We all understand that in order to grow our business we need to turn contacts (i.e. target customers who don’t know us today) into customers. It’s tempting to assume that one piece of marketing or one contact will be enough to convert these contacts but in truth, it’s much more complex than that. In order to create engaging content, you need to understand the customer journey.
Your customer personas/avatars
There are a number of stages we need to follow in order to truly know our customers and therefore ‘speak their language’. Firstly, we need to understand who our target customer is.
Sounds obvious right?
You’d be surprised how few companies have identified their target customer groups (maybe 3-4 different types) and therefore can map their typical behaviours, challenges and needs of each group onto their product/service. If you do this as step one then you can start to produce sales and marketing messages that resonate with each group.
Take me for example, as an agency coach, 2 of my ideal target customer groups are freelancers and owners of small growing agencies.
Do you think they have the same needs when looking for a coach? No, they don’t. If I understand their specific and unique requirements then I can start to ‘talk their language’ when marketing to them.
And you need to do the same…
Understand your customer’s journey
Now you understand who your ideal target customer types are, you can start to map the journey they will take as they look to buy your solution and knowing that journey you can then move through your sales funnel.
What are the various stages they go through as they move from contact to warm lead to prospect to hot prospect and finally customer (and then repeat customer)?
And what can you do at each stage to ‘encourage ‘ them to move through this process? It will certainly be different messages at each stage; your communications will get more detailed and sophisticated the further they move through the funnel.
Sound intriguing?
If so and you want to find out more, download my FREE guide on developing your customer personas.