Inbound Marketing For Dummies

Chapter 6

Mapping Your Customers’ Purchase Paths

In This Chapter

Refreshing your knowledge of Lewis’s Purchase Funnel

Understanding why the customer-centric Buyer’s Journey is important

Exploring the steps in the customer purchase paths

Evolving your marketing actions into a Lifestyle Loop

Mapping the consumer purchase path helps marketers identify key points in the decision-making process that connects people with products. As a marketer, you’ve probably heard of the Purchase Funnel, a concept developed at the advent of marketing in the late 1800s. In this chapter, I use the Purchase Funnel as a basis for explaining new marketing models that better reflect the complex interaction between customer and company.

Marketing itself is actually a relatively young field. St. Elmo Lewis’s Purchase Funnel was developed in 1898 and its linear map reflects the simpler consumer times of yesteryear. It’s interesting that a sophisticated enhancement wasn’t presented until 2003 when Hugh Macfarlane wrote The Leaky Funnel.

Now that the world has changed, marketing must change with it. It must ...