Digital marketing has lied to us.

It has convinced us that a great piece of content, a well placed ad, or a perfectly optimized landing page will convince total strangers to become happy customers in a single touchpoint. That’s never been how people actually make purchasing decisions, and the fact that we now have access to the internet doesn’t change that.

Think about the last few purchase decisions you made. Aside from a few impulse checkouts an Amazon or through Instagram ads, how long had you known about the brand before you clicked Buy Now?

The vast majority of our decisions favour brands that we have built an understanding of, or brands that are familiar to us.

That idea was, perhaps unintentionally, laid out in a recent Google Insights guide. In it, Google uses its access to billions of online purchases to show that the holiday shopping season actually started months ago. They believe that the seeds of the purchases made this October through December will have been planted as early as May, as people collected information (whether consciously or subconsciously) about the brands that they found interesting.

According to Google, that passive collection of information shifts to active shopping in the weeks before purchases are made. When it’s ultimately time to buy, we already have nearly all of the information we need, and all that’s left to do is a quick search, click, and checkout.

Why That Matters

When we focus our time, energy, and resources on that last click, we’re missing the majority of the story.

What happens is we get so focused on the ROAS or ROI of that last piece of content/ad/landing page that we miss what’s actually attracting people to our products or services.

That’s why many companies get frustrated when they can’t simply flip a switch and start seeing sales in the way that others seem to be able to do.

What Can We Do About It?

This is not a call to abandon our analytics, and I’m certainly not arguing that we should stop measuring the return we’re getting on our various marketing investments.

Instead, you could think of this as permission to think bigger. Look beyond the last-click and consider how people first encounter your brand – through your content, earned media, referrals, reviews, and other ways people discuss your brand.

Let’s take the 2024 holiday shopping season as an example. For some businesses, the period between October and December represents as much as 80% of their annual revenue, so they start planning their holiday campaigns as much as a year (or more) ahead of time.

But when do they start actually communicating with their audiences?

According to Google’s research, if we focus all of our energy on that short buying period, we may have already missed a huge opportunity to build demand.

The Four Mindsets of Shopping

Google suggests that there are four mindsets we should be considering when planning our marketing messages, and as I’m sure you can see already, these mindsets apply to any buying journey, not just the holiday season:

The question we should all be asking ourselves: What have we done to nurture and support our customers through every step in that buying journey?