Imagine this: You’ve leased the perfect retail location, set up attractive social media profiles, and built a beautiful website. You open your doors confident that customers will come flooding in, ready to purchase your goods and services. Days pass with little traffic or calls.
Unfortunately, for many small business owners, the above scenario is a reality when opening a new business. In today’s incredibly competitive world, offering wonderful products and services is not enough. Business owners must focus on client acquisition before opening their doors.
Today we will talk about the Customer Journey and the importance of business owners and managers understanding this journey and helping their customers succeed in winning their business.
Understanding What’s Wrong in the Customer Journey
First, you must identify whether you have no customers because you have no leads or if you have no customers but leads that are not converting.
Proper monitoring and reporting within your business will help determine this. Examples of metrics to look at include: Website contact form entries, emails and phone call inquiries, social media engagement, and Google Analytics.
At YellowFin Digital, we can help you analyze this data and develop a plan to attract more traffic and convert them into paying customers! McKinsey published an apt cycle of a customer decision journey in an article, “The new battleground for marketing-led growth.”
If we can figure that out and understand the customers at every point in this journey, then we can understand the underlying issue.
Let’s analyze these four steps one by one.
1. Initial Consideration
Initially, a person looks for different businesses offering what they want. Most often, the customer journey starts online. It can be through a simple Google search, product recommendations from any websites, or your online advertisements. So, if you want a substantial number of customers, then your business needs to be one of the brands that the prospects consider.
We can help you with that through the following:
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO): Optimizing the content, website structure, media, and technical details that improve your search engine ranking for the targeted keywords.
- Digital Marketing: Reach out to your ideal customer base through online marketing strategies. So the next time they want to buy something similar to what you offer, they will remember your brand.
- PPC Management Service: We craft attractive messages with keywords for Facebook Ads, Google Ads, Bing Ads, and other similar online ads that position your business in front of those interested.
These are the main ways you can enter the list of businesses a person considers.
Know more about Top 2020 Digital Marketing Tips & Prediction
2. Enter and Exit Points of Brands (i.e.) Shortlisting
As a person weighs the pros and cons and analyzes which brand to go with, several brands are eliminated. Only a handful of brands enter the consideration stage, and finally, only one gets chosen.
This is where you need to nail your business. The prospects will now dig deep into your business and the products. They may visit your website or social media page to get an idea of your business. They may ask around their circle or take your product or service at face value. They may compare what you offer with your competition.
So, what can you do to stand out from the rest and give the users what they want?
This is where product analysis and competition analysis come in. Position your business so that it shows the value it can add to your ideal customer and as a solution to a customer problem. Make it more about the customers rather than about your brand.
If you need help with that, we have copywriting and marketing experts who can help you craft appropriate messages that nudge the prospect to the next step.
The prospect may even contact you to get more information before making this decision. If your customer support isn’t up to the mark or can’t provide sufficient information and convince the prospect, then that’s a big red flag you need to address.
3. Moment of Purchase and Trigger-
This is the most anticipated time when the prospect chooses your brand!
As we are almost close to the finish line, there shouldn’t be anything discouraging the prospect of making a purchase. This is where the ‘Trigger’ comes in; it makes the prospect reconsider their decision and takes them back to the first step, Initial Consideration.
These triggers can be anything from website design to customer service. Here are a few things that can trigger your prospect into leaving:
- Your website design isn’t user-friendly for the prospects to use. This could lead to frustration and, eventually, make the prospect leave.
- Your prospect cannot find the information they want on your website.
- Your prospect has added the items to the cart. But as they are inching close to paying for the item, there can be any issue with the shopping cart or payment gateways.
- Your prospect may venture out of your website and check out reviews on third-party websites. You may lose out if they come across many damaging reviews about your brand.
You don’t want any of these things to happen! This is where the prospect is just a step away from becoming a customer, and any of these things could lose your valuable revenue.
We recommend businesses regularly conduct a complete website audit to be ahead of these issues and fix them. If you haven’t yet conducted an audit, it’s vital to do it now.
Our experts will audit your website from top to bottom, including the technical details. We have website redesign experts and web developers who can help redesign your website and make it completely user-friendly. We ensure that there is no reason for a prospect to leave the website once they have decided to purchase.
We also offer Online Reputation Management (ORM) services that help identify and stop the negative review that could affect the credibility of your business.
4. Loyalty
When everything happens smoothly, and the prospect turns into a customer, we use email marketing, social media marketing, and other similar communication platforms to keep your customers interested. Converting your one-time customers into loyal ones will ensure you never run out of customers.
When you clearly understand the customer journey, you can start figuring out why your business is left with no customers. There are a lot of things you can do to rectify the mistakes at each step, and you can soon create a regular stream of customers.
