One of the biggest mistakes an organization can make is underplaying the psychological “journey” a would-be customer must go through, in order to feel:
– Comfortable with your organization and its products/services
– Excited to buy from your organization (or take another desired action)
– Compelled to promote your organization to family and friends
Naturally, these feelings and actions don’t happen overnight, no matter how great our organizations, products and services might be. We can, however, create a series of strategies, systems and tactics which will move as many people as possible, as fast as possible, through the customer journey.
As you see in the infographic below, the customer journey includes four stages: awareness, interest, excitement, and advocacy. At each stage, there are strategic levers (the individual dots) we can pull to create compounding momentum. Ultimately, this will result in a higher conversion rate of your bottom-line, desired call-to-action (i.e. buy this, invest in that).
When architecting your organization’s customer journey, take into account your current PR and marketing resources, as well as ones which you’ll need to implement in order to:
1. Move as many people as possible, as fast as possible, through the customer journey, and
2. Maximize the conversion rate of your bottom-line, desired call-to-action (i.e. buy this, invest in that)
Here are a few thought-starters for each stage of the journey:
1) AWARENESS
What are the primary sources of your website traffic?
How can you enhance and expand upon these sources?
2) INTEREST
When people visit your website, what mechanism (e.g. a lead magnet) do you have to collect email addresses at scale?
What is your current website-visitor-to-email-address conversion rate, and how can you improve it?’
What happens immediately after website visitors enter their email address? (Tip: They should get an automated series of emails, designed to increase interest in your organization and its products or services.)a
3) EXCITEMENT
What’s your email marketing strategy?
How often do you send emails to your email list, and what do these emails consist of?
What’s your content marketing strategy? And do you have micro strategies for each channel/platform?
4) ADVOCACY
Does the content you’re sharing truly compel people to share it with people in their social networks? And, are you producing enough of it to stay relevant?
What’s the breakdown between original and curated content?
How are you getting email subscribers to follow your organization on social media, and join its digital community (e.g. Telegram)?
Based in Tel Aviv, Josh is the Head of Marketing & Operations for BlockGroup.
