Customer Decision Making Process

Not all visitors to a site have same needs. Karon Thackston, copywriter and proprietor at http://MarketingWords.com, explains by breaking customer decision making process (i.e. buying process) into at least four stages: Need/Want Recognition, Information Search, Evaluation, and Purchase.

If a visitor has already made decision to purchase a product or service, for example, she needs easy ordering options. If customer is early in decision making process, however, she needs more general information.

Information or Sales?

Dee Kreidel, owner of Dax Development Corporation http://DaxDevelopment.com, recommends identifying a site as either an information site (for early decision stages) or a sales site (for late decision stages), but not both:

"Our experience with our clients demonstrates that most people will not shop at a site if they see it as an informational site because their state of mind/focus is different when they are there - they aren't necessarily looking to shop, they are wanting information."

One way to keep sales and information content separate is to set up a "hub and spoke" system of Web sites.

Putting it Together with a Hub and Spoke System

In Part 1 ( http://www.webmarketingarticles.com/CustomerDecision.htm), I took a look at understanding your site visitors' decision making process and providing them with right information, thus converting more visitors to purchasers.

Here in Part 2 I will present some tips for attracting right customers to your site and ideas for profiting through information sites.

Breaking Through Clutter

If you are like most of us, getting people to pay attention and understand how you can help them is a daunting task. Repeated exposure is one way to catch your target customers' interest.

James Maduk has a unique system for doing just that, without becoming a pest. He has what he calls a search engine "Site Mesh" consisting of a hub and spoke family of Web sites (The hub and spoke concept is explained further in Part 1.).

By structuring sites so they are related, but with each spoke a highly targeted, one-page site selling only a single product, he is able to achieve multiple listings on competitive key words in search engines.

James explains, "What this means is that instead of having one chance of someone finding my site, I now have 55 chances - or as many chances as I have sales pages."

As an example, James owns three of top 15 sites currently listed in Google search engine under "sell audio ebooks", including #1 and #2 listed sites. These same results appear in Yahoo! engine as well, all at no cost.

(Author Note: For a free audio-visual demonstration of James' Google and Yahoo! search engine results for numerous keywords, go to his "Getting Ranked 1st on Google" sales page* and click on "Proof" in bottom navigation.)

Managing Sales Sites

In Part 1, Karon Thackston explained multi-step buying decision and why many of your visitors may not yet be ready to purchase. If you own a sales site, those early in decision process are not likely to buy from you.