Internet Marketing Digital_marketing_for_dummies | Page 30

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.
We can’t overstate the importance of sequence in marketing, and particularly in
digital marketing. Moving cold prospects from one stage of the customer journey to
the next must be done seamlessly and subtly. You’re not likely to convert a complete
stranger into a brand advocate overnight. But you can gradually move the prospect
from one stage of the relationship to the next. To move people through the stages of
the customer journey, go through the following eight steps. A worksheet, Figure 1-12,
that visualizes the steps of the customer journey is provided in the final section of this
chapter.
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