Path to Purchase Research

Path to purchase research aims to understand how each member of your buyer team experiences the journey from initial awareness of your brand and product, all the way through to final purchase decision. It gets into the details of how they feel and why they make particular decisions at every touchpoint along the way. 

This is about stepping outside your enthusiasm for your products or services and seeing your clients’ experiences through their eyes. Path to purchase research gives you a granular understanding of each one of your buyer personas. It reveals where you can reduce friction and create smooth purchase funnels for each of them to slide down.

Path to purchase tracking is important because B2B customer experiences are of critical importance to your business growth. Each stage of your customer journey can evoke a positive or negative response. Will they remain committed to traveling with you to a final purchase? Or will they be deterred by a poor experience – that they will probably share? 

Your first round of path to purchase research insights gives you a benchmark to measure from. The real value is in implementing regular research that monitors evolving client preferences and the consequences of other changes to a dynamic economic environment. Your clients and prospects aren’t static, so your path to purchase research strategy must move with them. 

With this constantly updated knowledge, you can adapt quickly to clients’ changing needs and pain points. This constant listening to the voice of the customer builds the consistency and trust you need for strong, long-term relationships. By constantly tweaking your customer journey to incorporate new information, your buyer experience shines above the competition.

Customer centricity

Path to purchase research insights give you a deeper understanding of your clients’ preferences, needs, behaviors, and pain points. This means you can take a well-informed customer centric approach to product or service development and marketing strategies. Your customers can only be satisfied if you’re giving them the products or services they need, within a carefully tailored customer experience. So, of course they’re going to come back and tell other people about their brilliant customer journey, Saving you the money on new customer acquisition. 

Save money

Insights from path to purchase research can save you money across your organization, for example:

• Marketing is better targeted and more effective because you can direct resources to the most impactful channels and touchpoints
• Increased client retention rates saves you money on new customer acquisition activities
• Regularly listening to clients’ opinions on your products and services means your offerings are always align to their needs, avoiding wasted investment in things that aren’t a good product-market fit
• Reduced operational costs by streamlining the entire path to purchase 

Competitive advantage

Consistency and agility are key factors in sustaining a competitive advantage. Businesses that maintain an excellent level of customer service, with a customer journey that’s free from roadblocks, dominates the playing field. By tracking path to purchase insights you can be responsive to clients’ changing perspectives and get new strategies in place with outstanding agility. 

Your clients and prospects are bombarded by unprecedented amounts of information at the start of their customer journey, including but not limited to:

• Colleague advice from those that are facing the same problems and have made the same decision
• Industry specific information from professional bodies and organizations
• Materials form events and conferences
• Online research of forums, social media platforms and relevant websites

This multitude of information influences decision making at every stage of their path to purchase – especially in the non-linear B2B context. It’s absolutely crucial that your path to purchase survey finds out what your customers are searching for and where they’re looking for it at every stage of their customer journey. Then you can be in exactly the right place, with the answers to their questions, at just the right time. Otherwise someone else will be. 

There are so many nuances to each stage of path to purchase research that it can feel like information overload. An expert path to purchase research partner presents their findings in clear visual formats and provides actionable insights that can be easily shared across your organization. 

Understanding each stage of path to purchase research insights means that you’ll:

• Understand the challenges, motivations and priorities of each member of your buying team – and how they interact with each other
• Create a comprehensive customer journey map for each of them, with signposts at key points to guide them all the way to sign off
• Know their starting point – each buyer persona starts their journey from their own motivations. With this information, you can match your product or service explicitly to their needs and clear their path to purchase with the right information in their preferred format

Your B2B path to purchase research partner finds and verifies the precise professionals you need to talk to. They use their expertise and experience to formulate a strategy that combines the right quantitative and qualitative methodologies to get your answers.