state? How has this person changed? In the same place where you took notes about her Before state, describe her After state. Is she happier? Healthier? More excited?
The shift from the Before state to the After state is what your customer is buying. This shift (or outcome) is the value that your business brings to the marketplace. Furthermore, the role of your marketing is to articulate this move from the Before state to the After state.
The understanding of this transition from Before to After is what allows you to craft what is called a Statement of Value. This statement is important because it sums up the value of your product or service. To craft your Statement of Value, simply fill in the blanks on the sentence shown in Figure 1-6.
Source: https://www.digitalmarketer.com/blog/launching-a-business/
FIGURE 1-6: Fill in the blanks on your Statement of Value.
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.
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.
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
