Mapping out the customer journey that delivers people to your contact form or checkout page is critical for your company’s success. If you can identify the most common paths that turn prospects into leads and leads into customers and clients, then you can better understand how to help people at every stage of their own personal journey.
What Is the “Customer Journey?”
The customer journey is someone’s path to purchase. How did they get from wherever they were to writing up a PO, signing a contract, or clicking a “Buy Now!” button? Understand that, and you’ll be able to direct them at every important fork in the road.
If you go online you’ll see that the customer journey can be divided into 3, 5, 9, or even more steps! This isn’t the Empire State Building, people, so let’s keep things simple! I prefer the three-step approach:
- Awareness – I know I have a problem (or an opportunity)
- Consideration – What are the possible solutions to my problem or opportunities I can take advantage of?
- Decision – Which one is best for me?
Now, not every customer starts at Awareness. Due to previous experience, someone might jump right to Consideration or even Decision. But at each step they need to gather the right information to move forward confidently.
So what does this look like?
Whenever I’m getting into something new, I take notice of my own journey through these three steps. Several years ago I wanted to take a month-long roadtrip with my daughters. I like camping, but they don’t. But I also knew that 30 hotel stays was probably out of my budget.
Content Marketing and the Customer Journey
Creating content is hard. Creating great content is much, much harder. So why is this so important?
If you’ve created helpful “roadside attractions” and “information booths” to help your customers along their journey, your brand gets associated with positive feelings. A good blog post can’t guarantee you sales, but it puts you in a better position to win that business.
There are branding opportunities if they’re reading your blog post at your website, or even watching your video at YouTube or reading a post on social media.
If they’re on your website or on certain social media platforms, you can even entice them to join your email newsletter to help them along their journey.
Even if that’s not an option, or they choose not to subscribe, you can use retargeting to continue to stay in front of them throughout the process.
While content marketing can’t guarantee the sale, it gives you plenty of opportunities to build a relationship.
Content Marketing for Awareness
As you start to create content for customers who have just become aware of a problem or an opportunity, you need to think about where they are and what steps they may take.
It’s probable that you have more than one product or service to sell. So, it’s likely that you’ll need to recreate more than one customer path. Even the same product may have different paths that lead to it, so you’ll want to get creative and come up with as many plausible paths as possible.
B2C (business to consumer) Example: You’re a landscaper offering lawn care. What are some of the pain points your customers need to become aware of to start them on their journey? What are some of the questions they might put into Google?
- How do I get rid of weeds?
- How do I get rid of crabgrass?
- How do I improve my curb appeal?
Content Marketing for Consideration
Once people are aware of their problem (or opportunity), they’re going to start to look for ways to solve (or take advantage) of their current situation.
Looking at our examples above, we can start to guess at the type of questions people are asking and the information they’d be looking for to help them move forward.
B2C Example: Let’s stick with our prospect’s weed problem. Likely, they’re wondering if they can take care of this themselves or if this is a job for a professional. They may also be wondering what their options are for getting rid of weeds.
A roundup (no pun intended) of different weed treatments would work well here. Natural solutions that people have on hand, products available at garden centers, fertilizer and other treatments, the list goes on.
You can also include the pros and cons of doing it yourself vs. hiring a professional.
B2B Example: Let’s focus on sellers, and specifically their concerns around what their business may be worth.
If they’re already aware that they need to determine the value of their company to find out what they should be asking, they may have already seen your (or someone else’s) post on the different methods for valuation.
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