There is no con­sumer express­way to your prod­uct or ser­vice. The long and wind­ing road of com­merce is traf­fic-jammed with ques­tions, obsta­cles, com­peti­tors, and a morass of mes­sag­ing that make deci­sion-mak­ing more com­plex than ever. It’s your job to tread this path right along­side your buy­er, plant­i­ng your mar­ket­ing road signs in the exact right places. But where? And how do you com­pel your audi­ence to take the exit and actu­al­ly make the pur­chase?  If you’re strug­gling to get a han­dle on your poten­tial buy­ers, you need a map.

The buy­er jour­ney is con­stant­ly evolv­ing. The entire process of mak­ing a pur­chase has com­plete­ly flipped. Buy­ers are savvi­er, more con­nect­ed, and more skep­ti­cal than ever before. In many cas­es, they’re able to become experts on your prod­ucts before ever inter­fac­ing with you – and it’s thanks to the avail­abil­i­ty of research and con­sen­sus of opin­ion at their fin­ger­tips (whether valid or not). The pow­er now lies with the con­sumer and their spheres of influ­ence. This shift in behav­ior makes it more essen­tial than ever to prop­er­ly map your buy­er jour­neys. Doing so will help dri­ve align­ment across all mar­ket­ing and sales efforts, and make them more effec­tive. Fair warn­ing, this will take time. Going through the process, how­ev­er, will gain you pow­er­ful insights into your buyer’s deci­sion-mak­ing process and the ques­tions they have along their jour­ney. From this lev­el of under­stand­ing, you can shape more effec­tive mar­ket­ing mes­sages and iden­ti­fy at which touch­points they need to see those mes­sages. It tru­ly is pow­er­ful.

Mapping: The Discovery

To under­stand your audi­ence you need to sur­vey it. Not with actu­al sur­veys (though that wouldn’t hurt), but as an explor­er would chart a new land, care­ful­ly map­ping every dis­cov­ery and path. By study­ing your audience’s buy­ing process from start to fin­ish, you’ll begin to notice trends and what is going on in their minds at each stage, allow­ing you to cap­i­tal­ize on small moments you may have missed if you sim­ply trust­ed your assump­tions. We have a say­ing around the office, “Noth­ing impor­tant hap­pens in the office.” We use it so much, we’ve even cre­at­ed an acronym for it: NIHITO. This is a reminder that you have to get out and actu­al­ly talk, face-to-face, with your cus­tomers, poten­tial buy­ers, and even those who may not yet know who you are. From these “NIHITO vis­its” you can begin to under­stand what your audi­ence looks like, using these insights to cre­ate buy­er per­sonas. These per­sonas will become the basis for your mar­ket­ing map.

Mapping: The 4 Quadrants

Just like any map ori­ents around four com­pass points, your buy­er process map has four crit­i­cal com­po­nents you need to know inside and out:

1. Iden­ti­fy and val­i­date their process by learn­ing how many phas­es they go through as they move toward the pur­chase. Phas­es might range from “out­side the mar­ket” to “prob­lem emerges” to “research,” and final­ly to “pur­chase.” Find the phas­es spe­cif­ic to your buy­er.
2. Under­stand and inter­pret buy­er actions with­in each of these phas­es. At what point dur­ing the research phase does your audi­ence reach out to their spheres of influ­ence for out­side opin­ions? What mes­sag­ing could you deliv­er that would be most effec­tive in that moment?
3. Iden­ti­fy the ques­tions your buy­er might ask them­selves with­in each phase. These should be the ques­tions of who will ulti­mate­ly be call­ing the shots on the actu­al pur­chase (this may be dif­fer­ent from the per­son doing the ini­tial research). Your mar­ket­ing con­tent and mes­sag­ing should meet their needs and answer their ques­tions at each phase.
4. Iden­ti­fy when your buy­er has moved from one phase to the next. Do they have a new set of needs that require a new set of answers or con­tent to help keep them pro­gress­ing through the phas­es? Under­stand what trig­gers each move to the next phase so you can sup­port their jour­ney.

Share The Map Company Wide

Once you’ve done the research and con­sol­i­dat­ed your find­ings into your buy­er map, share it across all com­pa­ny stake­hold­ers, from sales to prod­uct devel­op­ment and even the exec­u­tive team. This will help align the com­pa­ny around one cen­tral vision and set of goals. And as a prod­uct mar­keter, you’ll pro­duce stronger cam­paigns that res­onate with your audi­ence and help turn mere look­ers into buy­ers.