When purchasing a product or service, customers undergo a process that takes them from the identification of a problem to the acquisition of a solution called the customer journey, or buying funnel. By using the customer journey to guide your marketing program, you can provide the support your customers need throughout every phase of the buying process.

Radio - with its tremendous reach and influence with listeners - can be used throughout every stage to boost awareness, spark engagement and even drive conversions. Here’s how to harness the power of radio in every stage of the customer journey.  

Awareness

In the earliest stage of the journey, your customers passively research information about their challenges. They know that they have a problem, but do not quite yet know how to solve it. As they move through this stage, they are typically looking for educational resources on their pain points. This helps them better understand their challenges, which serves to create a path to the right solution.

As they’re researching and exploring various resources, you can use radio to increase awareness of your brand and drive search. Brand awareness campaigns can help increase your visibility, improve customer perception and help customers recognize and recall your brand. Radio also drives search, which 74% of customers rely on to research, compare, and even make final purchase decisions. To be effective, use messaging that speaks to their challenge and provide a potential solution(s). By leveraging radio in this phase, customers will become more aware of your business and how your products or services can help them overcome their challenges.

Consideration

Upon better understanding their challenges, customers begin the second part of the journey - the consideration stage. At this stage, customers start to learn more about the leading solutions available for their challenges. They often start weighing the options and learning more about each one to make the best purchase decision possible.

Radio can also help your customers during this part of the journey by helping you demonstrate the unique value of your product or service. You can do so by running informative ads and leveraging on-air endorsements delivered by your favorite radio personalities. Additionally, you can tap into a station’s lead generation tools to bring customers to your site and encourage them to start a conversation with your team.

Decision

At the third and final stage of the customer journey, it is time to start narrowing down the options and work toward actually making a purchase. Many people start looking for incentives at this stage - such as a discount or free trial - as they weigh the value of their intended purchase. Often, this can mean the difference between winning a customer and losing him or her to a competitor.

To keep customers engaged with your business throughout this stage, you can use radio to influence purchase intent. Radio reaches listeners at their point of purchase, and when people hear your ads right before shopping, they are more likely to buy your product or service at that time. Timely radio ads can also help drive foot traffic and increase sales overall. What’s more, radio delivers a 12:1 return on investment (ROI), according to a study reported by Adweek.

Using Radio to Support Your Customers Through the Buyer’s Journey

As you incorporate radio into your customer journey, you can help your customers identify their challenges, explore various solutions and purchase the best option. Radio ads can help them move from the awareness to decision stage — and ultimately lead to increased sales. To learn how radio can work for your business, contact our team at Zimmer. We will help you create an effective marketing strategy that ties radio to your customer journey in a way that drives results and increases revenue.