The Buying Decision
Want to know what’s under the ‘marketing’ hood here at WriterAccess? This series will give you a better understanding of what marketing concepts we think about, and it’s straight from the man responsible for keeping WriterAccess marketing moving.
In the previous post, What is Value?, I reviewed the process of identifying value in a product. Another part of finding value is quantifying a customer’s use of brainpower in the buying decision.
The amount of brainpower needed can be broken into two extremes: High Involvement and Low Involvement. Knowing which category your customers fall into will help you create targeted types of content.
High Involvement
High involvement buying decisions are a marketer’s dream. These decisions are made in a slow manner with many variables weighed. High involvement decisions are becoming more common with the digitization of the marketplace. Consumers are more likely to spend time online researching long before they make their purchases. Therefore, having a solid content marketing strategy is key to tapping into high involvement decisions. Here are some things for marketers to consider:
- Multiple touches are more likely to influence consumers’ decisions
- Buying decisions may be made over long periods of time
- Options are weighed among competitors
- Cost is usually less important as a variable
- Consumers will closely evaluate their purchases (watch out for cognitive dissonance!)
Low Involvement
Low involvement decisions are made quickly in a traditional marketing environment. They rely more on point of sale marketing to influence the consumer’s purchase. These buying decisions usually satisfy lower segments on Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs because they are easier to comprehend. Shorter types of content are best for these types of decisions because not as much information is needed to make a purchase. Here are some things for marketers to consider:
- Use traditional marketing like TV, radio, product descriptions, and displays
- Familiarity of products is extremely important
- Usually a quick decision
- Cost is usually a major part of the decision
- Local search strategies are moving into this type of decision process
High Involvement vs Low Involvement
WriterAccess customers usually lean towards the high involvement side of the spectrum. They tend to look through 10+ pages and come back to the site on multiple occasions over a long period of time. Because of that, we gear our content marketing to satisfy our customers’ need for information throughout their decision.
Below is an example of how we gear our content to different steps in our customers’ high involvement decision.
- The beginning of their decision usually starts with an organic search on one of our targeted keywords. They discover that we have tons of blog content related to hiring freelance writers and content marketing, and that makes WriterAccess look like it’s an authority in the marketplace. They just started their research and don’t feel comfortable making a purchase, so they continue their research elsewhere and leave the website.
- The customer still needs more information to make their decision. Now they’re looking throughout the entire website at pages that explain how WriterAccess works and how we compare to our competition. They still haven’t made up their mind yet and have more research to do.
- Again, they come back to WriterAccess and download our industry leading guides like the Pricing Guide. This in-depth guide usually satisfies their search for advanced information, and they feel like they’re making the right decision with WriterAccess.
Note that the level of information given in each part of the decision making process varies per asset type: blogs for quick information, webpage copy for more important information, and an in-depth guide for advanced information.
Understanding what type of buying decision your customer is making will help you know what type of content to publish. For example, for low involvement decisions, you’ll need blog posts, product descriptions, and webpage copy, and for high involvement decisions, you’ll need press releases, white papers, and ebooks. (insert default success cliché here) Master this and your content marketing will be forever better!
Glen Jackman is the Marketing Specialist at WriterAccess and ideaLaunch. He’s responsible for managing the database, running email marketing campaigns, executing SEO and content marketing strategies, and managing social media marketing. Contact Glen on Twitter @GlenJackman or by email Glen (at) WriterAccess.com.
