Unblocking Your Customer Journey to Superfandom

Believe it or not, many companies thrive without a repeatable operating framework. However, you can’t sustain growth when you don’t know what causes it. Your business can repeat wins when you optimize your customer journey.

Let’s face it. Your buyers desire a consistent and delightful customer experience with your brand. Randomness is a recipe for customer churn. Plus, it is difficult and expensive to optimize mass variations at scale.

In a nutshell, please don’t do it.

Instead, map out your buyer journey from the zero moment of truth to Superfandom.

What Is the Customer Journey?

Before you can optimize your customer journey, we need to define what it is. Authentic Customer Journeys serve the buyer with value to improve their situation. The more value you provide, the more conversions you can make.

As you segment your market, you’ll be able to create richer experiences for each audience. For example, B2B customers purchase differently from B2C buyers. Public Sector organizations have a different journey from privately held companies. Tune your customer journey to the audience segments to create more value.

What’s the Difference Between a Sales Funnel and the Customer Journey?

Sales funnels, by definition, are focused on selling. In contrast to sales funnels, the customer journey provides value in stages to enable buyers to achieve their goals. Funnels help the seller achieve her goals. Customer journeys help buyers achieve their goals.

Another important distinction is that funnels are terminal. Once the buyer completes the conversion, the funnel ends. Conversely, a customer journey is a loop that repeats over time. The goal of the customer journey is to create a value-based virtuous cycle map to the buyer’s needs.   

The Journey Starts with Your Content Platform

You have to be known by your market to get customers. The best way to sustain growth over time is to build your content experience platform. Grow your audience with helpful, people-first content.

As buyers search for information to solve their problems, your content platform will be the magnet to attract your ideal clients. Your content strategy needs to map your high-value content to each leg of the buying journey. 

Conduct a content audit to identify the gaps and opportunities to serve your audience with helpful information. Be generous. Your content platform must be the primary source of information for your tribe. When you control the story, you can accelerate the buying journey at each moment of truth.

Now, let’s look at how winning the Zero Moment of Truth (ZMOT) drives traffic to your business.

Understanding Your Traffic Sources and Brand Touchpoints

Let me paraphrase a popular country song, “Where do they come from, where do they go?” The “they” in this context are your audience. Moreover, the “where” are the points of engagement until they convert. 

Traffic sources are online and offline. The online traffic sources include:

• Organic (e.g., search, podcasts, and social posts;) 
• Earned (e.g., books, guest blog posts, product reviews, and backlinks;) and 
• Paid (e.g., search ads, social Ads, mobile ad networks, affiliate links, and display ads.)

Your offline brand touchpoints include physical stores, tradeshows, live events, out-of-home advertising, guest appearances, and more. You can leverage each touchpoint to drive traffic to your website. 

Once you know and document all your traffic, you can discover what’s working through attribution.

Let’s take a look at how attribution works.

Leveraging Marketing Attribution for ROI

Marketing attribution distills the art of marketing into science. Once you know what works or not, you can effectively guide investments that drive conversions. Think of attribution as what traffic source or touchpoint gets the credit for the conversion.

There are three types of attribution methodologies you can use:

• First Touch: You give attribution (or credit) to the initial point the buyer engaged with your brand.
• Last Touch: You give attribution to the final point that the customer converted.
• Multi-touch: You spread attribution across each point in the customer’s journey towards conversion.

Customers rarely move from a first touch to conversion. The last touch method ignores all of the engagements that preceded it. The metric that highlights the most effective path is the multi-touch attribution.

The benefit of multi-touch is that you gain insight into your Superfan Persona. Your ideal buyers can take different paths to your products and services. The more you understand those paths, the more you can ensure you have mapped content to accelerate the journey.