The first step
A Chinese proverb reminds us that even a thousand mile journey begins with a single step. So too does a thousand dollar purchase. Because marketing isn’t free, you need to spread your message only to people who may actually purchase from you, focusing on the most likely among them first. Unfortunately, those people aren’t walking around with signs over their heads, so picking them out from the crowd requires a little bit of marketing knowledge an a bunch of customer empathy. When you do the work, you will be able to drive higher conversions at lower acquisition costs, giving you more happy customers and a happier business.
The marketing funnel
We marketers like to obsess over the marketing funnel, which is a way to break down your customer journey into discrete steps. The funnel can be summarized in four stages--awareness, consideration, conversion and retention--with customers progressing from one stage to the next in their journeys even if they complete multiple stages in a single interaction. While it is not expected that every customer progress from a given stage to the next, understanding which customers drop out and why, is a key part of building and refining a strong marketing plan.
Know thy customer
Even if you have a wonderful product, you still need to get someone to buy it. In order to do that, you must communicate the value your product will bring to that customer and facilitate their purchase. And there are many different reasons that single customer may buy. When you sell to many different people with many different purchase reasons, you need to group your customers into segments. Customer segmentation is
Let’s say your wonderful product is hand-crafted, artisan, seaweed bath bars—who should you sell to? To answer this question, we need to understand the characteristic demographics of your customer base, which include things like age, gender, location and income. We also need to understand your customers’ psychographics as well, which include things like their values, attitudes, interests, and goals. Then we put those characteristics together in ways that represent real people, which is where customer personas come in. For example, we may be able to define three key personas from the data. Persona 1 can be Kim, who is a middle-aged mother who likes to spoil herself with a soothing bath after a long week. Persona two can be Rita, who is an environmentally conscious professional who wants to know she’s protecting the environment while protecting her skin. And persona three can be James, who doesn’t know what to get his wife for Valentine’s day but knows it needs to put a smile on her face.
Planning the journey
Each persona may have its own customer journey, and you should focus on serving the highest priority customer segment first. Priority depends on the following characteristics of the customer segment: size, lifetime value, and acquisition costs. For each persona, start by constructing the journey from the destination, which we recommend for a few reasons. First, you want to build the most efficient journey possible. If Kim is an impulsive buyer, you may only need to place a single direct response ad in front of her before she makes a purchase. Second, digital marketing has made it easier than ever to track ROI and direct response campaigns tend to have higher ROIs than other types. And lastly, constructing your journey from square one invites you to challenge your assumptions. Sure, Kim may purchase Dove bath soap by seeing an ad on TV and then going to the grocery store, but that may not be the best journey for customers of your seaweed bars. Use your demographic and psychographic knowledge to identify where your persona is likely to buy, consider, and hear about your product, and then build a plan that places your advertisements in those places. Use the tracking tools available on leading marketing platforms to link each stage of the journey, so you can be intelligent with your targeting and avoid spending awareness advertising money on customers who are already further down the funnel.
The journey continues
Even after you’ve mapped out compelling customer journeys for your personas, it’s important to remember that marketing itself is a journey, so your customer journeys may change. When your sales volumes are low, you may be able to convert adequate customers who fit the James persona through search ads run on prior to holidays like Valentine’s Day. However, when you’ve exhausted the pool of James buyers who are actively searching for gifts, you will have to begin reaching them earlier and consider adding new legs to their journey. Similarly, you may find that the journey you mapped out doesn’t align with what your customers need, even if it’s driven by cultural shifts, technological advancements, or other external factors. Irregardless, if you plan with empathy and listen to your marketing data, you will be able to adapt and the journey will continue.
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