How to Understand and Optimize Your Customers’ Path to Purchase

Purchases don’t just happen. Buyers become aware of sellers and determine what solutions fit their needs through an often long and complex series of discoveries and interactions.

Marketers and sales teams call this process the path to purchase.

The number of touchpoints and overall length of a path to purchase can vary widely based on the industry, product or service and the buyer – but in general they’re getting longer and more complex. This is thanks in part to the growing number of channels and possible interactions in the digital realm. And it’s especially true in the B2B space, where lengthy sales cycles have long been the norm.

The good news is a lengthy path gives you a lot of opportunities to learn from and engage with consumers. Of course, it also gives you more to manage and can reduce the ROI of your marketing efforts – unless you track and optimize it.

Why Tracking Your Path to Purchase Is Important

The growing length and complexity of the typical path makes tracking it crucial. Tracking leads to a deeper understanding of both the holistic journey and the individual touchpoints along your path, and it can teach you a lot about your customers. It can help you:

• Gather insights into the preferences and behavior of prospective customers

• Personalize and fine-tune messaging to fit your target audience

• Remove wrinkles in customer journeys to make experiences seamless

When done well, the overall impact of tracking your path to purchase helps you build trust, nurture relationships and improve the odds of conversion.

The Stages of a Path to Purchase Journey

In general, paths to purchase can be broken into three stages.

1. Awareness

In this first touchpoint of your path, prospects become aware of your brand and discovers you have a solution that may address one or more of their needs. A typical first touch occurs when a potential buyer finds a digital ad or a blog through an online search. Tracking during the awareness phase is crucial; it sets the stage for all that follows. Seeing what works here not only helps you attribute customers correctly, but can also inform how and where you deliver content moving forward.

Typical types of content designed for the awareness stage include blogs, articles, digital ads, social media, infographics, white papers, e-books, webinars, videos and industry reports.

2. Consideration

During the consideration phase of the path to purchase, your prospects learn more about your company, services and products. They weigh you against competitors to determine who might best address their needs. It’s likely they’re exploring your website, possibly investigating free trials or scheduling demos. They’ll also look at – and possibly speak to – other businesses with solutions similar to yours.

Typical types of content created to guide prospects through this stage include targeted emails based on their prior touchpoints, demos, client stories and customer testimonials, and product-focused content that dives more deeply into features, functionality and differentiators.

3. Decision/Purchase

After they’ve weighed the options, your prospects will make a choice. During the decision stage, it’s crucial to make experiences as simple and seamless as possible. If there’s friction when closing a deal, your checkout process is clunky or your onboarding/customer service is less than stellar, the purchase may fall through – or you may fail to retain the customer beyond this initial sale.

To help seal the deal and create loyalty, your content at this stage should include special offers, loyalty rewards and clear explanations of next steps and support channels. You can also give them the opportunity to provide feedback on the purchase process through surveys or short interviews; this kind of direct input can help inform your entire path to purchase journey.

Tracking the Path to Purchase Through Every Stage

Every touchpoint throughout your customer’s path to purchase is also a data point. An email opened, link clicked, video watched, social media post reacted to or guide downloaded – these kinds of interactions offer a significant breadth of information, including:

• What kinds of content did your audience interact with and how often?

• What percent of a video or demo did they watch?

• Where did they deep dive into your website, and what pages were dead ends?

This kind of quantitative data can tell you what works and what doesn’t. It helps you prioritize resources and adjust your marketing strategy to deliver the kinds of content that resonates with your prospects.

Tracking Quantitative Data

There are a lot of touchpoints for quantitative data – website traffic, social channels, email, point of purchases, mobile apps and so on. And there are just as many ways to track and collect all this data – if not more. What matters most, though, is getting the data out of its silos and bringing it all together in a modern data platform and strategy.

Of course, gathering all of your data in one place doesn’t do much good without the ability to gain actionable insights from it. At Material, we help businesses develop data strategies and map customer journeys to better understand and optimize experiences.

And there’s more to a path to purchase than quantitative data; there’s also qualitative data. If the above data can tell you what’s working, qualitative information can tell you why. Understanding the emotions and motivations that inform prospects’ decisions to click or not to click – or that caused them to tune out 30 seconds into a demo – can help you fine tune your branding, messaging and content in subtle and effective ways that ensure your value is connecting with your target audience.

Tracking Qualitative Data

Qualitative data can take a little more effort to collect, but it’s well worth the investment. It’s a powerful way to apply nuance to your quantitative data to better understand your customers’ path to purchase. Analytics, after all, don’t tell the full story. Surveys, interviews, in-person observation, etc., can offer profound insights into consumer decisions.

Material’s Center for Human Understanding is designed specifically to uncover the human emotions, perceptions and motivations that drive consumers to engage or disengage along the path to purchase.

A powerful way to marry your quantitative and qualitative data to improve experiences and optimize your path to purchase is through journey mapping. This method brings together disparate types of data from both online and offline touchpoints to create a visual representation of how customers are interacting with a brand. It enables marketing and insights teams to identify hurdles, focus on pivotal points in the path to purchase and refine ad placement, search terms and more.

Use Your Path to Purchase to Optimize Your Marketing Strategy

Your marketing efforts are the steppingstones of your customers’ paths to purchase. But these journeys are rarely straight lines, and each path will be different – because every customer has unique needs, motivations and preferences. They’ll do what fits their situation, whether it leads to your solution or not.

It’s your job to let them know you have a solution that meets their needs – and to make their discovery of your brand and products simple and straightforward. By tracking, mapping and understanding paths to purchase, you can gain insights that improve every path and experience moving forward. Your customers will thank you with engagement and loyalty – and you’ll see a tangible difference in ROI, retention and growth.

Want to learn how Material can help you optimize your path to purchase and customer experiences? Start the conversation today.

FAQs

What benefits can we gain from conducting a path to purchase analysis?

Tracking and analyzing your path to purchase can help you focus marketing efforts and spending on the content and touchpoints that are most effective – helping you improve your marketing ROI.

How do we collect data for path to purchase analysis?

There are lots of ways to gather quantitative data from your path to purchase – the best way will depend on the technology, platforms and channels you’re using. But we recommend a modern data strategy that brings otherwise siloed data together. We also recommend collecting data offline through interviews, surveys and observation, in order to add nuances about customer pain points, emotions and motivations to hard data.