The rise of ecommerce changed the way customers purchase products and services. With easy access to information, they can make comparisons in the comfort of their homes and make informed buying decisions, so the phrase “customers are the king”is more relevant than ever before.

For every business that enters the world of ecommerce, you have to employ SEO. It is the short term for search engine optimization that businesses in Singapore leverage to raise brand awareness in the online space.

To be successful at this, you need to have a good understanding of the customer purchase journey. The stages that a customer goes through before making a purchase. Here are the four stages involved in this process:

• Awareness
• Consideration
• Conversion
• Loyalty

By adapting your SEO marketing strategies for each stage, you can influence your target audience in a more relevant manner. Watch this video as we bring you through the stages of the customer purchase journey.

This guide dives deeper to give you more valuable insight on how to captivate your target audience in every stage of a customer’s purchase journey. As a result, you will drive more traffic and gain leads as you win them.

At this stage, your target audience might not be aware of your brand, which is why you should educate them through your digital marketing efforts.

The goal of awareness is to put your product or service out there. But first, you have to segment your target audience. Doing so should help you focus potential customers relevant to your business. Here are the four different market segments:

• Behavioural Segmentation: It refers to how your target audience behaves when they shop, their spending habits, their user status (are they active shoppers or not), and lastly, how they interact with your brand.

• Demographic Segmentation: It covers the details about your target audience, from their age, sex, education, marital status, and even their race and what their religion is.

• Geographic Segmentation: It’s basically about where your target audience is, from which neighbourhood, area code, city, and country they live.

• Psychographic Segmentation: It talks more about them on a personal level, such as their values in life, their hobbies, likes and dislikes, and even how they live their day-to-day life.

Knowing all of these is your job, and they can help you raise awareness of your brand to your target audience. If you did it right, it will eventually lead to a conversion action.

For example, a jewellery shop may decide to focus on a smaller, particular target market. Instead of promoting their jewellery to the public, they could focus on couples who plan to marry. Or they can concentrate on old couples who want to celebrate the years of their marriage, be it a silver or gold wedding anniversary.

Both examples are smaller, more precise segments of a jewellery shop’s potential market. Instead of hard-selling your brand, the goal of this stage is to make a specific set of target audiences more aware of what you can offer and satisfy their needs.

Here are the digital marketing mediums you can utilise to raise awareness to your target audience:

• Podcasts
• Infographics
• Social Media Ads
• Google Ads
• Ebooks
• Video
• Industry Reports

Make sure to use keywords relevant to your brand so your target audience will find you once they search for something related to your business. To know which keyword you should use, do keyword research. It is one of the SEO strategies that can help you captivate your target audience and make them aware of your brand.

Also, do not forget to include a call-to-action (CTA). The CTA will lead your target audiences to where you want them to go and fulfil your business objective. For example, your product page or a lead generation form.

When your target audience reaches this stage, they are still weighing their options, including their pros and cons. That means they are still gathering information from various brands before making a decision.

One of the things that could help them decide is the customer reviews. They are feedback from past customers of a brand that tells about their experience and how satisfied they are with what they bought.

A survey from PowerReviews revealed that 94% of people who read customer reviews help them to make a choice. They also mentioned that offering free shipping, a free trial, or a discount can influence a target audience’s purchase decision.

In other words, your job at this point is to make the consideration process as easy as possible so your target audience can make the right choice for their needs. Apart from posting customer reviews, here are other digital marketing campaigns your business in Singapore should have:

• Product or service comparison.
• Written or video tutorials about how-to.
• Live demonstration of products or services.

If your target audience made it through this stage, that means they already bought what your brand offers. However, try not to relax just yet because the customer’s purchase journey is still not over.

You have to gain the trust of your target audience at the consideration stage to convert customers. To make that happen, consider doing the following:

• Show social proof that customers are happy with their purchase from your brand (reviews, testimonials, ratings, etc.)

• Communicate, interact, and connect with them in different ways: chatbots, WhatsApp Business

• Show your brand’s awards, milestones, and achievements

• Share content on your social media page and website to update your followers and customers

Converting a target audience is the most crucial part of your digital marketing strategy since you have to be consistent with your actions when dealing with them. Once you succeed in attracting customers from the awareness and consideration stage, giving them a slight push will do the trick in persuading your target audience to make a purchase.

However, the conversion stage is not the end of the customer’s purchase journey. There is one last stage you need to do—that is to gain the loyalty of your target audience.

Gaining loyalty from your target audience is one of the goals of your digital marketing efforts and the finish line of the customer’s purchase journey. At this point, they already know how good your product or service is, which is why they continue to make another purchase, whether weekly, monthly or yearly basis.

The end goal of the loyalty stage is never to betray their trust. Your target audience trusts your brand because they have a great experience, which is why you should try not to let them down. Otherwise, your customers would not write reviews of your brand and recommend you personally to other people.

To guarantee their loyalty with your brand will long, make sure they are satisfied with your product or service. Also, include the following as one of their loyalty perks. They can help you assure your customers are happy with their purchase and to your brand.

• Community closed groups on social media such as Facebook.
• Priority access to newly released products or services.
• The opportunity to try and review your latest offer.
• Follow up a call or an email offering support from customer service.
• Suggest for add-on products or services when they are browsing the website.
• Offer coupon discounts, loyalty rewards or other special incentives that others can’t have yet.
• Respond to their inquiries as soon as possible.

You will know you succeed at the loyalty stage once your customers become brand advocates of your products or services. That means they are willing to pay for what you offer as long as the quality never changes.

Conclusion

Captivating your target audience in each stage of the customer’s purchase journey seems simple enough. However, when you start implementing them, you will find them complex.

In the end, you do not have to do everything on your own alone. You can reach out for guidance by getting in touch with an SEO agency like OOm. With more than 15 years of experience, they can help you understand the customer’s purchase journey.