How your consumer shops, i.e., the consumer purchase process, is an essential understanding you have to build, to sell to them effectively.
I meet a lot of dynamic, amazingly smart entrepreneurs.

While their ideas are very exciting, I have seen a bit of a pattern in the way they approach their branding and marketing strategy, and there are at times one thing in common which, as a professional marketer, scares me endless.

They are so excited about their startup idea and have identified some potential targets, but they go blank when we start talking about what their real value proposition is and why it will be so appealing to any particular group of people.

Big companies spend ages and millions trying to identify and understand their target audience and building a brand positioning that appeals to them. Because if you don’t know who you are talking to, what is important for them, you don’t know what experience to create for them, how to offer them value, so that they start trusting that you ‘get them’. Trust inspires confidence for them to make an investment.

To build a full understanding of your audience, build a complete buyer persona.

While you should know about all the different elements of your audience like demographics, lifestyle, etc., the key thing is to understand what a customer’s biggest problems are and what makes them solve it through a purchase.

1. Paint point and potential purchase trigger

A brand is a promise of value: it either meets a need or creates a desire.

So, identify first if your audience has a pain point (challenges or unmet need). In other words, is there anything that they’re not very satisfied about in their lives, a problem they perceive, that your small business brand can offer to solve?

As human beings, we can live with our pain points for some time. But then you know how like one day, something shifts, and we make a purchase? Something in an ad just mentions one final point that has been missing in the offers so far but we weren’t even aware of it.

Or maybe some incident happens that pushes us over the edge and makes us want to find a solution. Or maybe we read some new information on social media which prompts us to think this is the right time for the purchase.

Once we know we want to buy, then we start considering the subconscious top-of-mind brands.

The ones that have constantly been communicating to us and we hadn’t paid attention. And we also consider the ones that prompt that trigger in us. So depending on your marketing objective, you need to understand these triggers even more.

2. The present customer journey

What are the steps they take to meet their needs currently? Where are they looking for information, to take purchase decisions? Generally there are 3 basic steps that lead to the final one of purchase:

1. Awareness
2. Research
3. Consideration
4. Purchase

Depending on your marketing objective, you may have to decide which stage you want to show up in for the consumer.

E.g. Last year I changed my phone. My pain point was that my then phone was slow and kept dying, and my trigger was that I had to do a lot of conference calls with many stakeholders, and my phone would just die in the middle of an important discussion, which was very frustrating and affected my work.

So to change my phone, I took the following steps:

• I first searched online for options and selected a couple of phones to start with (awareness)
• Read online reviews, and asked my close network if there were any current users of the phones and what their experiences were. (research)
• Went to the nearest store to check them out. Selected one (consideration).
• Researched for reviews for that particular phone again online, just for double verification
• Went to an electronics store where I have a loyalty program and would get a discount
• Purchased it. (purchase).

Now I am not a smartphone marketer, so I cannot say for sure if my journey was the same as other customers, but there are definitely patterns that I would share with others. Some people may ask their Facebook network for reviews, I didn’t. But I still wanted to know the reviews.

3. Decision-making factors

You need to understand which key factors could influence their decision. In my case of the smartphone, the key points were speed and efficiency, look and feel, size and weight, display, price, warranty.

However, if I had been an avid video game player, my needs could have been slightly different. This is why knowing the demographics and lifestyle helps.

4. Blocking points

These are the factors that would stop someone from investing in your brand wanted even if they wanted it. In my previous example, I didn’t have my phone tied to a contract in Singapore so I could change it without a hassle, but for people who do, buying a new phone may incur an extra cost that they may not want to incur.

Knowing the potential blocking point helps you to create solutions to address it, or at least know that you could reach out to them when the block is gone later.

Now you need to build a buyer persona.

This is basically a summary of all the research you have done so far, which captures who your audience is, what she wants, and what influences her. You can download a sample one below, and feel free to customize it as per your TA.

Now that you know what your TA wants and what their regular journey could be, you know exactly what kind of information/ education your TA could be looking for, and you can build your brand promise and whole marketing strategy around it. You can fine-tune your marketing mix (product, price, place, promotion) and create your communication and messaging.

You know what content to create, which type of marketing channel to use, what kind of content to share on what kind of media. And in social media, even what kind of social groups you should be present and communicate in.

You need to be where your target audience, your consumer is.

This works even in a B2B setting. Even if the model seems to be more dependent on relationships, people need to know how successful and credible you are, if you are trustworthy, and how much value you can provide, and for this, they will go searching.

The best thing you can do is establish your brand proposition and story, how you can add value, and express that in a language they understand, through a channel they can access and trust, even if it be building your network right.