Digital Marketing For Dummies. Ryan Deiss

state. By the end, you will have taken your customer on a journey to that customer’s ideal After state.

Knowing the Stages of the Customer Journey

      If your business has acquired even a single customer, some kind of customer journey is in place. Perhaps this customer journey was not created intentionally, but it does exist. Or perhaps you call it something else in your organization, such as a “marketing (or sales) pipeline.”

      Regardless of what you call it, becoming intentional about the movement of cold prospects, leads, and existing customers through the stages of this journey is the purpose of your marketing. When you’ve properly charted your ideal customer journey, you quickly find the bottlenecks that are restricting the flow of prospect to lead, lead to customer, and customer to raving fan.

We can’t overstate the importance of sequence in marketing, and particularly in digital marketing. Moving cold prospects from one stage of the customer journey to the next must be done seamlessly and subtly. You’re not likely to convert a complete stranger into a brand advocate overnight. But you can gradually move the prospect from one stage of the relationship to the next. To move people through the stages of the customer journey, go through the following eight steps. A worksheet that visualizes the steps of the customer journey is provided in the final section of this chapter (Figure 1-12).

      Step 1: Generating awareness

      Every repeat customer and raving fan of your business was, at one time, a complete stranger to your company. She had no idea what problem you solve, what products you sell, or what your brand stands for. The first step on her journey from cold prospect to raving fan is awareness. We go into more detail about tactics later in this book, but if awareness is your issue, you should employ the following digital marketing tactics:

       Advertising: Advertising, both online and offline, is a reliable and effective method of raising awareness.

       Social media marketing: Billions of people access social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn every day. Social media marketing is an inexpensive method of raising awareness.

       Search marketing: Billions of web searches on sites such as Google and Bing are processed every day. Basic search marketing techniques direct some of that traffic to your website.

Figure 1-7 shows an awareness campaign from TransferWise, a company that was created by the same people who built Skype. TransferWise is a relatively new company in the money transfer business, and it uses the Facebook advertising platform to raise awareness of the service. Notice how the language used in this ad focuses on teaching what TransferWise is and how you benefit from using the service.

      Source: https://www.digitalmarketer.com/blog/launching-a-business/

FIGURE 1-7: A Facebook advertisement focused on the goal of awareness.

      Step 2: Driving engagement

      It’s not enough to simply make a cold prospect aware of your business, products, and brand. You must engineer your marketing to capture the attention of your prospect and engage him. For a digital marketer, that engagement almost always takes the form of valuable content made freely available in the form of

       Blog posts

       Podcasts

       Online videos

For example, the grocery store Whole Foods prides itself in selling fresh, organic foods from its hundreds of brick-and-mortar locations. The supermarket chain’s online strategy includes its Whole Story blog, which engages its ideal customer with content relevant to the products the company sells. Blog articles with titles such as “9 Refreshing Summer Drinks You Need to Try Right Now” (see Figure 1-8) show existing and prospective customers how to use the products sold at Whole Foods.

      Source: https://www.wholefoodsmarket.com/blog/9-refreshing-summer-drinks-you-need-try-right-now

      FIGURE 1-8: An engaging blog post from the Whole Foods blog.

      

A prospect, lead, or customer may spend anywhere from a few minutes to a few years at any one of the stages in this customer journey. For example, a prospect might become aware of your blog and engage with it for a year or more before moving to the next phase of the journey. Others will sprint through multiple stages of the journey in the space of a few minutes. A healthy business has groups of people at all stages of the journey at all times.

      Step 3: Building subscribers

      The next step in the customer journey is to graduate a prospect from the “merely aware and engaged” stage into the stage of being a subscriber or lead. A subscriber is anyone who has given you permission to have a conversation with him. Savvy digital marketers create lists of subscribers by building social media connections on sites such as Facebook and Twitter, attracting podcast subscribers on services such as iTunes and Stitcher, or generating subscribers from webinar registrations.

      Offline companies might build subscription online by offering aware and engaged prospects the ability to receive physical mail or request a consultative sales call or product demo.

      But the Holy Grail of lead generation in the digital marketing realm is email subscription. Email is, by far, the cheapest and highest-converting method of moving a prospect through the rest of the stages of this customer journey. We tell you more about email marketing in Chapter 11, but for now, take a look at an example of an effective email marketing campaign from one of the world’s largest furniture retailers, IKEA.

IKEA builds social media subscribers on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and more, but acquiring email subscribers is clearly the focal point of IKEA’s digital marketing efforts. Upon visiting the IKEA website, you’re asked in multiple locations to join IKEA’s email list. Figure 1-9 shows an email opt-in form from the IKEA website.

      Source: https://www.ikea.com/us/en/

FIGURE 1-9: An email subscription offer from furniture retailer IKEA.

      Step 4: Increasing conversions

      At this stage, the goal is to elevate the commitment level of the prospect by asking him or