How to Influence Your Customer’s Purchasing Criteria

Creating volumes of topical content is not enough to acquire new customers. Understanding your customers’ buy cycle and creating relevant content to influence your customer’s purchasing criteria … now you have my attention.

As a marketer with a few gray hairs, I’ve seen my fair share of trends come and go and come again. Last year was the year of content. This year is the year of convenience. Last year print was dead. This year print is making a comeback. I have long since learned there is only one truth that matters — your customer is the one buying what you’re selling — so don’t get distracted.

Whether you find your customers at a kitchen table or boardroom table, they are the influencers and the decision makers, they are the purchasers and the users. Your customers’ buy cycle must inform your content.

Was that a “sigh” I just heard? I’ve seen it on the face of more than one marketer. If you have limited resources, you can still make progress by focusing on one critical phase of your customers’ buy cycle.

Consider the following approach to jumpstart your inbound marketing engine:

1. Outline the stages of each customer’s (target audience) buy cycle. To aid in this process, you may download our Buy Cycle Chart.
2. For each stage, document the:
   • Questions your customer will ask to learn more
   • Places your customer will look for answers
   • People your customer will trust for answers
3. Highlight the stage where your customer is focused on education. We typically see this occur at stage two of the buy cycle, referred to as Interest.
4. Evaluate the content you have for this one stage. How well does it address your customer’s questions? How well does it reflect your relevant differentiation?
5. Re-imagine your current content or develop new content to “seed questions” for which you are uniquely positioned to answer. As a colleague of mine likes to say, “run the race you can win.”
6. Lastly, think about how to make the content for this stage as easy as possible for your customer to consume and share. Consider videos and infographics, blogs and top tips. Most importantly, highlight the must-have criteria that will make their research and selection process a success.

Interested in learning more about how to craft content that influences your customer’s purchasing criteria? Give us a holler at CMS@rmagency.com or call 919-677-9555 and we’ll chat.