassador.

Not only are these stages a significant addition compared to a sales funnel, but you should really focus on these two aspects if you want to position yourself as a market leader.

They don’t clearly define the Customer Avatar

The Customer Avatar is your ideal customer.

This can be a fictitious person constructed the way you’d like them to be, or it can even be one of your favorite customers. Because you always need to know, TO WHOM you are selling, in order to know HOW to sell.

Defining the Customer Avatar should be the first step in constructing the Customer Journey. Only with a well-defined avatar can you create a relevant path for your customer.

Let me briefly explain how to define a customer avatar. If you choose your Customer Avatar to be fictitious, it shouldn’t be entirely fictitious. We recommend that you conduct thorough research to learn as many real details about this type of customer or borrow characteristics from your current customers. There are free tools like Semrush Persona that offer you the possibility to quickly and specifically construct a customer avatar. You just need to fill in the necessary fields.

Let’s assume you sell gardening articles and want to build a customer avatar. Where do you start?

Think about what your ideal customer would be like. Start searching on Google, Facebook, Forums, and most importantly, in your customer list. Then fill in some details about them.

• Give them a name.
• Demographics (gender, age, location, marital status, education level, etc.).
• Frustrations: List all the frustrations you think your avatar has here. These could be frustrations related to the industry in which you operate, the products you want to offer, or the sales processes they go through as a customer. Here, you might discover they have problems with bugs, there’s been too much rain, the soil they work with isn’t very fertile, or they can’t find a garden supplier who offers everything they need.
  
  What are the avatar’s frustrations that make them search for what you sell?

• Goals: What do they want to achieve with your product or service? Why?
• Social – belonging to a group of interest? Are they part of a group of people who only use eco-friendly products that have minimal environmental impact, or are they people who don’t care and focus more on product quality than its impact on the environment?
• Brands and influencers they follow. Find out which celebrities these people follow.
• How do they prefer to communicate? On Facebook, Whatsapp? Does your customer avatar frequently use email?
• Factors that influence them to buy. Here you can search through reviews from other online stores, such as eMAG, to see why someone purchased a particular product or why they returned it. What matters more? The price or quality?
• BONUS: put up a profile picture and write a short description of your customer avatar. This way, when you run a marketing campaign for them, it will help you create more personal materials.”

They don’t invest enough in R&D (Research & Development).

Research is not just important for building your customer avatar, but also in many other aspects of your business. Such as developing new products, improving existing products, capturing a new market, or improving the customer retention process.

Investing time and money in R&D is a long-term strategy, which comes with numerous benefits:

• it improves your reputation;
• it gives you an advantage over competitors;
• it provides you the opportunity to take advantage of new opportunities;
• it can position you as a market leader;
• it attracts quality customers.

If you have a relatively small business, you don’t need to invest large sums of money in R&D, but you do need to invest time. For example, it’s absolutely necessary to monitor your customers’ negative reviews and do everything possible to solve the problem. If the review is due to a product defect, fix the product. On the other hand, if it’s because of an unpleasant experience with support, improve the support.

They try to jump directly to the purchasing stage without going through awareness, interest, and consideration.

Source -visualstorytell.com

Many entrepreneurs hope that if they start a promotional campaign, the visitors to the store will flood the business website trying to buy. It would be great, but reality isn’t quite like that…

No matter how good and useful the product you sell is, if the person who sees it doesn’t know you or doesn’t necessarily need that product, they won’t buy at the first interaction. That’s why you need to pay attention to the stages that precede the purchase.

They focus more on acquiring new customers than on retaining existing ones.

According to Invesp, it can be 5 times more expensive for a company to acquire a new customer than to retain an existing one. And, unfortunately, only 18% of companies focus on customer retention.

Moreover, besides the fact that it’s much more expensive to find new customers, the likelihood of selling a new product to these customers is at most 20%. On the other hand, if you try to sell the same product to someone who has bought from you in the past, the likelihood that they will buy is 60-70%.

And the last advantage of retention that I want to present to you, and with which I hope to convince you that existing customers are extremely important, is that they spend on average 31% more than new customers.

So, are new customers more valuable than returning ones? ?

They don’t ask for reviews from customers.

If you’ve ever bought something online, you know how important reviews are. We rely more on the opinions of others about a product than on what the company selling the product says. It’s natural…

That’s why it’s important to get positive reviews from your customers. But know that even the negative ones aren’t as terrifying as they seem.

These are the 6 major mistakes you risk making when outlining the customer’s journey for the first time. I hope I’ve convinced you that a Buyer Journey is not just a game but a very powerful real tool that can offer you huge advantages over the competition and help you take your business to the next level.

At the same time, I hope I’ve conveyed clearly enough what the mistakes are that you should avoid when establishing your customer’s path.

Request a free audit from the DAR Media team, and find the best option for promoting your business.