How To Map Video Content To Your Customer Buying Cycle

We hear so often that content is king! This is no longer breaking news. But what type of content are you talking about? Video content is the by far the most engaging content that we’ve seen online. Every year it’s growing leaps and bounds yet it is still largely not being adopted and used by businesses in their buyer process. As of late written content, (blogs, email, white papers, etc.) regardless of quality, was the focus of most commercial websites. Here’s how you can guide your prospects through their buying journey and purchase from you.

Use Video Content to Guide Customers in Their Buying Cycles

It may be a stretch to claim that content alone motivates buyers to purchase, but it may not be a mega stretch. Depending on your use and quality of video content, you can persuade prospects to enter the purchase funnel.

Much depends on the engaging quality of your video content as much as the quality of your products. At first, you must make prospects “aware” of your business and products. Quality video content does this for you.

Quality video establishes and enhances your brand and company expertise. This result helps guide your prospects through their buying cycle. Your success level depends on how well you understand your target audience buying behaviors—and how well you address their preferences by offering quality content that the right time, that speaks to their needs and wants.

Buying Cycle Stages

Converting quality leads into customers first involves making them aware that your company exists and offers products they want. Whether you get this message out through popular social media sites, email marketing or your own website, it remains “job one.”

The next stage is convincing your leads to become engaged with your organization. Talking about product quality, yours and the competition’s, can accomplish this objective without appearing to be a blatant advertisement.

The third stage is critical as you speak about the customer benefits should they buy from you versus the competition. This step builds on the first two and segways into step four, converting leads into customers.

Conversion is the fourth stage in the buying cycle. Converting leads into customers can be daunting, but happens often and seamlessly if you perform the prior three steps effectively.

Bringing people into the buying cycle is always dependent on the quality of your lead generation efforts. Quality leads often become quality customers. Random leads tend to have much lower conversion quotients, because there is little or no pre-qualification of their preference or ability to buy.

Ways You Can Map Customer Centric Video Content to Your Buyer Journey

Successful video content strategies often work whether you have a B2B or B2C organization. Mapping content to the buying cycle involves understanding and tracking the four, sometimes five, stages of the typical cycle.

Buying cycle stages are always the same regardless of your industry, but remain dependent on the quality of your leads. The best content you can afford, matched with outstanding marketing strategies can easily fall short of your expectations with less than quality leads. However, if you generate or receive quality leads you can often turn what were strangers into profitable customers—possibly returning loyal customers.

Providing customer feedback forms and encouraging reviews can lead to better mapping and content evaluation. When you combine these with special and promotional offers, you can often easily map the effect of your content throughout the stages of the buying cycle.

To get to stage three, the purchase decision, you should include and map your product specifications, customer reviews, pricing information and shopping cart results. Unlike your stage one and two content, which establishes awareness and engages leads to identify your products as optimal solutions for their wants and needs, purchase decision content involves information, such as product specs, pricing and ease of ordering.

Understanding your buyers’ behavior patterns and preferences drives your content focus, while helping you map and track the results. Mapping buying cycle activities is a key ingredient to helping you align your marketing strategies to your objectives. It’s not complicated. Get good leads, post quality content, offer prospects properly priced products, make it easy to buy, and ask for feedback is a recipe for success.

Mapping your customers’ traverse through the buying cycle stages as a function of your content is a repeatable exercise that identifies strategies that work. Even identifying content or strategies that fall short is valuable information, as it cuts your losses and saves your company money.

Learning more about what kind of videos you can use when mapping content to your buyer’s journey: How to Use Video at Every Step of Your Sales Lead Funnel to Nurture

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