Very generally speaking, the consumer buying cycle can be broken down into three stages: awareness; consideration; and purchase. Traditionally, this was quite fragmented across platforms, while digital has meant that you can theoretically hit all the stages online, in many ways it has also made the process more complex.
According to Forrester, today’s buyer could be anywhere between two thirds and 90% of the way through their buying cycle before reaching out directly to the brand, because they are now so much more in control of the process. Furthermore, that process is now much more fluid and non-linear.
This creates a problem for marketers who are trying to target particular consumers along this journey. Fortunately, the amount of data available online today means there is help at hand for marketers to prepare more targeted media plans. Publishers know their readers and the kind of content experiences that resonate with them most, and now the data and tools are available to engage with those consumers more efficiently. Indeed, now that we have all this information, marketers are urged to engage with consumers in more personalised ways online.
Ultimately, the approach brands should take boils down to what marketers’ goals are and then working closely with ad partners – either publishers or a programmatic platform – to define the correct tactics. If you are talking directly to publishers, the good news is that conversation needs to take place with far fewer people than it did five years ago. Back then, you needed perhaps 50-100 advertising partners, whereas today you need maybe a maximum of 5-10 to reach enough of your target audience. This makes the process more efficient.
What this also means is that understanding the role of different types of content can play an important role in helping marketers pinpoint their publishing partners. One of the most obvious mistakes brands make is by going to comScore and Nielsen and finding the three top publishers in their chosen sector, and considering all content types equal.
The reality is that engaging with a consumer who is reading the latest industry or product news can deliver vastly different results. If, as a marketer, conversion is your goal, then the product piece will deliver a greater performance. Not enough marketers actually focus on this. By doing this you can target based on who the audience is and what their interests are.
Another interesting observation is product reviews. They are actually a good example of the non-linear nature of the buying cycle. We have found that buyers consume a number of reviews (between four and five) throughout their buying journey and they may come back to one or two of those reviews and then purchase. Although still an emerging trend, buying guides are a powerful recommendation tool that our own research showed to deliver the best conversions but on fairly small traffic subsets. Understanding these differences is crucial for marketers and the only way to do so is to choose carefully the publishers they work with and to work closely with a few of them to engage with their audience in the most efficient way possible.
Finally, we would recommend that any publishing partner a marketer works with has a good understanding of programmatic; a lot of publishers still work with CTRs and take large budgets, but offer little measurement. Yet programmatic offers them the tools to be able to operate with heavy goals of performance if not entirely performance-based models. This simplifies the marketer’s job and allows them to use their media plan to go after different phases of buying cycle.
As publishers we live in a world now where we have all the data to tell us whether and where we are relevant. Yet too many publishers focus on the wrong KPIs – such as page views – instead of looking at metrics like where the user comes from, what content they engage with, do they come back and are they completing a purchase. If publishers’ are focused on conversion, all the matters is that they helped people make the right decision and whether they are going to come back and purchase from them again. And if they understand this, as well as their customers’ journey through their site, they are of much greater value to marketers.
By Antoine Boulin, president media at Purch