Market to Every Step of a Customer's Journey
Many people I meet as a marketer ask me how quickly their marketing will lead to sales and ultimately, revenue. I reply by asking them what their time to sale is and what their level of awareness is within their target markets? I also like to understand how many happy customers or clients they have created over time. Occasionally I get some puzzled looks. Whenever I do, I offer this simple Marketing lesson.
Have you ever heard of the principle that one satisfied customer can bring you up to 10 more customers in a shorter amount of time than you can build them all by yourself? Well, let me show you why:
There is five stages to building a customer from no-awareness to full blown evangelist. Get it right and you'll only have to go through the initial campaigns once or twice to build the initial base of satisfied customers extolling your virtues.
This is the foundation I build many marketing campaigns on, ensuring I have strategies to take a potential customer on the journey through each stage.
Awareness: You must make a customer aware of your product or service category, your business and its capability. At this point of the process, lets face it, many potential targets are largely disinterested or indifferent as they can't see a need for your product or service in their life much of the time. This step is a hard, often cold part of the sales process, full of apathy and rejection.
Interest: Something happens in a potential target's life or business for them to move from basic awareness phase and raise their interest in your offering. A target cannot get to interest if you haven't raised awareness of your brand and offering or capability with them — except through step five: satisfaction. This is the point of a process where we would qualify a target as a warm lead and nurture them carefully to build their interest into hungry desire.
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