Grow With Soul: Ep. 49 Understanding the Customer Journey With Kayte Ferris
In this episode, I talk about the customer journey. So you will have probably heard me refer to a sales funnel before which is the way people move through your band from discovery to purchase. The customer journey looks at the entirety of the journey from when before someone finds you to past the point of purchase and beyond. The customer journey is a huge piece of the puzzle when it comes to your marketing, and in this episode, I wanted to talk you through the best way I have found to take your customer on the journey through your sales funnel.
Here's what we talk about in this episode
What is a customer journey?
Building trust with your customers
Providing value to your customers
Creating great marketing materials
Practical steps in thinking about your customers journey and areas for improvement
Keep the customer journey in your mind when producing content
My new training course Playbook which is launching in January 2020
Read the episode transcript:
Hello and welcome to episode 49 of Grow With Soul. It’s just me today, and I wanted to talk you through one of the most helpful theories for the big picture of your marketing: the customer journey. You will have heard me refer to the sales funnel, and I do kind of use the two terms interchangeably, as they both describe the same thing - the way that people move through your brand, from discovery to purchase. However, the customer journey not only sounds nicer, but also covers more bases. It looks at the entirety of the journey, from before they find you, to past purchase and beyond, and better encapsulates the elements of your marketing rather than just consumer behaviour. For me, the Customer Journey is a huge piece of the puzzle when it comes to your marketing, as it gives you perspective on all your activities and how they fit together.
One thing that’s a problem for marketers at all levels, whether it’s you at your kitchen table or hundreds of people at Coca-Cola, is that we isolate our different marketing activities into silos. We have our blog over here, and our email marketing over there, and the outreach is over on the back burner and we switch between each of these pots on our hob. This is just the way we need to manage it, because we do need to single-task and focus in on the tasks at hand while we’re doing it. The trouble is, this can go too far and we forget that all the the different saucepans need to come together to make the meal.
I see this most often in people’s expectations. They get disappointed if one email doesn’t lead to a sale, or are put off from blogging because they can’t imagine that anyone will buy from that one post. The silos get us really short-sighted because marketing isn’t a one-two step, or an action and a reaction - it’s cumulative. It’s all the different elements working together to create the end result.
This is where the customer journey is so useful, because it reminds of this, and helps us to take that bird’s eye view of everything we’ve got going on and how it’s working together. It also helps us to create better individual marketing materials because we can better empathise with where a customer is on their journey, and what they need in that moment. It’s the difference between shooting in the dark and thinking ‘what on earth am I going to write in my email today?’, and knowing that the people in your email list are further along in their journey with your brand and excited to gain more in-depth content from you.
So, let’s reel back and start with 'what is a customer journey?'
The customer journey is how people move through your brand and the experience they have as they do so. It begins before they’ve heard of you, and are either seeking a solution,
or going about their life. Then they discover you and begin to move through what you do - in practical terms, this might look like following you on Instagram, then reading a blog post, then hearing you on a podcast, then signing up to your newsletter. Over the course of this journey, they are building trust in you, and going through the decision-making process of whether what you provide is the solution they want to their problem. Once they have made up their mind and they buy, they then continue in their customer journey, as they experience your customer service and, hopefully, their journey loops back round as they decide to buy again.
A customer journey can be long or short. Let’s use Coca-Cola again as an example - you realise you’re thirsty, and you look for a solution to that problem. You go into the nearest shop and you choose a drink - this choice may have been subliminally affected by advertising you’ve seen, the packaging, good experiences with the product you’ve had in the past. You drink your Coke, you thoroughly enjoy it and next time you’re thirsty you’ll likely choose it again because you had such a nice time. That customer journey was only about 30 seconds, so Coca-Cola had to make sure that they’re distribution was good enough so that their product was in the place you needed it in that journey, and that all the advertising made you want a Coke in that moment.
Other products have a slightly longer journey. Say you’re listening to a podcast and a guest is talking about their book - you love the sound of it and it feels like a solution to your problem. You maybe check out the author on Instagram or read their blog to get a feel for their style of writing. You look up the book, read the blurb and the reviews, and decide to order. That might be a 30 minute customer journey, but all the different elements you encountered took you from having never heard of that book to deciding it was the one for you.
For service businesses, we can have a really long customer journey. Not only because it tends to be a bigger purchase that requires more consideration than a can of Coke, but also because someone has to really know and trust that we are someone they want to work with. As I always say, you’re not going to drop 2 grand on a coach you’ve just found on the internet. It can take weeks, months, even years for someone to be ready to work with you, so we need to be conscious that their customer journey is going to be longer than one blog post and an email, and create our marketing in such a way that accommodates that. In my experience, we can give up too early on new offerings just because we haven’t realised the customer journey length - it’s easy to think a course has ‘failed’ because it didn’t sell out in the first run, but perhaps people don’t know you as someone who can teach this topic yet and need to build more trust before they buy. Side note, I get this all the time when I release something new - people always ask if something will run again in the future so they can do it then.
I recently started working with a new client who in her email to me said “I can see how everything you say about the funnel plays out because here I am” - Which is nothing if not a good confidence boost! But it’s true, I am conscious of my customer journey and I can see how people pop out the end of it. I get enquiries from people who say their friend recommended my podcast and they’ve been on my email list ever since and are ready for coaching now, I see names I recognise from years on Instagram join my courses, and I also see that customer journey loop back around as previous students join new courses or enquire about coaching. I know the concept of the customer journey works because I see it in my business.
Here’s how I think of it:
Someone is pootling along with their business, they’re either feeling a bit lost with it, or wanting to level up, or generally just open-minded to ways to improve. They find or stumble upon my work - perhaps a blog post came up in a search, a friend recommended this show, or they find one of my posts on Instagram. If what they found was useful, they’ll stick around and go a bit deeper - they’ll subscribe to the podcast, read a few more blogs, follow me on Instagram. If they keep enjoying what I’m producing, they might want to go a little deeper by signing up to my mailing list to get the more personal content that’s shared there. This continues, for months maybe. They read and listen to my stuff, they try a few things out in their business, they start to trust me. Eventually, they’re ready to work with me - this might be because they’ve just decided, that happens, or it might be that I’ve released a course that sounds ideal for them, or they hit a wall in their business and trust me enough to ask me for help. We work together, and they feel better about themselves and their business. They achieve those things they wanted to and feel confident to go off alone. So they go back to consuming my content, and the loop starts again.
So while I’m dealing with all my pots on my hob, and I’m writing a blog post and planning a newsletter and popping up on Stories, that flow is always at the back of my mind to make sure that what I’m creating is matching up with that journey and providing value to people when and where they need it.
I’d like to clarify as well that just because you’re listening to this doesn’t mean I expect you to buy from me! It’s a total joy for me to blog and record and create content - I always say that if someone gets everything they need from one blog post then it’s definitely not worth their while working with me. This is where the image of the customer journey as a funnel is really helpful - the people that are moving through to buy get fewer and fewer the deeper they go, because some people reach the level they need in that customer journey. It may be that someone listening to this podcast doesn’t need to move further through their journey at the moment - perhaps for financial reasons, maybe confidence or personal issues, maybe they’re getting on just fine listening to the podcast. That’s great and I’m happy they’re listening.
So that’s been a practical look at a customer journey, so let’s look now at taking this forward. There are two main ways customer journeys are going to affect your experience - in your expectations and in your creation.
You can set much more realistic goals and expectations. If you know a customer journey is going to take a few months, you can take your foot of the gas a bit and focus on a nurturing journey, rather than one where you’re pushing people to purchase before they’re ready - spoiler alert, that makes no one feel good. You can maintain an awareness of that cumulative marketing effect, and therefore not pile expectations on one podcast leading to hundreds of sales, and instead let your content breathe and fulfil its job.
Which brings us on to creating great marketing materials. When you know where things sit on the customer journey, and have an awareness of what people need from them, you can create them from a much more consumer-first perspective, which will make them more valuable. Rather than think ‘I want to sell from this blog post’ so it becomes quite a general product edit that isn’t lighting anyone’s fire, you can instead think ‘well most people are coming over from Instagram, which is more general, so I can write a blog post that takes it a level deeper so they can really understand why I’ve curated the products I have and how much nostalgia is important to the brand, and then they can go over and look at the products with a deeper understanding’.
So to close this off, I thought I’d give you a couple of next steps.
On a piece of paper, draw out a map of how people currently move through your business. You can make it a flow chart or whatever feels natural. Start with the places where people can find you, and then draw how they can move through your business from there. Mine would look like - being recommended a podcast episode, following on Instagram, reading a blog post, subscribing to the podcast, signing up my email, and purchasing (but remember, that whole process might be 6 months with them continuing to flit between, blog, podcast and Instagram). By mapping it out you can find any blocks to the journey - for example, if they’re reading your blog is it hard for them to then sign up to your list because the box isn’t obvious enough, if someone watches your Stories will they ever know you’ve got a podcast? As well as blocks, you can identify areas that could be improved on - perhaps Instagram is the only place where people are finding you so you need more option, or maybe some of your blog content is too general and doesn’t help build know, like and trust.
Once you’ve identified these areas for improvement, redraw your customer journey with all the edits included - this is the smoothest, most scenic drive through your business. And then, set about making it happen! Make those changes you identified, optimise a few areas that felt a bit dodgy, and then continue to use the customer journey and keep it in your mind as you work on your single tasks to make sure that you’re always looking at the big picture as well as the detail.
Before we go, I have one last message for you. If you are a coach, a mentor, a teacher, or someone whose business focuses on facilitating a change in others, then I’m working on something especially for you. In this kind of business, it can be easy to feel out of control and like things aren’t happening the way you want - I certainly have felt, and sometimes still do, feel like that. The Playbook is a course especially for your business, to help you take control, shine your light and make your impact. We’re going to be looking very specifically about how you can stand out in a crowded market, improve your business model to get sustainable income, plan and organise your schedule for short and long term gains, and making sales. We’ll go into much more of the specificities of the service-based customer journey to help you get comfortable with selling and marketing what you do and become known and visible in your space. This course is the one I would have wanted 18 months ago, and it’s absolutely everything that has worked in my business.
The course starts in January, but pre-orders open this Monday 14th October with some great bonuses. There’s a workbook I’ve created that you can work over the next few months, we’ll have an exclusive live workshop before the course starts and you get 10% off, which is always nice. To find out more about the course and get your bonuses, go to simpleandeason.com/theplaybook.