The Silent Decision-Makers: Tapping Into the Hidden Buying Journey

In order to focus efforts on the appropriate demographic, any successful marketing strategy must include a step to determine the target buyer. In fact, 39 percent of consumers now expect brands to speak directly to their needs.

Who are shadow buyers? They're the people who browse your product, weigh their options, and help shape the final decision without ever talking to a sales team or making their interest known. They don’t fill out forms, book demos, or follow the usual path through the sales process. Yet they still have a major say in what gets bought.

So how can businesses figure out who these buyers are, connect with them, and earn their trust?

Identifying Hidden Buyers

Some of the most knowledgeable and serious potential customers are shadow buyers. This group is expanding due to changing consumer buying habits, and companies cannot afford to overlook them.  Shadow buyers will search websites, examine case studies, review third-party evaluations, and do their own competitive analysis. Yet they act on their own judgment, doing all this behind the scenes:

• Problem-solving: It's more important to them than rigorously adhering to procurement regulations.
• Disbelief in authority: Bureaucratic processes appear convoluted, unrelated or slow.
• Autonomy and empowerment: They think they should take independent action to achieve their goals.
• Valuing innovation: They view embracing new tools early and experimenting as essential for moving forward.
• Focus on cost: They're motivated to cut expenses and always prioritize value.

How do businesses identify these buyers, then? Attention to detail is essential. For instance, even in cases when consumers do not complete forms, organizations should keep an eye on digital footprints such as website visits, content downloads, and social media engagement. Additionally, analytics tools can help businesses by monitoring anonymous user behavior and trends that can point to purchase intent, including recurring visits to the same product page. Lastly, organizations can use intent data from third-party platforms that compile anonymous research behavior from the internet.

How to Interact With Shadow Buyers Without Frightening Them

As soon as a business identifies a shadow buyer, it’s time to take action. However, excessively intrusive outreach can quickly turn off shadow buyers, and a harsh or inadequately tailored approach can permanently turn them off a brand. Therefore, it's essential that participation be open, sympathetic, and truly valuable.

This includes:

• Offer useful, easily obtainable content. Assist shadow buyers with their research by including thorough product guides, case stories, or comparison sheets on the business website.
• Allow them to take the lead. Give customers flexible, low-friction ways to participate, such as live chat, ungated content, or anonymous Q&As, so they can communicate without disclosing personal information.
• Make use of data. Without using direct outreach, use behavioral data to customize website experiences and retarget advertisements to maintain brand awareness. Research from HubSpot shows that 76 percent of marketers report data-driven campaigns yield higher return on investment.
• Establish trust. To foster trust, display customer testimonials, reviews and clear product details.
• Pay attention to the purchasing process. To accommodate customers who would rather have little direct interaction, make sure the purchasing process is as easy and self-serve as feasible. When shadow customers do get in touch, reply right away with information that's specific to their online experience.

For instance, a software business might observe a rise in visitors to its pricing site, but a decrease in requests for demos. By looking into user pathways, it can see that a lot of people read comparative guides and customer case studies. As a result, it includes a chatbot that provides a free "Instant product tour" and encourages users to sign up, which increases the number of conversions from previously anonymous visitors.

In a similar vein, an online retailer may observe that over a few weeks, customers are returning to product pages and paying close attention to the product detail section and third-party reviews, but not the brand's email pop-ups. The retailer adds comprehensive product comparison sheets that are available as ungated PDFs and provide clear breakdowns compared to competitors. The retailer also observes an increase in sales.

Developing Connections

Shadow buyers are an important part of today's purchasing environment that shouldn't be disregarded. Organizations can strategically alter their marketing methods to appeal to this hidden audience if they put more effort into developing connections with these potential customers than merely completing individual transactions.

Brands must create go-to-market strategies that guarantee shadow customers are brought into the spotlight by using technology to provide subtle involvement, displaying value wherever possible, and keeping the purchasing experience as hands-off as possible.

Unnikrshnan Kurup is the director of client consulting and strategy at Theorem, a digital marketing solutions provider.