What your customers want from you to make their purchasing decisions

How well do you know your customers? Do you have an understanding of what motivates them? Do you know how they view your services? Are you aware of their patterns? If you don’t have these insights, it may be time to start figuring out the buyer’s journey for your business.

No matter the type of product or service you have to offer, potential customers follow a similar journey as they determine whether to make a purchase. This buying journey is represented with a map that details how the customer makes a purchasing decision. While they’re detailed, they should be thoughtfully designed. After all, once you know how a customer decides to buy from you, it can help you develop the types of products and resources they need to choose your business.

Here are a few of the questions to ask yourself to help you develop what your customers need to make smart decisions about your business.

Let’s face it: you wouldn’t have a product or service to offer if there wasn’t some kind of problem a customer was trying to solve. They are likely to come across your business as they see they have a need or desire. Use that to get to the heart of how to talk to them.

What does it take to show them you’re the company for them? Typically, it takes a comprehensive branding or marketing campaign that helps them understand what your business and its products or services have to offer for their needs. Once you understand what it is a customer is looking for, start thinking about the ways it makes sense to communicate how you solve that problem for them. It may be through blog posts, email marketing campaigns, digital advertising, or social media. Give them exactly what they need to make informed decisions.

Customers love doing research before they buy, especially today. And information—the good and the bad—is readily available online. A simple Google search can pull up reviews, news stories, and countless data potential customers have access to using the phones in their pockets.

Today, consumers use numerous ways to research the brands they want to use. Consider this data point from Semrush: 90 percent of people are more likely to trust the brands people recommend to them, even if those people are strangers. In other words, that research is vitally important to helping customers make buying decisions. Make sure you’re paying attention to what people are saying about your company, because you’ll want to make things right if there is any negativity about you out in the world. Course correction can go a long way toward creating brand loyalty.

A little competition can be good for business. Just make sure you’re providing the right knowledge about what sets you apart from your competitors. You need to understand how you’re unique, the things they’re doing right, where they’re failing, and where you have opportunities to grow your own business.

Having an intimate awareness of what other companies are like yours will help you know how to provide potential customers with the insights to choose your product over someone else’s. It can also provide you with the knowledge of how to develop innovations that will ensure customers choose you in the future.

Once the decision is made to purchase your product, your job is done, right? Wrong. You’ll need to make sure your purchasing experience is as seamless and enjoyable as possible, which means you need to understand the purchasing experience first-hand to see if there are any opportunities for buyers to abandon the purchase.

As you’re working to understand that purchasing process, focus on removing any pain points that might make them abandon the purchase altogether. Work to be responsive to their needs, ensuring they don’t hit any snags along the way. And then make sure they are happy with their purchase to ensure they become a loyal advocate down the road.

When customers are armed with the information they need to make an informed decision, and it’s an easy process, it’s truly easy to win them over. Just give them what they want. It’s that simple.

Jim Allen is a business leader and entrepreneur who has built one of the top-producing real estate groups in the Triangle. He is President of The Jim Allen Group, which is consistently named one of the top real estate teams in North Carolina and even North America.