Understanding the Buyer's Journey in Solar Digital Marketing

Understanding the customer journey (or buyer's journey) is very important for implementing your digital marketing. In this video I explain what the customer journey is, why it's important and how to categorise where people are in their journey.

Transcript (video also available on YouTube):

Craig Bailey from XEN Solar and in this video I want to walk you through a very important concept when it comes to digital marketing for your solar business.

And it's the concept of a buyer's journey.

So I'm going to walk you through what that means and then explain how it fits in with the marketing that you do.

Buyer's Journey (Customer Journey) Stages

Okay, so let's think about a typical customer, say for residential solar.

At one end, right at the start of the journey, we're gonna call it the customer journey, they don't know anything about your business, they don't know probably much about solar at all, they haven't started doing research. Right through the various touch points at the end when they've chosen a dealer to work with, hopefully that's you. They've had solar installed on their house and they're a happy customer telling their friends. So that's the journey that they go through. And so what we need to understand is the different stages and then how that fits in with marketing.

Of course, we'd love all those people that are ready to buy, I.e., they just call you up, give me a quote, I wanna chat, and I'm ready to buy. However, in the weeks and months before getting to that point, they've gone through a number of steps.

What normally happens, and this is generalising a bit for the sake of the concept, to understand it. But really what they've gone through is a research phase. So right at the start they might be aware of solar, that you can get solar panels, they're probably starting to be aware of batteries that you can store power in the house for use later. However, they probably don't know about things like inverters, they don't know about quality, they don't know kilowatts versus kilowatt hours, they don't know all the concepts and in fact, they don't really know how it fits together, they don't even know what size system they need.

So if the only advertising that you're doing is a particular kilowatt system at a special price, it's probably too early.

Now they might have visited other sites and choice and there's various sites in Australia where they might get that information.

But you have a chance to be at the start giving them information and answering their research questions and building a relationship through to when they become a customer. So let's chat about some of those.

Research (Awareness) Stage

So first of all, we think about the research phase, that's them diving into what is their problem. So their problem might be their bills are too high, or they're worried about the environment, or maybe they have lots of blackouts and so they want more reliable power. There could be a number of problems that they're searching for. Perhaps a friend of theirs has had solar installed, maybe they wanna save money, maybe they've heard of tariffs and rebates and they're interested in that. So that's the research phase.

Consideration Stage

Then they move onto their consideration phase. So this is really where they've actually decided that solar is probably a good option for them. Maybe they're thinking about batteries, maybe they're thinking about smart home systems as well. That's all gonna come. But they're thinking about it and they've got an idea of some of the solutions that they could purchase and get installed.

Decision Stage

Then they come to the decision stage. This is really where they're thinking, look I kind of know what I want, now I'm gonna decide who to get to install it, who to help me with it. So they might wanna get a quote, they might want an on-site assessment, those kinds of things. Maybe they just want to call and chat on the phone through to they actually decide. And then once they're a happy customer, then who will they refer your business onto? So there's a whole journey that they go through.

Now we know that this varies for everyone, everyone has their own journey and path they go through.

Content Assets for each Stage of the Customer Journey

What's an important though is that when you're doing digital marketing, you have content and advertising and information at each of these stages. So let's look at how that might actually be implemented.

So typically, we look at in the research phase right at the start, we look at providing information, there's blog posts, e-books, Facebook ads tend to be a very good way to push this out to the market to get your brand in front of people, to get your site as a trusted authority on the topic, and basically building confidence in their minds early on.

Now, second in the consideration phase, this is really where you're gonna get FAQs, you're gonna have product information on your site, you'll be doing emailing and remarketing. So if someone signed up for an e-book before or maybe they signed up to get blog updates, that's when you can start giving them marketing about your services.

And then third, when they're deciding, this is really where credibility is crucial. You need to have customer reviews and testimonials, and also on social, you need people talking about you, say on your Facebook page, talking about how happy they are. And also, this is when Google Ads tend to be much more effective, people are getting closer to purchase intent and so Google Ads is often when they go back to search for a particular supplier.

In future videos, we're gonna break down the actual assets that you use at each of these stages. So we'll walk you through:

• what do you use in a Facebook ad?
• What kind of e-book do you write at the research stage?
• When it comes to Google Ads, what kinds of terms should you be bidding on then and what should you avoid.
• And in the middle, what kinds of email messaging can you include.

Thanks for watching, if you've got any questions, please drop us a note and we'll get in touch to help you further.