#24 The different stages of your customer journey

I’ve talked previously about the customer journey and why it’s so important.

I know I keep saying everything is my favourite topic, but the customer journey, customer experience and how you look after your customers is so important. So, it is one of my favourite topics I think!

I want to talk about being a customer-centric company. So that means you are always putting the customer at the forefront of everything you do. It means that you are very focused on your customer experience, delivering amazing customer experience.

Prospects

It means that you spend time researching the market and researching your customers and talking to your customers, prospective customers, existing customers, and finding out from them what products and services they want. What are their wants and their needs? Where do you find them? What are they reading? What are they doing? What are their pain points?

Find out as much as you can about your customers so that you can deliver the right products and services for them.

So I’m going to be talking more about ideal customers in the coming episode. Also going to be talking about how you craft your messaging so that it resonates with your ideal customers. So that’s very much talking to a customer in their language. It’s making sure that your message is clear, consistent, and credible.

And then I’m going to be talking in one of the future episodes about how you choose the right media so that you can advertise to those ideal customers.

And I’ll also be doing an episode on partnerships and collaborations, which again is something that I’m very keen on because that doesn’t involve a significant amount of money. Quite often it’s just about creating a strategic partnership with someone who has similar ideal customers. I’m going to talk a bit more about networking as well. So that is the prospecting stage. That is finding people that would be your ideal customers, finding prospects and making sure that you’re targeting the right prospects, giving them the right key message and using the right media to get in front of them.

Leads

And once they’ve shown an interest in your business, then they can be considered to be leads.

And I’m going to talk about how you capture those leads in a system. So that would be things like what CRM system you might be using.

It would be things like using a quiz or some kind of lead magnet in order to get your prospects’ data, so their email addresses for example in return for some valuable content. And then I’m going to be talking about how you get your leads to know, like, and trust you.

So I’ve just done a previous episode on how you get your customers or your prospective customers to know, like, and trust you. That’s so important because people just don’t buy from other people/brands/companies immediately. You need to build a relationship and you need to build that know, like and trust factor.

And then we’re going to talk about converting the sale. So how do you make that sale as easy as possible for the customer?

And there are lots of ways you can do that. It’s things like making sure your website’s really usable and that you’ve got the right payment options.

Customers

And then last of all, we’re going to look at customers. How do you deliver amazing customer service? And that for me is really, really important. Always thinking about how can you be remarkable? Seth Godin wrote a brilliant book called The Purple Cow, which is all about being remarkable and how you can stand out from your competitors.

And that’s one of the main things in this crowded market where there are so many competitors, there are so many people shouting out, talking about their products and services. How can you differentiate yourself in a crowded market? And that is by being remarkable.

We’re also going to talk about how you increase the lifetime value of your customer. So once you’ve got your customer in through the door, you’re delivering an amazing service, you’re giving them a great customer experience. How can you get that customer to keep coming back time and time again? And how can you make sure that you are giving the right products and services that they want?

And how can you increase the value of your customer because that is how you can really start generating a really good profit for your business. And then in an upcoming episode, we’re also going to talk about referrals, testimonials, and reviews.

So this process, which is something that I’ve taken from a brilliant book called The One Page Marketing Plan, which makes marketing very simple, by a guy called Allan Dib. He suggests this very basic setup where you’ve got nine squares split into prospects, leads and customers and you talk about how you’re going to deal with those at each stage.

And then I add to that, when I do this with my clients, I have an extra square, which is all about measuring and testing. So that’s making sure you’ve got your Google Analytics installed and talking about what the key metrics might be, making sure that you’re reporting on a monthly basis.

Marketing is all about testing and evaluating what works and then making sure that you change things accordingly. So if something’s working really well, you’re going to do more of it. And if it’s not working, you’re either going to decrease it or stop it completely.