Managing the Customer Journey

The secret to creating a marketing system lies in understanding the Customer Journey as it plays out in your business.? Similar businesses have similar Customer Journeys within industries and business segments, but even then, minor variations can occur even between identical businesses.? It pays to examine the Customer Journey you have created for your customers because your campaigns themselves change the nature of the journey in significant ways.? For example, if you are not using content marketing campaigns to nurture leads, then you are missing steps that should be in your Customer Journey. A robust marketing system will have multiple campaigns that touch every step in your customer journey.?

Identify key issues, needs, and challenges that your products and services help address.? Do your products and services solve problems by themselves, or do they exist within a larger solution that involves other companies. ?Complex problems and challenges require greater insight on the part of your customers.? Identify genuine areas of expertise needed to evaluate potential solutions.? Just knowing that a challenge requires multiple vendors is an important part of finding effective solutions. For example, legal compliance may require a team of service providers including independent business consultants, attorneys specialized in areas of law, and technology experts, all working with teams within your own organization.? Other challenges may be less complicated, but still require special knowledge or insights that are not widely known.? These are all opportunities for you to create content that can help educate your prospects about things they need to know to make informed buying decisions. Then look to your internal Subject Matter Experts.?They might even be among the most knowledgeable experts in the industry.? Create a media team to interview them on a regular basis to capture the information you need for your content marketing campaigns.

An informed buyer is a good prospect for you if they are looking for solutions that you provide.?Taking the next step requires these prospects move from being a consumer or subscriber of your content to a true, Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL). Once they are in your Marketing Audience, you can begin separate campaigns that deliver more detailed articles and information along with promotional ads and product-related content.?At this point in the Customer Journey, your prospects have moved on from understanding their needs to comparing solutions.?Your competitors are likely in the race now, as these prospects consume their information along with yours.?The key to success is to have better information.?If you provided non-promotional content early in the Customer Journey, you would have already established credibility and trust with the prospect, which is essential at the top of the Sales Funnel.?Design campaigns that connect the dots between your prospects needs and the kinds of solutions that work best, assuming that your products and services are a good fit.?If they are, your prospects need to know that.?This is a good time to subtly introduce your value proposition.?You may have a value proposition that is unique to a particular product; it may arise from a collection of features from your product (common with SaaS solutions), or it may be more global, inherent in your brand itself, or even in your slogan.? In the latter case, consider explaining your slogan, what it means, and how you defined your brand and your brand values.

The next step in the Customer Journey is to the top of your sales funnel where a salesperson can begin communicating with them, further qualifying them and customizing the explanation of exactly why your products are a perfect match for your customers needs.?Moving a prospect into the sales process requires a Sales Conversion.?As we define it, a Sales Qualified Lead (SQL) is not a closed prospect. It is a prospect that is qualified to enter the sales process. If you have done a good job with your content marketing campaigns, these prospects may already be reaching out to you, downloading more content, either in their inbox, or on your website, as they begin to finalize a solution for themselves.?Look for these early buying signals in your CRM tracking.?If you have set up content related tags, this is easy to do. Share these with sales early in the sales process.

Continue to retarget these prospects at this critical stage in the sales process.?If this typically takes several days or even several weeks. Your sales staff will appreciate all the help you can give them.? Product information designed to align challenges with their resolution is helpful here.?What specific challenges are these prospects dealing with? How do your products deal with those challenges or ease the pain of implementation? These are questions that your sales staff is dealing with.?You should know the answers and create content that you can deliver to the prospect, or your sales team can deliver it themselves, either in person or by email. Create a content library just for your sales staff with plenty of content that addresses every pathway to conversion you can identify. Short whitepapers written with great clarity, specific to how your product works and how they solve challenges for your customers work well here. We believe whitepapers are better tools than video for your sales staff because it is easier to refer to specific parts of a whitepaper in discussions with prospects. In addition, either party can bring them to a meeting for more detailed discussions.

These practices are key to creating a seamless connection between marketing and sales so be sure your marketing team is collaborating with sales to support them as much as possible with good closing collateral.?You might invest quite a lot of time and effort into understanding the qualification process and the kinds of objections your sales staff deal with on a daily basis.? Knowing the answers to these questions should be part of both your marketing process and sales training.

The end of the Customer Journey for your prospects is a closed deal which is completed by the sales department.?Marketing should keep track of deals won or lost with a keen eye on why some are successful, and others are not.? Interview your sales staff for insights into what works and what doesn't. Always look for opportunities to improve your marketing communications but also provide marketing collateral for your sales staff that enables them to communicate effectively to successfully close the deals that pay for everything your business does. For most businesses, the Customer Journey never ends as new customers become long time customers.?In some cases, this requires different campaigns altogether.?If prospects rarely buy from your company, they may repeat the entire customer journey all over again.? But note that each time, they become more informed buyers. Be sure that you keep up with them or they will know more about your product than you do! Providing valuable knowledge and information for your prospects and customers throughout the Customer Journey can lead to dramatic improvements in customer satisfaction and loyalty.?The benefits to your brand compound with every campaign.

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