- By: Mark Jakobsen
- Published on:
Share on:
To really excel at winning new business, you need to understand the journey they go through
To really excel at winning new customers and growing your business you need to understand the journey your customer takes when making a purchase. Knowing this will enable to you better target them with the right material. If that’s answered it for you, great! If you would like to know more, then keep on reading…
If you are unsure how to go about this then there are two options available, either the customer journey or the marketing hourglass. Both are great frameworks that help businesses understand and map out the interactions and the experiences of their customers. While they have similarities, they do have a slightly different approach.
What is the Customer Journey?
The customer journey looks at all the stages your potential customer will go through when interacting with you. It will encompass the end-to-end experience, from the initial awareness of the brand to the post-purchase stage. The stages the customer will go through can typically be broken down into the following:
Awareness – The customer becomes aware of your brand and the product, service or solution they are in the market for.
Consideration – The customer will evaluate your offering, most likely they will compare you with your competition and weigh up the pros and cons. This could be on price, functionality, location, look and feel, or something else depending upon what the product is and who the customer is (learning more about your customers and drawing up personas will help with this bit).
Decision – The customer has considered all the options and has made a decision on which to go for.
Purchase – The customer completes the transaction and is now a customer of yours.
Post-purchase – The customer’s experience after the purchase. It’s important not to leave out this stage, as doing this right will lead to the customer becoming an advocate for your company and promoting you to their friends, family, and/or work colleagues.
The customer journey will focus on understanding each stage and optimising it to create a seamless and positive experience for the customer. Putting yourself in the shoes of a customer will help you identify touchpoints, pain points, and opportunities to engage effectively with your customers throughout their journey.
What about the Marketing Hourglass?
Well… the marketing hourglass started off as just the marketing funnel. But as that only concentrated on the pre-sales interaction with the customer it was missing a big chunk of the action. So it got expanded by John Jantsch. There are now several versions of it and a simple google will show you a variety of options to choose from.
We work off the following version of the marketing hourglass. It is simple, trusted, and straightforward, broken down into 8 sections. The thinking behind it is your potential customers will enter at the top and proceed down through it. As they progress you will lose some, which could be due to them purchasing from a competitor, deciding they no longer need what they are looking for, or another reason entirely.
With the midpoint being the purchase it expands out again as the idea is as you gain more customers, and if you have a good post-sales strategy in place then this pool of customers will grow.
What does this mean for you?
Understanding these will be a big help for your business. If you know the journey a customer takes through the process of purchasing your product you can uncover areas of bottlenecks, understand where they drop out, and adjust the process accordingly.
With the marketing hourglass, you can create content that focuses and talks directly to your potential customers at each stage. Working in tandem with the customer journey you can bring in pain points, promote benefits, and generally make your marketing work harder and smarter for you.
It’s important to remember at each stage in the marketing hourglass favours a different type of marketing collateral. We’ve listed them below for your ease.
Each of the pieces of collateral should be developed to focus on the key messages you need to get across to progress them through the funnel, from one stage to the next.
However…
Now just to be annoying, it’s important to remember that not everybody thinks, reacts, and shops in the same way. So, while the majority of potential customers will start at the top and work their way through, others will enter midway through, or go straight to the purchase stage. Because of this, it is imperative that you have good quality content ready in all stages, and you don’t miss any out.
Again… why is this important?
The simple answer is, if you do this right then you will be giving all of your potential customers the information they want at each stage of their purchasing journey. Imagine that, no need to look for the information, rather it’s right there for them to digest.
This will then make it a lot easier for you to win their business and gain them as a customer. The thing is, that’s when the real hard work begins… keeping them as a customer and converting them into an advocate! Let’s talk about that another time.
If you think you need help with understanding your customer journey or auditing your marketing collateral to ensure you have the marketing hourglass covered, get in touch and we would be happy to discuss.