Time to learn. Get ready to start.
Define customer journey.
Customer journey is a story about people from your tribe deciding to buy your product, i.e., how people engage with your marketing.
We’ll learn how to plot a course for your customer journey.
In plotting the best course ever, you have the opportunity to blow them away.
Case Study – Nourishing Essentials
Nourishing Essentials sells superfoods—cacao nibs, goji berries, etc. The company sells mostly online, but they’ve started opening brick-and-mortar stores.
Mercury H. owns and does the bulk of design work for Nourishing Essentials.
As many one-man bands, His next challenge is figuring out the optimum time to put marketing energy toward Instagram. Plotting a customer journey will arm Mercury.
Mercury’s goal is expanding his tribe, and he has heard everyone say that Instagram is the space to nurture a tribe. Mercury has already done some work figuring out his values. He’s defined his tribal avatar as people who want to eat healthier but specifically want to avoid the “health food stigmas.”
But wait...it starts with knowing how to find The Tribe.
So here’s a description of that tribe:
For the purposes of today's quick lesson: it's people who buy superfoods, obviously. (Or is it?)
Why plot the customer journey?
With a firm grip of his customer journey, Mercury H. has a better idea where to put his marketing energies this season.
Three stages of the customer journey. (This is common knowledge about it, in its most simple form):
The journey your customers take is the story of the adventure from tribe member to customer.
It’s got three, flexible stages:
Awareness: Your first brush with them, when you get to say hello and start attracting attention to your story.
Consideration: This is the part when people get more curious about your story.
Conversion: The end of the story. Your new people decide to buy.
Customer Journey Funnel
Marketing is funnel-shaped. It catches a lot of people at the top, but a lot of them fall out of the story before you make sales. That’s just human nature. The best marketing has a narrower margin between who you catch at the top and who buys by the end.
Customer journeys are that story. Not everyone who sees your marketing will get to the end of the story. That’s okay, though. We take that data into consideration when designing effective marketing.
Marketing messages by stage of the customer journey
You tell your story in different ways at different stages of contact with potential customers. At some point--when done well-- the conversation becomes a two-way street, as all good conversations go. In plotting the customer journey...Mercury H. approached me, and together we discover that The Tribe is not just "superfood buyers".
The Tribe, in this case, is actually a "Superfood Society" --- a somewhat cerebral play on the calibre of buyers who invest in superfoods...
As the conversation deepens, The Tribe is actually a Not-so-Secret Superfood Society-- these are buyers who feel connected to others like them: ones who volunteer themselves in more ways than betraying themselves as "discount chasers". Plotting the Customer Journey is essential in uncovering the ways by which leads, customers and brand advocates discover and then (hopefully one day) fall in love with your brand. Ok. Let's step away from the metaphorical / common knowledge examples by Mercury H. and "Nourishing Essentials".
A bit of detail now, using totally true case study examples from my past work:
Awareness
Be brief and striking. These are ads, social posts, and other short bites of your company culture. This is an example of making a tribe (the aforementioned Not-So-Secret Superfood Society) aware of the ease at which we can develop good habits regardless of our backgrounds. These two videos were seen by different tribe members. As a mini-series, it's a very visual and emotionally engaging way to stay: "Hey! We care and it IS easy to nurture ourselves!"
(This video series was a part of the funnel strategy)
Consideration
You go into more specifics next. The idea is that your tribe has hit the “Learn More” button on your ads. Talk here about addressing the needs in your tribe. For this, eBooks and Newsletters do still work, don't let anyone tell you otherwise. A lead doesn't event NEED to read the eBook to be affected by the conversion rule...the fact that you gifted them something can often make the different between "NO!" and "...Maybe..." This is an example of how it was considered by us that first-time trials take a bit more of a push...and cross-selling another product set created an easy way for existent buyers of a subsidiary product (natural herbal drops) to buy superfoods!
(Go ahead. Fill it out just for fun!)
Conversion
The last stage is the “act now” stage. Make it easy for people to give you their money. Don’t explain more. Remove hurdles.
This goes without saying and with tonnes of examples, from BOGO (Buy One Get One) and Today Only Sales, to Free Shipping...
If they like what you do in the first two realms: Awareness and Consideration...chances are they will be blown away enough to say YES today.
This is truly where the statement "Numbers don't lie" come true to form. In correctly mapping customer journey, conversion comes easy, right? Tell me in the comments below...
Applied Case Study – Nourishing Essentials
Here’s A Summary of how Mercury can do it...continually, not just predicated on a single customer journey map and its creative assets.
Awareness
Mercury does a series of posts showing people not usually associated with health food eating health food. Goths with granola. Punk rockers with healthy smoothies. Construction workers with kale salad. It’d be groovy.
Consideration
Here, Mercury could post some videos of goths talking about how they’ve been vegetarian for years, or punk rockers talking about how it’s nice to walk into a Nourishing Essentials shop without feeling out-of-place. Mercury could also provide pricing for his various products.
Conversion
With a “Buy Now” button, Nourishing Essentials offers seasonal discounts for anyone who’ll tag Nourishing Essentials in their workout progress posts.
But here's a spanner in the works:
Is it actually the only way to get people to buy? Discounts? Classic Fear of Loss and Buy Now (or else)?
Final Thoughts
Customer journey refers to the story of your tribe deciding to buy your product.
Although a flexible method of plotting, a good place to start is with these three steps: Awareness, Consideration, and Conversion.
A firm grasp of the plot of your customer journey is a powerful tool in building your marketing strategy.
Kristina and Desiree have crafted a Branding Bootcamp that includes a Customer Journey lesson in its 3-Workshop Offering. Subscribe for the full Info. We focus on execution.
