Speaker 1: Hey, everybody. My name is Garrett Mergut. I am the CEO and co-founder of Directive Consulting, and today we're going to be diving into the five stages of the consumer decision-making process. A lot has changed. How they go about it is completely different, but the five stages are exactly the same. Let's dive into what this new world looks like. Now as a brief overview, the five stages of the consumer buying process or decision-making process were established by John Dewey in 1910. Now, that whole system of how it's done is very much the same. At stage one, you have the problem or a need. Okay? Someone goes out there and says, I have a problem or I have this need. Stage two, they want to go out and do an informational search. It used to be maybe ask a friend, ask a colleague, look at the newspaper, right? But that's a little different now. Stage three, evaluation of alternatives. Okay, I have this one option I like, but what about these others? Stage four, I have to actually make a decision and which will I purchase? This is the purchasing decision. And then stage five, the post-purchase evaluation. Was this the right decision for me or did I make a mistake? Now, we work mostly with B2B companies and enterprise organizations and they still invest a lot in field marketing. And the reason why a lot of these companies invest in field marketing is because that's when a lot of the VPs, the C-suite decision-makers are gathering information, right? They're looking at, okay, where's the market at today? Where's it going tomorrow? And what options exist? Now, the reality is, is that in this need phase, you have a lot of ways to influence how people are deciding what they need. One of those is field marketing. Another is your sales team. But an often not so used way of helping people understand their need is actually through SEO and paid search. At this stage, people are trying to figure out how to generate leads. For example, that's a query, right? So what problem does your product or service solve? And then is your brand discoverable through search engines at stage one? So maybe you are a time tracking software. People are searching how to manage my employees' time. Well, if you're Toggle or you're one of these other many apps out there to actually manage people's times, it's critical that you have the right content for the different stages of people when they're discovering what options exist to solve their problem or their need. An awesome tool that you can use for this is actually called Answer the Public. So if you're looking at understanding what product or service is out there and what the need is, type in your primary keyword, type in SEO for us or PPC for us. Or for you, maybe it's cloud security. And then see what are like, maybe what are people searching, like the benefits of cloud security? Am I hacked? Right? These are the needs and the problems people have. You need content at this stage of the funnel. Once someone is aware of their own need or their own problem, now they need to actually solve that. So they need to determine a couple of things at stage two. Could I solve this myself? If I need to hire someone, who's the best option for me to hire? For our B2B SaaS clients, this is where the majority of their opportunities, deals and revenue comes from is at this informational stage. Okay, this is the bottom of the funnel. People now know that they have a cloud security issue. Now they're looking for top cloud security vendors, top cloud security companies, services, strategies. Here's where your own website probably won't rank. In fact, stage three, it probably won't rank either. And you're going to have a hard time generating these leads through yourself. See, historically, people would gather information through friends, through television, through the radio, through the newspaper. And now it's changed, right? They're going primarily to search engines, areas where they can control the entire experience themselves. But the reality is, is you need to make sure that your brand shows up not only as your own website, as one of those 10 possible results or one of those four ads, but you're also prevalent in the marketplaces. This goes back to the Yelp and the Amazon effect. B2B customers are now just the same almost as B2C customers, in the sense that they don't want you to tell them why you're so great. But instead, they want to look at other people saying that you're great, right? This is why Gartner has a full business model. This is why Forrester has a full business model. It's because these are independent, now I say that with quotes, research companies that are giving information to targeted consumers who are looking to buy. You need to be a part of that journey. Now, stage three blends right into stage two, right? Stage three is the alternatives. Historically, you got to control as the marketer what people thought about your product. Now, other people control what is being said about your product. You need to make sure that when they're evaluating alternatives, they don't forget about you. Now, most of the time I see people address stage three through what I call competitor AdWords campaigns. This is where you launch ads on your competitor's brand terms so you can show up and say, hey guys, you want to try Zenefits, but you really should know about Gusto, okay? Now, the problem is, is in the last four and a half years, we've never seen one of these campaigns perform profitably. And so instead of simply trying to take people who have already decided they want Zenefits and try Gusto, you need to go back into that informational search, okay? That's where SoftwareAdvice, that's where Captera, that's where G2 Crowd, for us it's Clutch.co. For your industry, it could be anything, but usually you can find these directories and these review sites for your space by doing very simple queries, okay? So take your primary keyword and before that, search top or best, or take your primary keyword and after it, put reviews or alternatives or competitors. And now, start to see the ecosystem from which your brand, product and services exist within and make sure that every conversation you're a part of. In this day and age, stage four, the purchasing decision, is such an undervalued part of marketing. I see constantly sales reps going into pitches with poorly designed decks, no real case studies that are designed properly, nothing's in the proper medium and everything's from 10 years ago or five years ago. And everybody's so worried about lead gen that they forgot that you can generate a million leads, close none of them and nothing matters. What's so critical at stage four is that you can actually lower your cost per opportunity drastically here by affecting your close rate. See, when you look through an entire funnel, there's so much money that's spent into generating the lead that actually activating the lead and closing the deal is such an afterthought of marketing that it's not being funded properly. One of the biggest wins you can do today is ask yourself, if I was talking to two other vendors, does my sales team have the best assets compared to those other two competitors? And if not, maybe it's time for you to invest more into the stage of closing the deal than trying to get more. In other words, what's the point of throwing all this water into a bucket if there's all the holes at the bottom? Focus on the bottom of the bucket just as much as getting water into it. And then stage five, the post decision analysis. Was this company the right choice for me? The reality is, is not every customer will probably love you. And those ones that don't are some of your greatest learning opportunities. There's simple NPS software like Ask Nicely, which we've leveraged here. There's also simple things like quarterly check-ins, monthly check-ins. Here we do weekly updates. The tighter you can get your feedback loop from customer success or customer failure, and then learn from that, is the faster you can improve your deliverable, your product or your service. The reality is, is the thing people pay you for has a huge part to do with how you're marketing yourself. In other words, if you looked at what Seth Godin preaches, the purple cow approach, is your marketing just more noise in a noisy environment? Or is what you're marketing doing the marketing itself for you? A perfect example would be Tesla, right? They can take almost zero corporate advertising budget and still grow at a rapid rate because their product is a purple cow. So start to ask yourself, what types of features, sets or innovations can my service or product pertain to or contain so that marketing it is a natural growth of what happens after someone purchases They can't help but tell their friend, not one friend, but multiple friends, right? That post-purchase is going to be critical for you as you go towards hyper growth. Thank you so much for watching this video. I think these five stages, if you can understand them into the new context of search engines and how people are actually discovering information, you can empower your marketing and have successful campaigns that generate terrific return. As always, please feel free to subscribe to the channel and leave a comment below. Thanks and have a great day.