Chapter 1

Understanding the Customer Journey

IN THIS CHAPTER

Getting clear on your ideal customer

Understanding the value you bring to the marketplace

Learning to take a prospect from awareness to raving fan

Think about the last important purchase you made. Perhaps you bought a car, hired a babysitter, or switched coffee suppliers at your office. Chances are, you consulted the Internet to read reviews, get recommendations from friends and family on social sites like Facebook, and boned up on the features, options, and price of the product or service before you made your choice. Today, purchases and purchasing decisions are increasingly made online. Therefore, regardless of what you sell, an online presence is necessary to capitalize on this trend.

This new digital landscape is impacting organizations in more than just the lead and sales generation departments, though. Savvy companies use the Internet to drive awareness and interest in what they offer, but also to convert casual buyers into brand advocates who buy more and encourage members of their network to do the same.

In many ways, nothing in marketing has changed. Marketing is still about developing a mutually beneficial relationship with prospects, leads, and customers. We call the development of this relationship the customer journey. In this chapter, you learn to create a customer journey for your organization and the role digital marketing plays in that journey. The rest of this book helps you to create and execute offers and marketing campaigns that intentionally move customers through the stages of this customer journey.

The role of your digital marketing is to assist in moving a prospect, lead, or customer from one stage of the customer journey to the next.

Creating a Customer Avatar

Because the role of your marketing is to move people through a series of stages from cold prospects to rabid fans and promoters, you must first attain clarity on the characteristics of your ideal customers. You want to get clear on their goals, the challenges they face meeting those goals, and where they spend time consuming information and entertainment. Creating a customer avatar will give you this clarity. Other terms for customer avatar are buyer persona, marketing persona, and target audience, but customer avatar is the term we use throughout this book.

A customer avatar is the fictional, generalized representation of your ideal customer. Realistically, unless your product or service fits within a narrow niche, you will have multiple customer avatars for each campaign. People are so much more than their age, gender, ethnicity, religious background, profession, and so on. People don't fit neatly into boxes, which is why broad, generic marketing campaigns generally don't convert well; they don't resonate with your audience. It is absolutely crucial that you understand and make your customer avatar as specific as possible so that you can craft personalized content, offers, and marketing campaigns that interest members of your audience or solve their problems. In fact, the exercise of creating a customer avatar impacts virtually every aspect of your marketing, including:

• Content marketing: What blog posts, videos, podcasts, and so on should you create to attract and convert your avatar?
• Search marketing: What solutions is your avatar searching for on search engines like Google, YouTube (yes, YouTube is a search engine), and Bing?
• Social media marketing: What social media sites is your avatar spending time on? What topics does your avatar like to discuss?
• Email marketing: Which avatar should receive a specific email marketing campaign?
• Paid traffic: Which ad platforms should you buy traffic from and how will you target your avatar?
• Product creation: What problems is your avatar trying to solve?
• Copywriting: How should you describe offers in your email marketing, ads, and sales letters in a way that compels your avatar to buy?

Any part of the marketing and sales process that touches the customer (which is pretty much everything) improves when you get clear on your customer avatar. After all, you're aiming toward a real person - one who buys your products and services. It pays to get clear on the characteristics of that person so that you can find and present him or her with a message that moves this person to action.

What to include in your customer avatar

The customer avatar possesses five major components:

• Goals and values: Determine what the avatar is trying to achieve. What values does he or she hold dear?
• Sources of information: Figure out what books, magazines, blogs, news stations, and other resources the avatar references for information.
• Demographics: Establish the age, gender, marital status, ethnicity, income, employment status, nationality, and political preference of the avatar.
• Challenges and pain points: What is holding the avatar back from achieving his or her goals?
• Objections: Why would the avatar choose not to buy your product or service?

In some cases, you need to survey or have conversations with existing customers to accurately flesh out your customer avatar. In other cases, you may already be intimately familiar with the characteristics of your ideal customer. In any case, move forward. Don't wait for surveys or interviews to be conducted to create your first draft of an avatar. Instead, go ahead and make assumptions despite having no data or feedback, and put completing your research on your short list of to-do's. In the meantime, you can begin benefiting from the avatar you've created.

Giving a customer avatar an actual name assists in bringing this fictional character to life. In addition, your team members have a way to refer to each avatar among themselves.

Using the five elements described in this section, we created a worksheet that we complete each time we create a new customer avatar. The worksheet helps you hone in on the ideal customer and pair him or her with the right message. In the following sections, we go into more detail about this worksheet so that you can use it in your own business.

Introducing Agency Eric: A customer avatar example

In April 2015, DigitalMarketer introduced a new offer. We began selling a new type of digital marketing training product: Certification Classes. These new trainings include exams, certificates, and badges, and they appeal to a new ideal customer. Of course, having a new ideal customer means that a new customer avatar must be built.

As a result, we defined four distinct buyer personas who would be interested in certifications and training from our company:

• The marketing freelancer: Wants to distinguish herself from the other freelancers she is competing with in the marketplace.
• The marketing agency owner: Wants to add to the services he can offer his clients and to sharpen the marketing skills of his employees.
• The employee: Wants to distinguish himself at his place of employment or to secure a new job or promotion within his existing job.
• The business owner: Wants to sharpen her own marketing skills and the skills of her internal marketing team members.

From the buyer personas, four new customer avatars were born. We call one of these new avatars, pictured in Figure 1-1, Agency Eric.

FIGURE 1-1: Agency Eric is a customer avatar who purchases the certification product from DigitalMarketer.

The next section describes the approach to filling out each section of the customer avatar worksheet so that you can define your customer avatars.

Getting clear on goals and values

The customer avatar creation process begins with identifying the goals and values of one of your ideal customers. Make note of the goals and values that are relevant to the products and services you offer.

Being aware of your customer avatar's goals and values drives decisions that you make about

• Product creation: What products or services can you develop to assist the avatar in meeting his or her goals?
• Advertising: How can you describe these offers in your ads and sales copy?
• Content marketing: What blog posts, podcasts, newsletters, and other content vehicles might your avatar respond to?
• Email marketing: How can you tailor your email subject lines and body copy to be consistent with the avatar's goals?

At DigitalMarketer, our Agency Eric avatar owns a digital marketing agency and manages a team of marketers providing services to clients. One of Agency Eric's goals (shown in Figure 1-2) is to increase the capabilities of his team. Agency Eric knows that a more capable team will result in satisfied customers.

FIGURE 1-2: Understanding the goals and values of your avatar is important.

Because Agency Eric has this goal, he is likely to open and respond to an email that promotes our company's Content Marketing Certification with the following subject line:

Need Content Marketing Training?

Finding sources of information and entertainment

This section of the customer avatar worksheet is critical to...