Step 8: Growing brand promoters
Brand promoters go beyond advocacy and do everything from tattooing your logo across their chest (think Harley Davidson) to dedicating hours of their free time blogging and using social media to spread their love of your brand online. The difference between an advocate (Step 7) and a brand promoter is that the promoter actively spreads the word about your business, whereas the advocate is more passive.
For brand promoters, your company has become part of their life. They know that your brand is one that they can trust and depend on. Brand promoters believe in you because your brand and your products have delivered exceptional value again and again. They have committed not only their money but also their time to you.
Preparing Your Customer Journey Road Map
For successful businesses, the customer journey doesn’t happen by accident. Smart digital marketers engineer marketing campaigns that intentionally move prospects, leads, and customers from one stage to the next. After you become aware of your ideal customer journey, the tactics (taught in the remaining chapters of this book) that should be employed become clear.
For example, if you determine that you have an issue building subscribers (Step 3 of the customer journey), you want to deploy tactics that generate email leads (covered in Chapters 3 and 11) and social media connections (discussed in Chapter 9) to move customers through this part of the customer journey.
Creating a customer journey road map that clearly delineates the eight stages that we cover in the previous section of this chapter (see Figure 1-12 for just such a road map) is a fantastic way to plan and visualize the path that an ideal customer will take from cold prospect to brand promoter. Gather the stakeholders in your company and complete a customer journey road map for at least one of your major products or services. Brainstorm which campaigns and offers (covered in Chapters 2 and 3) to use at each step of the customer journey to make people aware of your product and move them from awareness to their desired “After” state onto the path of a brand promoter.
FIGURE 1-12: Create a customer journey road map for at least one of your core offers.
https://www.digitalmarketer.com/lp/dmfd/customer-journey/.
Optimizing the Customer Journey
It’s good that you’ve documented your customer journey, but just because you’ve written it down doesn’t mean you’re done. When you understand the customer journey, and after you’ve built it for your business, it’s time to optimize it. The customer journey isn’t something you laminate upon completion. It’s not something you set and forget. If you want your business to grow — to truly be set up for success — you’ll want to revisit and hone your customer journey as your business and customers evolve.
Avoiding an Optimization Mistake
As you begin to optimize your customer journey, your instinct may be to approach it from the beginning and start with Step 1: generating awareness. But that’s not where you want to start. In fact, the awareness stage is the last place you want to start when optimizing your customer journey.
Why?
If you start from the beginning — as the saying goes — you’re pouring more water into a leaky bucket. All the work you’re doing to optimize the beginning steps of the customer journey will be for nothing if you have holes later in the journey that are causing your customers to get stuck or not convert at all.
To avoid this pitfall, you don’t want to focus your optimization efforts on the beginning of the journey. Instead, you’ll start toward the end of the journey.
When optimizing your customer journey, it’s best to start at the ascend stage (Step 6). Start here with the perspective of, “How do I increase the average customer value? How do I remove the bottlenecks that are causing the customer to get stuck?” By plugging any holes in the ascension stage, you’ll be able to maximize your profit. And with more profit, you’ll be able to invest more into your journey (and not send leads and customers into a leaky bucket).
When you’ve maximized the ascension stage, work backwards.
Optimize your excite stage (Step 5).
Then optimize your convert stage (Step 4).
Then the subscribe stage (Step 3).
Followed by the engage stage (Step 2).
And finally, ’optimize the awareness stage (Step 1).
After you’ve worked backwards and optimized all of the beginning stages of the customer journey, you then turn your attention to optimizing the final two stages — brand advocates (Step 7) and brand promoters (Step 8), looking for ways to generate more of each.
Chapter 2
Choosing the Right Marketing Campaign
