What is the Buyer’s Journey?

Put simply, the buyer’s journey is the active process someone goes through to become aware of a problem, weigh up the ways to solve it, and decide on a purchase. But there’s a lot more to it than that...

Here we’ll take a look at what exactly the buyer’s journey is, its different stages, why it’s important and how to create one for your audience. We’ll also look at how to create content that aligns with the buyer’s journey and how this can really benefit your marketing efforts.

Buyer’s journey definition

Let’s start with a clear definition. Here is how Aira’s Head of Performance frames the buyer’s journey:

Within the buyer’s journey a business needs to consider not just how people research and purchase, but also the symptoms and problems that form the beginning of their journey, and how they move along the different stages of their journey.

Buyer’s journey stages

The three stages of the buyer’s journey are Awareness, Consideration and Decision.

Awareness

What happens

The buyer realises they have a problem. They are showing symptoms and researching to understand and define it, not yet looking for a solution.

Your role

Publish educational content, such as blog posts, guides, and checklists, that help them frame and name the problem.

Consideration

What happens

The buyer has defined their problem and is researching the different approaches and methods that could solve it.

Your role

Offer solution-focused content, such as comparisons, webinars, and case studies, so they evaluate you against the alternatives.

Decision

What happens

The buyer has chosen an approach and is comparing providers and products to make a final purchase decision.

Your role

Give them the confidence to choose you, using demos, free trials, clear pricing and social proof such as testimonials.

These three stages are a model, not a rule. Real buyers rarely move through them in a tidy straight line - they loop back, skip ahead and revisit stages as they learn. Some frameworks also stretch the journey into five stages by adding the purchase and post-purchase steps; there is more on that in the FAQs below.

Buyer’s journey vs customer journey

The two terms are often used interchangeably, but they are not the same thing. The buyer’s journey covers the pre-purchase path - awareness, consideration and decision - and ends at the sale. The customer journey is wider: it picks up where the buyer’s journey finishes and follows the whole relationship after the sale, through onboarding, support, renewal and advocacy.

In short, the buyer’s journey is the first chapter of the customer journey. Map the buyer’s journey to win the sale; map the customer journey to keep and grow the account.

Why is the buyer’s journey important?

The buyer’s journey gives value to customers

A major problem with traditional marketing is that it wasn’t designed to help people. Traditional advertising uses tactics that shout for attention and tell people what they need. It doesn’t provide value by educating people, reflecting the way modern buyers search for information online.

The buyer’s journey is a vital aspect of this evolved form of marketing because it enables businesses to help their customers, by providing informative content to enable them to understand their problem and their options for solving it.

It will help you sell your products/services

If you can create content that helps your audience at each stage of their buyer’s journey, you will have a good chance of getting them to engage with your website, and subsequently become a lead. You then have the opportunity to nurture that lead with more useful content and personalised pre-sales support, until they hopefully become a customer. And let’s face it, that’s what we all want, right?

Your ideal customer wants the right content at the right time (which is on demand, whenever they need it) and they want it in the format they prefer. By creating content aligned with the buyer’s journey, you should always be able to provide them with helpful, relevant content that will be genuinely useful and aid them in moving along their buyer’s journey.

The proof is in the statistics

The numbers underline why the buyer’s journey, and content mapped to it, matters:

Format matters as much as message: buyers lean on different content types as they move along - preferring webinars and guides early on, and case studies and product demos as they near purchase.

You need strong content mapped to each stage of the buyer’s journey, and it needs to be visible in search results, as well as answers from AI assistants, for the questions and keywords your audience actually uses.

This is where keyword research and mapping comes in. Aira’s Dan Brooks wrote a guide to labelling keywords by buyer’s journey stage. By tagging keywords to the awareness, consideration and decision stages, you can build content that both users and search engines respond to. Done well, your audience can discover genuinely helpful content from you, wherever they are in their journey.

Putting together keyword research, keyword mapping, content design, and content promotion takes strategic thinking and dedicated resource, which is often where external consultants can help. Whether you work with a digital marketing agency or utilise your in-house team, considering the buyer's joruney in your content strategy can reap rewards if done well.

Buyer’s journey content

So telling you to create great content might be quite obvious, and a little unhelpful. What should your content actually look like? What format should it take? How exactly should it align to the Awareness, Consideration and Decision phases of the buyer’s journey?

The actual content you create, and the formats you choose, will differ depending on your buyer personas (the semi-fictional representations of your ideal customers). Some personas will prefer blog posts, some will prefer video content, some perhaps original data, charts and templates. The focus of your content will differ too, depending on which of your personas you are targeting.

Let’s briefly look at a couple of Aira’s own buyer personas to explain why content needs to differ:

• Marketing Marvin is a marketing manager, interested in traffic growth and lead generation. Marvin gets most of his information from reading industry blogs and news.
• Sales Sally is a sales manager and is much more interested in improving sales processes and customer acquisition. Sally reads industry blogs, but also watches a lot of video content.

It’s easy to see that, despite both being potential customers, these two personas want different content to satisfy their needs and help solve their problems.

It’s essential to develop buyer personas, otherwise you won’t be able to create targeted content in an appropriate format, and you won’t be able to map accurate buyer’s journeys for your audience.

With personas, you can create content that is relevant and useful, and by mapping a buyer’s journey for each persona, you can plan content to engage each customer type at each stage of their journey.

How to map content to a buyer’s journey

Now you know a bit about the benefits of the buyer’s journey, it’s worth looking at how to apply it to your content strategy. If you want to do buyer’s journey mapping for your own business, here’s how to get started:

Create buyer personas

We’ve already talked about the importance of buyer personas, but having them in place really makes defining your audience’s buyer’s journey so much easier. By understanding their problems, needs, motivations, and goals, you can create helpful content to support them.

If you’d like to learn more about this stage of the process take a look at our comprehensive guide to buyer personas.

Buyer’s journey examples

Let’s take a look at some buyer’s journey examples to further illustrate the process, and show how this can lead to content that is engaging for your audience.

Here’s a buyer’s journey example for our persona Marketing Marvin. It shows his thought process and the kind of on-site and downloadable content we might create to attract and engage him:

Here’s an example we created for On the Go Tours, who organise group tours and bespoke holidays:

As you can see, the process is pretty logical, and it’s not too difficult to plan content to address the problems your audience is facing as they move through their buyer’s journey.

Certain types of search terms and phrases often appear as buyers reach different stages, which can help you plan the kind of content that would be most helpful, and therefore engaging, for them. As you can see from the table below, awareness stage terms often include things like ‘troubleshoot’, ‘resolve’, and ‘improve’. At the consideration stage you’re likely to see phrases including ‘solution’, ‘service’, and ‘tool’; and at the decision stage terms like ‘compare’ and ‘review’ are common.

Evaluating search terms and their motivations can be helpful when planning content throughout the buyer’s journey, but they are certainly not definitive and should be used as guidelines rather than rules.

Terms relevant in each buyer’s journey stage

Awareness	Consideration	Decision
Problem / Opportunity Terms	Solution Terms	Comparison Terms
Troubleshoot	Solution	Compare
How to	Provider	Versus
Resolve	Service	Vs.
Risks	Supplier	Comparison
Upgrade	Tool	Pros and Cons
Improve	Device	Review
Optimise	Software	Test

Source: HubSpot

Just remember that your aim is to create content that is as helpful as possible for your personas at every stage. If you can provide real value to your target audience, your content is likely to bring more traffic to your website and lead to more purchases.

Buyer’s journey FAQs

What is the buyer’s journey?

The buyer’s journey is the active process a person goes through to become aware of a problem, evaluate the ways to solve it, and decide on a purchase. It describes the route to a sale from the buyer’s point of view rather than the seller’s.

What are the steps in the buyer’s journey?

The core model has three steps: Awareness (the buyer realises they have a problem), Consideration (they research the approaches that could solve it) and Decision (they compare providers and choose one). In practice, buyers move back and forth between these steps rather than through them in a straight line.

What are the five stages of the buyer’s journey?

There is no single fixed five-stage model. Some marketers extend the three core stages by adding a purchase step and a post-purchase step, such as retention or loyalty. Others use the classic consumer decision-making process: problem recognition, information search, evaluation of alternatives, purchase, and post-purchase evaluation. The three-stage model covers the pre-purchase journey; five-stage versions usually include the customer journey that follows the sale.

What is an example of a buyer’s journey?

Take a marketing manager whose website has lost traffic. At the awareness stage they think “my traffic has dropped suddenly”; at consideration, “I need to increase traffic”; and at decision, “an SEO audit would help me build a strategy” - reading different content at each step. The two example tables earlier in this guide map this out in full for two different businesses.

Where to go from here

With the theory in place, the next step is to map the journey for your own audience - one journey per persona, with content planned for every stage. Write down each persona’s likely thinking at the awareness, consideration and decision stages, then list the on-site and downloadable content that would genuinely help move them forward. The two example tables above are a useful starting point.

Keyword research, content mapping, and the writing itself will take time and a clear strategy. If you're looking for additional support, this is the kind of work digital marketing agencies take on every day. Either way, content built around a real buyer’s journey is content that earns engagement, and customers.