Customer Life Journey First Three Stages

 A Customer Life Journey consists of 8 stages. We completed an overview on the customer life journey in the last Podcast.

In this episode, I'd like to go into more detail on the first three stages of this journey with you and how you engage with your ideal customers and clients and bring them into this journey with you.

Your first stage in the Customer Life Journey is making them aware of who you are, what you do, where you're located, and how to engage with you. This can be done through advertising, blog posts, events that you might speak at or host, and of course, social media.

Stage Two: Engagement

Once you have set up your Awareness stage and you begin to drive traffic to your site or business, you want to engage with those you have attracted. Engaging with them creates an emotional tie and the best way to do this is communicating with them.

You want them to jump on this journey with you, and they will once you start to engage with them.

This could be accomplished through your blog posts, social media posting, or it could be through an event. You can combine these two stages together.

I recommend that you sit build the awareness stage, and never stop because you're constantly going to be filtering people in and out of your community.

These first three stages are your foundation and first floor! You'll continue to bring awareness to your business and engaging through the life of your business.

Clients will often struggle with the “engagement” stage. They don’t know what to say or feel like they will be bothering their customers and clients with conversation. Remember, the engagement stage is not for nonsense conversation but true engagement; continue to share valued information, take time to ask a question or two for you or your team to get to know THEM!

Work on the top three foundational pieces of your customer life journey and stick with it. If you need any help, let us know.

If you've already have these elements in place, remember to revisit those “messages” at a minimum annually to make sure they are still relevant to your business at that time and that your offers are still relevant. If you'd like someone to review and evaluate what you have, we are here to support you reach out to us!

If you have any questions or need any feedback on what you've been doing, I'm happy to speak with you. Give me a call or contact me. All the information is on this page.

Customer Life Journey Introduction

Having a Customer Life Journey in place with all of the right elements will build your business.  It will strengthen the relationships between you and those that connect with you.  In this podcast article I will help you understand the 8 stages to a solid Customer Life Journey.

Over the last few weeks I've been sharing about branding and how important that is to your business. Making sure that the visual brand becomes, in a sense, iconic and a strong way to recognize your business is crucial. Then we went into messaging and consistency. Importance of your messaging is across the board, where your messages go, how often they go, and the “attitude” written or recorded. Consistency in your messaging will help build your audience.

Communicating with potential customers and clients, as well as your existing base while being consistent keeps them looking to you for support, info, tips, because they feel you have a relationship with them. Visuals added to your messaging are a big part of building that brand. Are they cartoony all the time? Are they direct pictures looking more realistic? Once you have chosen that image style/look, staying with it keeps the expected look together and is part of your consistency.

Let’s talk about your client/customer life journey. Business leaders refer to the time clients and customers are involved with a company in several different ways. Customer life journey is one of them. Customer life cycle, customer journey, and the funnel flow are others. A variety of visual representations also represent paths of direct marketing options your clients/customers travel as part of your marketing plan.   

Some paths are linear. Some are visually attractive.  In some cases, boxes with arrows lead prospects in specific directions and some of these are circular.  I’ll share my personal preferences I prefer to call this relationship a customer journey because journey is something we can all relate to. I will refer to a customer journey for these trainings.

The journey of life is ongoing.  Our experiences are part of this journey. Sometimes we are rewarded, and other times life gives us stuff we're not so happy about, but it's all a part of a journey along a path. I like to think of that game, Chutes and Ladders for a visual.

If you remember the board game (or you can look it up), the chutes took you downward to lower levels along the board, and ladders would take you up to the next level. The goal is to make it up to the top. So, for me, it's a customer journey that resembles a Chutes and Ladders board game concept.

Keep your paying clients and your customers excited: excited about you, excited about what you're doing, excited about them and their progress within your community.

Be excited about whatever people purchase from you. Continue the conversation and engagement. Share how to use your product or service and maybe offer some secret tips for it. You know, things like that. You want to excite them and support them – this will lead to their having faith in you and your products AND will lead to the next purchase because you've already converted them into a loyal customer. You want to lead them through the customer journey.

Everybody wants to matter. In my future podcasts I'm going to go through and break down each of the eight steps I discussed and offer tips to make sure you're including them. I hope you enjoyed this podcast!

If you have any questions or need any feedback on what you've been doing, I'm happy to speak with you. Give me a call or contact me. All the information is on this page.

Hiring an Expert

Hiring experts to support you in your business is important BUT how you work with them is vital to it's success!  Avoid some of these simple mistakes....

Welcome to the Make It Happen podcast, brought to you by Strategies For Small Businesses, #SFSB, and Christina Littrell-Williams, lead master tactician. My team and I have been working as online marketers for over a decade supporting entrepreneurs as they grow, achieve goals, and even surpass them. We love what we do. It is our intention to give you something you can take away from every episode; an idea, a sense of encouragement, a new tool, and/or answers to any questions you might have submitted to the team.

I want to talk to you about hiring an expert. 

There are several opportunities to hire experts for support. Maybe it's an auto mechanic, or a construction worker to build our homes. Or sometimes it is somebody to help us in our businesses.

Let me ask you a couple of questions... 

Do you hire a mechanic to then turn around and tell them, “This is the problem, this is what needs to be done, these are the tools you need to use, and this is how the job needs to be executed?”

OR

Do you take your car into the mechanic shop to get the diagnostic report, and then listen to their recommendations for necessary next steps for maintenance or repair? Do you then approve the plan to implement the fix?

Same thing with building a house or any type of construction project. Do you walk in and tell the contractor what to do and how to do it?

My guess is you don’t do that.

You're paying 1,000s of dollars to have those experts do what they do best. Some have gone to school for what they specialize in and in a lot of cases are licensed. Many have been trained intently while being in the trenches and staying up to date on requirements and best practices.

My advice to entrepreneurs and small businesses is this. When you hire experts or subcontractors, it's important to evaluate the relationship first. The same is true when hiring employees.

Do you trust them? Have you researched them and feel confident enough to say, okay, I'm going to give them a try?

Do you put an agreement in place to work on one project together and see how that goes? Also, do you look at how you communicate with each other?

Are you really a match?

As SFSB works with entrepreneurs and small businesses, part of our Marketing Support includes working with teams already in place, or in some cases we help to put a team in place if needed. We have trained many business owners in processes to work with their support teams so everyone is having the best time they can, and relationships remain harmonious.

If you have any questions or need any feedback on what you've been doing, I'm happy to speak with you. Give me a call or contact me. All the information is on this page.

Register to get your Branding and Purpose Worksheet

Staying Consistent

Let's talk about consistency!

Welcome to the Make It Happen podcast, brought to you by Strategies For Small Businesses, #SFSB, and Christina Littrell-Williams, lead master tactician. My team and I have been working as online marketers for over a decade supporting entrepreneurs as they grow, achieve goals, and even surpass them. We love what we do. It is our intention to give you something you can take away from every episode; an idea, a sense of encouragement, a new tool, and/or answers to any questions you might have submitted to the team.

Consistency seems to be one of the consistent problems across the board with my clients and most business owners in general.

They want to market their services or products and they see all these different ideas, opportunities and tools to use to make it happen.  They have big ideas … I'm going to do this and then I'm going to do that then the next “marketing bright shiny object/idea” comes in and they are I'm going to do this; I'm going to do that and nothing gets done to create any foothold on their audience.  Sure, they start something, but it seems to be short lived. They lose interest quickly OR they get “too busy” to continue it. They become inconsistent with their efforts and then they lose a lot of potential revenue, a lot of followers, and a lot of people in their tribe/community who have been distracted by a competitor.

Consistency across the board is huge in your business success!

Let’s focus on marketing here.

What is consistency when it comes to marketing?

When you’re planning to market your services/programs/products, you want to do it on an expected path and outcome for your followers, your tribe, your community.

You want to do something that they can expect and that they can count on. Especially if you are providing content that is helping others in a guiding or training manner.  You want them to be wanting more from you. You want them to be looking for you because of the value you provide. (Side note, we will be discussing content and what is TOO MUCH vs JUST ENOUGH in a later episode). Consistency is how you infiltrate their busy lives by making it convenient, because they know when to expect things and where to best get it from you just by you being consistent.

A lot of times, we'll have clients go, I'm going to do a podcast, I'm going to do a blog, I'm going to do it every day. We will sit with them and lay out just what those plans look like, and we tell them, you know, that's great, that's going to be amazing! Then we ask them, but can you keep it up? And show them their projected Marketing Calendar based on their idea.

When you're planning your marketing, always keep in the back of your head and tell yourself, I need to be consistent with this. I can grow but I never want to decrease what I'm doing in my efforts (unless it is not working, and we will discuss evaluating what is working and what is not in a later episode).

You want to create a marketing plan calendar and plug in what you’re looking to do and overlay that on your daily business calendar.  Look at it honestly, is your newest plan something that fits into your schedule and do you have the available time to get it done?

Podcasts are amazing, they're fun, your listener gets to hear your personality, and they get to learn the tone of your voice. They get to connect with you on a completely different level. You have the ability to deliver a podcast in video format as well as audio, as well as a written post like we do, and your audience gets to consume the content on the platform they enjoy. You also end up with three different platform submissions with one piece of content.

When you're planning also plan be consistent!

When we have clients that want to do something short termed and not be locked into a rigorous schedule but want to make sales, we will work with them to produce/services flash sales. Those are short term, you're looking at a week to two weeks tops, on putting out something for a quick marketing venture. These will have an educational set of emails/posts/blogs on a specific topic guiding to purchase the program/service/product that will solve the problem the audience has, and the marketer has the solution for. When that flash sale is done then content creation for the most part can slow back down to a daily routine of just being “seen” in the virtual world.

Flash sales are easier but then you want to set up your consistency in these too. Once a quarter, maybe twice a year. Maybe it's just New Year's, what is that for you and then you stay consistent.

The more you build that foundation of what your followers, your community, can expect from you, the stronger they're tied to you.

Register to get your Branding and Purpose Worksheet

Branding and the Importance of a
Clear Consistent Message

Welcome to the Make It Happen podcast, brought to you by Strategies For Small Businesses, #SFSB, Christina Littrell-Williams, lead master tactician. My team and I have been working as online marketers for over a decade supporting entrepreneurs as they grow, achieve goals, and even surpass them. We love what we do. It is our intention to give you something you can take away from every episode; an idea, a sense of encouragement, a new tool, and/or answers to any questions you might have submitted to the team.

Thank you in advance for joining us, and we look forward to engaging and inspiring you

In this episode I talk about Branding and your Business.

I'm working with a couple of clients who are struggling with understanding branding, why they need it, and what happens when it’s not in place.

You might also be struggling with this and I felt this was a good topic to discuss.

Branding, what is branding overall?

It is an identifying force for your business that will tie what your business IS and what it DOES for potential clients/customers. This is a consistent visual “icon” along with your business name and tag line.

Sometimes it's a logo with a strong message. By sharing it consistently with the right audience you build a recognizable brand and people take one look and KNOW.

Think of the Nike swish. Before it achieved worldwide familiarity, no one would know what that image was just by itself, but they paired it over time with their tagline “Just Do It.” After a strong conviction to their vision and message they have taught us all to say “Just Do It” upon seeing the swoosh logo.

Nike’s consistency and staying strong with their message has built their empire.

Maybe you aren’t looking to be a mega-giant like Nike, but the framework for building your brand is the same.

It's important to structure your overall BRAND. It’s not just the image logo that builds your brand. It also includes the colors you use consistently. It includes cohesiveness and consistency across the board, from your website to your emails communicating with current and prospective clients, to your social media post messages. It is important to remember it is not just the images people associate with your brand, but also the tone of voice when you write, how you challenge people or don't challenge people, and even how passive you are. Are you nurturing or are you just sending “special offer” messages?

I invite you to go over to StrategiesForSmallBusinesses.com and download the Branding and Purpose Checklist. This will help you work through the questions you need to answer and really helps you have a focused dive into all of your Branding.

If you have any questions, remember we're always here for you. Just utilize the question button on the website and will get back to you.

Thank you

if you want more from Strategies For Small Businesses, #SFSB, stay connected by subscribing to our list and connecting in Facebook https://www.facebook.com/sfsbagency 

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