Show Notes

One essential part of your foundation is your customer journey, this is all about designing the path your ideal clients take from learning about you, through to purchase, and if you’re really good, retention and upsell.

The reality is that digital marketing is changing. And we as business owners need to get up to speed quickly and make the adjustments to our marketing now.

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Hey there. Thanks for listening and welcome to the marketing matchmaker podcast. If you're looking to grow your business, increase your revenue and scale your impact all while staying true to who you are and the people you serve. This is the show for you. I'm Jennifer Tamborski, digital marketing strategists, fractional CMO, and founder of Virtual Marketing Experts. My team and I work with six and seven figure coaches, consultants, and online entrepreneurs who are tired of playing the guru game of one size fits all marketing. They're ready to create a business and marketing strategy that actually builds relationships with their ideal clients creates massive shifts in their business and rapidly increases their revenue. As your marketing matchmaker, I'm going to help you find the perfect marketing match for you. This show will teach you how to reach your ideal client, connect with your audience, build that perfect relationship and generate more revenue. All through a process I like to call dating your ideal client. Now let's go have some fun!

Hey there. Welcome back to the marketing matchmaker. I don't know about you, but I'm pretty excited that we are hitting summer of 2021. I have to say summer of 2020 was kind of a bust for me. I don't know about you, but 2021, I am making plans to really kind of get out of the house. Go do some things, take some vacations. And I hope that you are too. By the time you listen to this episode, I will most likely be on a vacation. So I am getting these episodes recorded prior to that, so that you are able to continue to enjoy learning about marketing. Today, I wanted to dive back into the foundations of your business, because let's be honest, just like our relationships, your marketing is only as strong as your foundation.

If you listened to the dating your ideal client episodes, and if you haven't, I would suggest going back and giving them a listen. You'll remember that, step one is really about creating a strong marketing strategy in the introduction phase. And you will hear me talk about your marketing foundations over and over again in the coming episodes, because quite frankly, they're really what leads to your business success.

Once you have a solid marketing foundation, you're really able to grow and scale your business into well, any direction you want. Honestly, today, I wanted to focus on one of the essential parts of your foundation, and that is your customer. This is all about designing the path your ideal client will take from learning about who you are, through to purchase. If you do it right, into the keeping the romance alive phase, which is all about customer retention and upselling them.

The reality is, is that digital marketing is changing. And we as business owners need to get up to speed quickly and make adjustments to our marketing right now. Several episodes ago, we talked about the new Apple iOS update and the effects that it has created in the paid ad industry has really been a ripple effect throughout all digital marketing. What it really showed us, is that a lot of us got too complacent with our marketing and we were relying way too heavily on social media. It's time to really take a look at our foundation and reassess what is working and what isn't. And that's what this episode is designed to do. One of the most important things to have in your business is a fully built out customer journey. A customer journey, or a sales funnel, or customer client acquisition map, or a marketing funnel, or a marketing pipeline or sales process or sales pipeline.

Any term you use really boils down to the same process. A customer journey is the sum of all the interactions a customer goes through in relation to your brand. It's really from the moment the customer first hears about your brand to the actual purchase, and keeping that romance alive, to the post purchase process. Your customer journey should include all aspects of interactions with your ideal customers, which means things like email, and social media, and text messaging, and content marketing. That really, if you're not creating multiple touch points of valuable content for your audience, you're going to fall behind. There are three main stages to your customer journey. Each stage can then be broken down into smaller pieces of how you're going to interact with your audience in that stage. And it's really important to kind of look at it as an overall process and then break it down into the smaller pieces.

So we're going to start with that big overlook. And we start with the top of the, funnel. So whether you call it a customer journey or a sales funnel, it's all of the same thing, but you'll often hear them call it. The top of the funnel.

And that's the whole point of the customer journey is to take them from an awareness of a problem through to the solution that you provide. The question that they're most likely going to ask about are things that may not name the problem itself yet. It's more about the symptoms. For instance, if you're a weight loss coach or a health coach, they may be talking about their weight, or they may be talking about their food, or they may be having body issues. Those are symptoms of the actual problem. They're trying to verbalize their problem and are looking for a trusted source of information and education.

So at the top of the funnel, your prospects want to feel educated and confident to be able to talk about their questions when the time comes. From a marketing perspective, they want content that will guide them through the topic that matters to them; including blog, posts, videos, maybe quizzes.

This part of the funnel is really all about building that brand awareness. Making them aware that they have a problem and that you could potentially have a solution. That leads us to the middle of the funnel. And this my friends, is where your audience is aware of the problem and is really researching for that solution. Generally, they may be aware that you exist, and are a potential solution to their problem. This is where we start to build that know, like, and trust, or as I like to call it the dating face. In this stage, you're no longer dealing with nameless, faceless contacts, quite frankly, hopefully you've moved them onto your email list with some kind of opt in, in the top of the funnel. They now have a name and definition for their problem. And they're looking at all of the available solutions, such as products, services that you may provide questions in the middle of the funnel are no longer generic.

Instead of asking "why" questions, your audience is really diving into a range of opportunities to remedy their problem. At the middle of the funnel, your audience is diving deeper into specifics of that problem. They understand what's bothering them, maybe even in great detail, and they want to know how they can fix it. And more honestly, how you might be able to help them fix it. At this point, they may not necessarily be looking for a solution provider, instead they are looking at the different types of solutions available to them. For instance, that health coach, a person who's looking for some way to help with their health. Maybe they're looking to lose weight or exercise or whatever. Right now at the middle of the funnel, they're really deciding whether or not they want to hire a coach to help them get to their goals, or if they want to continue to DIY it. At the content in this section, really needs to serve them in a way that shows them that your solution is much better than them trying to do it on their own things.

In the middle of the funnel can include things like webinars or five day challenges or specific trainings, or quite honestly podcasts, and sometimes videos on YouTube. It's all about giving them the opportunity to understand that you have the solution to their problem. And it may be about giving them a small win, something that they can change or edit, that helps them with their problem and makes them decide to come back to you to really dive into all of those pieces.

The last stage of the funnel is what they call the bottom of the funnel. Pretty obvious, right? This is where we all want to drive our ideal clients to be. It's them making that commitment to solving their problem and buying your product service or solution. They know in this part of the funnel, they know that they have a problem and they know that you have, you are a potential solution to that problem.

Now we get to help them make the decision to purchase that solution from us. This is where that whole unique selling proposition comes in. It's about educating your audience about why they should buy from you, how you are different, how your product service or solution is different from all of your competitions. What distinguishes you? The content in this area can really range from things like frequently asked questions all the way through to case studies.

It's really about showing your ideal client, that you have the solution to their problem, that you get results for your audience, and that you're different from every other provider out there. So at first glance, realistically, that customer journey is kind of pretty simple. It's you offering something that people want to buy. All of the different platforms out there from social media, to email, to texting. That's how the customer journey becomes complex.

It really requires you to map out those different touch points. Nowadays, it generally takes about eight to 12 touches before someone is ready to buy from you. What does that mean? It means that they need to see you and interact with you 8 to 12 times before they're ready to buy. That is an industry average across the board of all sales and your business. Your audience may have a different number. That's something that you learn along the way.

How many times do you need to interact with your audience before they're ready to buy? However, if we go back to the average of 8 to 12 touches, it really gives you an idea of why you need to map out those touch points. You need to know what it is they need to hear at every phase of their journey to getting to purchase. Customers can really come into contact with your company in a multitude of ways. Everything from referrals to marketing, to search engines, to social media, to paid traffic.

And all of those points may have a different messaging. And in order to create a really amazing customer experience, which I hope is what everyone is looking for. It means that you will need to map out every touch point or experience along the way.

One of the main reasons that we map out all of this is so that we can analyze the data later. We can get a lot of information from how our customers are, how our ideal clients interact with us, which then allows us to understand what it is our audience needs so that we can figure out what's working in our business. And what's not. It really allows us to identify those roadblocks and improve our customer experience, which is what I think everybody is looking for. Because an excellent customer experience leads to referrals or repeat customers.

We want to make sure that the journey from introduction through commitment, and into keeping the romance alive into the actual experience in transformation that they're going to receive, is amazing. We can do that by mapping it out ahead of time. It will save a lot of time and headache. And honestly, it will also allow us to look at maybe there's something that's not working. I've said it over and over again. Marketing is both an art and a science. And if we use the data in a scientific method formation, we collect information and we see what's working, that allows us to make adjustments to our marketing, which then allows us to make these experiences for our audience and for our ideal clients that much better.

Thank You for listening to the Marketing Matchmaker podcast. If you enjoyed this episode, I would love to hear your feedback. Please head over to iTunes and leave a review so we can hear from you. And if you are a coach, consultant, or online course creator who are looking to grow your business, increase your income, and scale your impact connect with me at yourmarketingmatchmaker.com. I look forward to hearing from you.