Path to Purchase Research

NewtonX path to purchase insights reveal how clients travel towards a final buying decision. Use this to create consistently excellent customer experiences for all your buyer personas – driving long term growth and profitability.

Join the organizations who have already found success

Path to purchase research services and capabilities

Do you want to strengthen messaging at a particular crossroads of your prospects’ path to purchase? Are your clients disappearing after just one purchase? Is there a particular part of the sales funnel that’s leaking leads?

NewtonX path to purchase research insights gives you this granular level understanding of your clients’ experiences and motivations. You’ll optimize your entire path to purchase, fixing the cracks in your sales funnel along the way.

Deeper understanding of every member of your buying teams and prospective clients informs strategic thinking with insights based on expert data. This reduces wasted spend on marketing campaigns that miss the mark and are in the wrong place, targeting the wrong people. Path to purchase research insights help you:

Create messaging that deeply resonates with buyers and prospects because it directly meets their needs and pain points
Generate content that will move clients along their path to purchase, with the information and social proof they need
Create marketing and advertising campaigns that speak to the right people, in the right place, at exactly the right time
Meet your buyers wherever they are on their customer journey, with whatever they need at every touchpoint

Path to purchase research to deliver both scale and specificity

Our technology reaches across 140+ industries to give you the scale of a panel combined with the depth of an expert network. From professionals en masse to niche, hard-to-find audiences, the NewtonX Knowledge Graph can find the exact people to deliver the business insights you need. We’re the only customer loyalty research agency that’s developed proprietary research technology to keep up with market demands. Here’s just a sampling of who we pinpoint, for everything from 5,000+ participant surveys to curated groups of in-depth interviews.

140+

industries

Cryptocurrency specialists advising on hedge fund projects
Advertising professionals overseeing brand spend
Reddit users that visit Reddit for NSFW content
IT decision-makers evaluating cloud software services

NewtonX helps industry innovators turn inquiry into impact.

Digiday and NewtonX Show Gaming Companies How to Monetize the Free-to-Play Era

Is the free-to-play revenue model the future of gaming? Digiday partnered with NewtonX to survey 50 game developers to solve the puzzle.

Capturing customer voice for a San Francisco ad tech giant

We used our AI-driven research methods to identify the professionals with the insights our client needed to keep up with the rapidly evolving advertising industry.

How NewtonX grew a publisher’s higher education revenue

A leading academic publisher wanted to understand their customers’ needs for MBA students. They turned to NewtonX to target 50 professionals in one of the most notoriously difficult demographics in B2B research: senior-level academic professionals.

Want to see how NewtonX can help you?

What is path to purchase research?

Path to purchase research aims to understand how each member of your buyer team experiences the journey from initial awareness of your brand and product, all the way through to final purchase decision. It gets into the details of how they feel and why they make particular decisions at every touchpoint along the way.

This is about stepping outside your enthusiasm for your products or services and seeing your clients’ experiences through their eyes. Path to purchase research gives you a granular understanding of each one of your buyer personas. It reveals where you can reduce friction and create smooth purchase funnels for each of them to slide down.

Why is path to purchase tracking important?

Path to purchase tracking is important because B2B customer experiences are of critical importance to your business growth. Each stage of your customer journey can evoke a positive or negative response. Will they remain committed to traveling with you to a final purchase? Or will they be deterred by a poor experience – that they will probably share?

Your first round of path to purchase research insights gives you a benchmark to measure from. The real value is in implementing regular research that monitors evolving client preferences and the consequences of other changes to a dynamic economic environment. Your clients and prospects aren’t static, so your path to purchase research strategy must move with them.

With this constantly updated knowledge, you can adapt quickly to clients’ changing needs and pain points. This constant listening to the voice of the customer builds the consistency and trust you need for strong, long-term relationships. By constantly tweaking your customer journey to incorporate new information, your buyer experience shines above the competition.

3 benefits of path to purchase research

Customer centricity
Path to purchase research insights give you a deeper understanding of your clients’ preferences, needs, behaviors, and pain points. This means you can take a well-informed customer centric approach to product or service development and marketing strategies. Your customers can only be satisfied if you’re giving them the products or services they need, within a carefully tailored customer experience. So, of course they’re going to come back and tell other people about their brilliant customer journey, Saving you the money on new customer acquisition.

Save money
Insights from path to purchase research can save you money across your organization, for example:

Marketing is better targeted and more effective because you can direct resources to the most impactful channels and touchpoints
Increased client retention rates saves you money on new customer acquisition activities
Regularly listening to clients’ opinions on your products and services means your offerings are always align to their needs, avoiding wasted investment in things that aren’t a good product-market fit
Reduced operational costs by streamlining the entire path to purchase

Competitive advantage
Consistency and agility are key factors in sustaining a competitive advantage. Businesses that maintain an excellent level of customer service, with a customer journey that’s free from roadblocks, dominates the playing field. By tracking path to purchase insights you can be responsive to clients’ changing perspectives and get new strategies in place with outstanding agility.

Factors that influence path to purchase

Your clients and prospects are bombarded by unprecedented amounts of information at the start of their customer journey, including but not limited to:

Colleague advice from those that are facing the same problems and have made the same decision
Industry specific information from professional bodies and organizations
Materials form events and conferences
Online research of forums, social media platforms and relevant websites

This multitude of information influences decision making at every stage of their path to purchase – especially in the non-linear B2B context. It’s absolutely crucial that your path to purchase survey finds out what your customers are searching for and where they’re looking for it at every stage of their customer journey. Then you can be in exactly the right place, with the answers to their questions, at just the right time. Otherwise someone else will be.

6 stages of path to purchase research

The B2B path to purchase is not a straight line from A to B. Your clients may take several revolutions around the same road before they’re happy to move onto the next stage of their journey. Its crucial that businesses meet their prospects where they are, with whatever information they need. Path to purchase research gives you both the details and the overview you need to strategically plan excellent experiences for every client. The digital landscape complicates this journey mapping with a new set of touchpoints to account for.

Each industry and business will have their own unique customer journeys, but generally B2B path to purchase research investigates each of these 6 stages:

Awareness

Do customers know about and understand your service or product? This element of research identifies your clients and prospects, their needs and pain points, where they are and how to best connect with them.

Consideration

Customers are considering your offering alongside others. Now you need research to tell you the priorities of each member of the buying team, and who has most influence over the final decision.

Decision time

To close the deal, you need everyone who needs to sign off on it to be happy. Path to purchase research insights tell you exactly what they need.

Sale

The deal is done, now you need to know how to make an unforgettable first impression and deliver more than expected.

Repeat business

You need to address all aspects of customer service to ensure that you retain clients and boost customer loyalty.

Growth

Your happy clients boost growth by being repeat customers, and being open to upselling and cross selling. They also boost your reputation with their recommendations. Path to purchase research helps you determine the most efficient ways to promote this positivity to new customers and continuously strengthen your brand.

Understanding the stages with an expert path to purchase research partner

There are so many nuances to each stage of path to purchase research that it can feel like information overload. An expert path to purchase research partner presents their findings in clear visual formats and provides actionable insights that can be easily shared across your organization.

Understanding each stage of path to purchase research insights means that you’ll:

Understand the challenges, motivations and priorities of each member of your buying team – and how they interact with each other
Create a comprehensive customer journey map for each of them, with signposts at key points to guide them all the way to sign off
Know their starting point – each buyer persona starts their journey from their own motivations. With this information, you can match your product or service explicitly to their needs and clear their path to purchase with the right information in their preferred format

Your B2B path to purchase research partner finds and verifies the precise professionals you need to talk to. They use their expertise and experience to formulate a strategy that combines the right quantitative and qualitative methodologies to get your answers.