Internet and Customer Journey.
Internet plays a vital role in customer journey and affects his purchase behavior in a significant way. The smart digital marketing manager will influence the behaviour by making effective utilisation of internet marketing. The consumer before buying seeks information about his purchase and look for suggestions from his close ones. Earlier before internet era, one use to rely on recommendation of his peers, advices from family and friends and use to seek the reviews from magazines. Since the inception of the internet the things are changed and people Google for every information.
The customer today has access to all the information he wants on internet. Companies are making their website content rich to share their product features and benefits to their customers. The consumer visit the review based websites and compare the offers made to them and then decide the best buys.
A typical customer journey starts from either his needs or wants or desires but internet has the capabilities to make a customer feel the need of something which he actually doesn’t need. Purchase at Mantra or jabong.com is one such example where people buy the clothes derived from either discounts or presentation.
The offline customer, once he needs something shall speaks to his relatives, visit the stores and the evaluate the options and buy. In case of online consumer he just go to Google baba and make searches there and take helps of evaluating websites and make purchase. The process ends the participation of any individual other than buyer himself.
So how do one take advantage of internet marketing. Internet marketing is faster and agile than the offline. It reaches fast to consumers in various ways. You can follow the consumers through cookies. One can easily target his customers by following him through cookies stored on his computer or mobile.
The customer can be reached with Facebook or website page he visits. The internet marketing is economical as compared to offline hence it gives advantage for continuous hammering.
For an online customer his journey starts when he desires to buy something. Sometime this desires is induced to him by creatively nice designed advertisements and sometimes he actually has the need. Once the customer identifies his needs he start searching for solutions and in case of being an online customer he searches through various platforms including google, bing and other search engines. The search engine leads customers to various service providers or product supplier sites. At the time of search also, internet provide the opportunity to influence the customer through search ads or PPC.
Out of the results appeared the customer tends to visit the top ranked pages and browse through them. Once customer find his desired products he can visit the price and feature compare sites like Cardekho.com for cars or policy bazar.com for buying policies. The review websites influence the customer decision in a big way as they tend to put a comparative scenario for various products. One can easily advertise on review website and can attract the customers through his product USPs.
After going through the reviews the customer takes a conscious decision and make the purchase.
The whole customer journey gives ample opportunities to marketers to influence its customers and excite them about their offerings. Hence the digital marketing manager really need to act in most innovative and creative manner to influence the customer throughout their buying journey.
