Customer Journey: use content to engage leads

The customer journey is the sum of all customer experiences when interacting with your business. Every touchpoint adds up to a total customer journey from their first Google search to their most recent customer service experience. And in today's digital world, there are countless touchpoints to consider. Therefore, taking charge of your customer's path with your business is critical to creating a smooth journey that builds loyalty and encourages return business and many referrals.

Marketers have long held to the idea of the sales funnel. It suggests that you start with a large target group and squeeze a few clients down through the small end of the funnel.

• Buyer behaviour has changed a lot. Customers make about 60% of their B2B purchase decisions before they even talk to a supplier. If they decide they have a problem, they'll go out and proactively try to find a solution.
• The sales funnel suggests that the buyer's journey is straight and predictable. However, in today's digital landscape, this is rarely the case. Much of the buyer's journey today happens without our knowledge and participation.
• It neglects to address what happens after a buyer has made a purchase. What about repeat business? What about referrals? What about making a client a promoter of your brand?

Here's the main thing that the marketing funnel neglects to address – when it comes to lead and referral generation, a happy customer is your best tool. After all, most companies, especially in B2B, list referrals as their main source of new business!

The Marketing Hourglass

At Mawazo Marketing, we use a more holistic and practical approach to guide the customer journey from beginning to end. It's called the Marketing Hourglass, and is proprietary to Duct Tape Marketing. At Mawazo Marketing we are a certified Duct Tape Master Consultant.

The Marketing Hourglass is a way of thinking about the customer journey. It starts with a prospect getting to know your company and goes all the way to when they've become a happy repeat customer, ready to refer friends and family to your business. It covers the dozens of different points of interaction that your (potential) client may have with you, such as the initial purchase, getting support, or paying your bills.

The Hourglass will allow you to map the progress the customer takes from discovering your business to liking and trusting it, then to trying your product or service and making an initial purchase, and finally making a repeat purchase and referring your company to their network. Breaking it down into small parts allows you to successfully build systems that deliver value and create positive interaction with your audience:

• Know – The first step is for a potential customer to get to know your business. In this phase, we use articles that get found in search engine results. In this phase, we also use digital advertising and referrals from existing customers.
• Like – Once you attract visitors to your website, you have to give them a reason to come back and an opportunity to relate to your business.
• Trust – With continued engagement with your audience, you develop a relationship, trust and authority. In this stage, sharing Google reviews, success stories, and client testimonials is essential.
• Try – For many companies, it is possible to offer a trial version or evaluation product. That allows your audience to try your solution at low risk. Other elements in this phase include in-depth information such as eBooks, Webinars and detailed how-to information.
• Buy – In this phase, you want your audience to pay for your solution. It is vital to give your customers the best possible user experience. This phase's activities and content is about creating customer delight and exceeding their expectations. 
• Repeat – Once you have established a commercial relationship with your clients, you want to motivate them to continue to do business with you, e.g. with repeat purchases, service contracts and opportunities to upsell and cross sell. 
• Refer – The Marketing Hourglass journey is about turning happy clients into referral partners and brand ambassadors. You do this by creating a great customer experience and by providing opportunities for your clients to refer you to their network.
  

By taking the marketing hourglass approach, you set your business up to create momentum from an end-to-end customer journey.

Start with auditing customer touchpoints

The first step is taking stock of how your business engages prospects and customers. It describes the baseline of how your business currently interacts with prospects and clients and helps you understand how your prospective customers make a buying decision.

It affects all departments in your business that are in touch with customers, mainly Marketing, Sales and Service.

Here are some widespread gaps we have seen in the B2B businesses we work with:

• A gap from transaction to implementation: marketing and sales got the order, but what happens next?
• A common mistake is to believe that all you have to do is run ads and respond to requests when, in fact, many potential buyers want hand-holding and nurturing to know you'll deliver on your promises.
• Referrals are the most important source of new business for most of our clients, but only some companies have a process to get referrals from their clients.

Map the customer journey and construct your marketing hourglass

At each of the stages, your clients will have questions they need to have answered. If you answer them objectively and in detail, you establish your company as the authority in your industry!

So, to effectively build your Marketing Hourglass you must fully understand the questions of your prospects and clients at every step, even before they know that you or your solutions exist.

The next step is to identify how you can answer these questions. It involves creating content in the form of web pages, articles, emails, brochures etc. In other words, you need content for every phase of the customer journey!

We will now go deeper into the Marketing Hourglass stages and give you ideas for the type of content you need for each step.

Know

The Know stage is where people first become aware of your business and solutions. Here are the most common ways to reach your target audience:

• Create content that gets found in Google search results when people type in a relevant search. It includes writing articles that answer the most common questions your target audience is asking. Your sales team is an excellent source of information for this content. After all, they are always answering questions that prospective customers ask them!
• Digital advertising, such as Google Ads, and social media ads, leads potential customers to useful content such as eBooks and webinars.
• Give presentations at industry events such as conferences or Chamber of Commerce meetings.
• Provide relevant information on your social media platforms, informing your audience about what's happening in your industry.
• Creating a process that makes it easy for current customers to refer your business to their network is also a great way to generate awareness with new prospects.

Like

In this stage, you want to give website visitors a reason to convert from anonymous visitors to consumers of your information and engage with your company. In addition, you'll want to provide reasons for your audience to receive more information and permit you to engage with them. It can include:

• eNewsletters to nurture leads and demonstrate your expertise and experience;
• a sequence of articles and other resources covering a specific topic in the form of an eBook or email series;
• white papers and in-depth reports on the topics your audience is interested in;
• webinars that offer your audience the information they need to make an informed decision.

Trust

In this phase, you give your audience all the reasons to trust your company and your solutions. It is the most time-consuming phase and also the most important. The more a potential customer authorizes your company and the more you establish yourself as an authority in your field, the more your prospects are likely to buy from you.

Examples of activities and content include:

• Inviting existing customers to post Google reviews on your Google Business Profile.
• Getting other websites to link to your content is an excellent way to establish credibility and authority.
• Case studies that show how you have helped a customer solve a problem.
• Publish client testimonials, quotes and customer-generated videos on your website.
• Webinars that provide helpful content and demonstrate your expertise.
• Publishing deep and detailed content such as eBooks.
• Having a solid proposal creation process that answers the needs of your clients.

Try

Many companies skip this phase. Still, it is often the easiest way to move your target audience toward purchasing your solution, especially in industries that are very competitive and highly-priced.

Here are some of the activities and content you can use:

• Offering a trial version or evaluation product, or a free trial period
• Providing in-depth information such as eBooks, webinars and detailed how-to information.
• Publishing content that compares your solution to your competitors' offering as objectively as possible.
• Organizing workshops that give potential customers a taste of your products and services
• Offering ready-to-use material such as checklists and cheat sheets.
• Offering a low-cost audit or review with recommendations for improvement.

Buy

Once your clients pay for one of your core solutions, you will want to give them the best possible user experience and show actual positive results. If you exceed your client's expectations, you will set yourself up for success in the subsequent two phases.

Here are some of the activities and content in this phase:

• Creating a smooth and fast onboarding process
• Providing your customers with quick start guides and robust user manuals
• Establishing an excellent support team to help your customers solve problems, and with a customer support community
• Customer success stories show how other clients have successfully used your solution.

Repeat

It is much easier and cheaper to get repeat business or upsell to an existing client than to start the sales process at the first "Know" phase. In this phase, your activities and content are all about cementing the customer relationship and growing the commercial relationship with your client:

• Keep your customers informed of all other products and services your company offers and how they integrate with the solution they are already using. 
• Offer service and maintenance contracts to avoid break-downs and make the overall cost of ownership more predictable. 
• Keep your customers informed about what's happening in your industry with email newsletters.
• Offer education in the form of workshops and seminars.
• Provide feedback on reporting so your clients can see a measurable impact of working with you. 
• Organize customer events to your customers can get advanced information and engage with your team and with other customers. It is also a great way to get your customers to create and share content about your solutions.
• Stay in touch regularly, with an occasional phone call or sending a handwritten note.

Refer

Referrals are the primary source of new leads for many businesses. However, most companies don't have a structured process to get referrals from their existing clients! In this last phase of the Marketing Hourglass you will want to establish campaigns and content to turn your clients into referral partners and brand ambassadors. It's a very reliable method of bringing new leads to your business.

Here are some of the things you can do to make that happen:

• Create a transparent referral process and execute it diligently. Inform your clients up-front, at which point you will be asking them for a referral, and make it as easy as possible.
• Entice your team and your clients to introduce your company to their network, e.g. a gift certificate.
• Establish a network of referral partners with the same target audience and possibly a complimentary product or service.
• Create eBooks, videos and teaching events and offer them to your strategic partners to cobrand and present to their clients.
• Create a results review process where you help your client measure their results by working with your firm and use the information to reach out to other companies in a similar position.
• Create a list of ideal prospects you would like to be introduced to, and ask your clients and your network for these specific introductions.

How content shortens the sales cycle

Each stage of the customer journey requires specific content relevant to your audience at that time. For most companies, this means they need to create a large amount of content to answer the needs of their clients.

This seems daunting, and companies often wait to start the process altogether. But, unfortunately, that is a costly mistake. Companies that fail to help their customers along the way on every step of the customer journey will depend on accidental referrals and cold outreach by their sales team.

On the other hand, companies that actively guide their customers along the customer journey with relevant content, find that it shortens the sales cycle and makes it much easier for their sales team to seal a deal.

Here are some of the reasons:

• Company websites will start ranking for relevant search terms so that the company website will attract many more leads.
• Prospects are much better informed when they engage.
• Sales managers spend much less effort when they can send relevant content to individual leads.

Over time, creating relevant content for the Marketing Hourglass will lead to more business and sales.

How much content do you need?

So, how can a company cover all clients' needs at every stage of the customer journey without becoming a task that takes over the operations?

First, many companies have much content available within a company in the form of manuals and training. You can easily repurpose this material to enrich your web presence with content to educate potential clients. For example, you can convert videos of training seminars to educational videos, which you can transcribe to written blog posts. Each blog post can be repurposed into bite-sized chunks and posted on your social media platforms and Google Business Profile.

Partners and suppliers can be part of the content creation process. Often, they have specific knowledge and expertise that you can tap into to get engaging content.

Most importantly, however, it is crucial to get your whole team engaged in the content generation process, especially a company's sales team. After all, sales managers answer most of your client's questions in the sales process. They likely get the same questions asked over and over again. It's easy to create relevant content by getting a content writer to interview each sales manager and create blog posts based on the material collected.

Conclusion

It's essential to guide your customers along the individual stages of the customer journey. The Marketing Hourglass is an excellent method to cover all the steps. It helps you guide your prospects from getting to know, like and trust your company to trying and eventually buying your solution, becoming a repeat customer, and eventually referring new leads to your sales team.

For each step of the Marketing Hourglass you need to create excellent content in different forms, such as articles, videos and social posts, and use it in your digital marketing.

Helping your customers along the customer journey requires that you publish relevant content that answers any questions they may have. In addition, it establishes your company as an authority in your industry, makes you visible in Google search engine results, generates leads for your business and shortens your sales cycle.

It's essential to include all relevant departments in your company to generate the campaigns and content necessary. It should consist of all departments participating in client interaction, mainly the Marketing, Sales and Service departments.

A Marketing Hourglass is never really done. Instead, you will discover where people need to move to the next step more quickly. That's where you want to develop actions and content to help them along in the customer journey.

You can use this framework whenever you enter a new market or develop a new solution. It helps you create an end-to-end customer journey for every offer.