By matching consumer needs to your buying cycle you overcome a problem most marketers encounter, which is how to marry the needs of their audience with the commercial objectives of the business.
Once you understand the emotional, social and other factors influencing your buyer persona – within the context of their preferences and daily lives – you can begin to think about creating content to meet their needs and interests within the buying cycle.
Essentially this is where all the social and emotional drivers meet your business
imperatives.
A good content programme creates and publishes information according to the stages of the buying cycle because your persona’s information needs will change with every stage, and it is important your content is there to fill in the gaps.
One model of the buying cycle is provided by Engel, Warshaw, Kinnear in the book Promotional Strategy. It is a comprehensive model and whether or not you apply it will depend on your time and resources. Essentially the Engel, Warshaw and Kinnear model follows five stages:
- Need recognition
- Search for information
- Alternative evaluation
- Purchase
- Outcomes/evaluation
A more concise, less resource hungry model may be broken down into three States:
- Awareness stage
- Consideration stage
- Decision Stage