Start with your customer and map the way to your business

Start with your customer and map the way to your business and the product and or services that you provide. That may seem strange when you initially look at it, however upon a second glance it becomes clear how sensible this is. When going about assessing the potential value you could bring to those who may need your services, it only makes sense to position yourself in their shoes. Doing so helps in understanding exactly what’s going to stand out, and what’s going to make them become aware of your business, service, and or product.

Let’s do an exercise, if you’re reading this, close your eyes, and imagine your prospective customer, with your eyes closed inhabit their body, feel the challenges that they are having whereby your services could bring an alleviation of those challenges. If you are able to do this, then the bridge between the products or services you offer, and your prospective clientele, is easily traversed and your lead generation strategy is clear cut. If you’re not able to do this, then why did you go into business in the first place, you made a mistake going into business.

Though, fortunately this is a mistake that can be rectified by going back and defining the value you are bringing to the table for the people who you think would need your products and services. Here, it is important to have a profile, a defined profile of your clientele, and don’t think you are able to engage everyone, it’s imperative to have a defined profile so that your messaging, marketing, and efforts can have an organization, a strategy, and a form. Plus its costly to try to be everything to everyone.

Start with your customer and map the way to your business

Imagine you’ve located a treasure, you’ve defined the value that it can bring, and you believe it is something that a lot of other people would find value in. However right now only you know its location, furthermore you are not able to realize any gains from this treasure, unless you help several other people gather at the same location where you are and take value from it.

Consequently your goal is to go out there and create maps, create enticing propositions, that motivates others to come and realize the value from this treasure which you have defined. You have to start with your customer and map the way to your business. Your business, product or service being that treasure. Let’s dig a little deeper into your customer’s journey. And this is the same for every business and for every customer.

Helping prospective clients become aware of you.

A customer at first does not know who you are, they cannot distinguish you among the many other businesses out there. To put it bluntly, you do not yet exist. And the first challenge is helping the customer become aware of your product, service, or business. The process of creating and helping your customer become aware of your particular offerings involves advertising such as PR, radio and TV ads, email marketing campaigns, Social Media Marketing & Pay Per Click Advertising, among others.

The objective here is to help the prospective client become aware with our brand, product or service and we accomplish this through various channels including word of mouth. Today there are plenty of way by which we can reach prospective customers, social media marketing being a core part of that arsenal. For instance  with paid advertising we are able to really drill down on who our prospective customers are and engage them when they are most receptive.

Mapping prospective customer’s point of consideration.

Okay so after putting forth the effort to help our prospective customers / clientele become aware of our offerings, the customer is now at a point where they are actively considering if they’re going to engage with our offerings or not. The point of consideration on the map,  is crucially important because our clientele / customer that we want is aware of our offering, and their interest is piqued enough that they are now considering whether to move forward.

There are a number of things we can do to lubricate that decision to move forward. At this point we want to sprinkle a little bit of that golden dust that entices the decision forward, things such as:

• Reviews from past customer.
• Content that reinforces that value that is waiting.
• Social media ads that reiterates the problem that our business solves.
• Pay per click ads that offer the solution at a slightly discounted cost.

There are many more options, though these example serves to illustrate.

A prospective customer makes a purchase and becomes a customer

Our prospective customer has moved forward in the decision process and made a purchase and is now a customer. And at this point we want to reinforce that decision through thanking them for their purchase, providing receipts, perhaps providing a coupon towards their next purchase, and following up after the purchase, etc.

These are all things among many others that serves to reinforce and help our customer appreciate the decision that they have made. This point is also crucially important because by adequately communicating our appreciation and the value they are getting, our customer become an advocate for our offerings to others. We want advocates because advocates equates to referrals, reviews, and fans.

Retaining our customer long term.

At this point the prospective customer is now part of our choir and we want to enable means by which a customer can provide feedback and communicate with us about our products and or services. This feedback is important in fine-tuning our processes for other prospective customers. Additionally it helps in retaining our customer long-term.

At this stage our customer becomes a point upon which we can fine-tune our targeting, by asking questions, surveying, and encouraging our customer to engage us and we do this by incentivization, we not only are communicating our appreciation, but we have now the opportunity to obtain information upon which we can better position our messaging and presentation.

Our customer becomes our champion.

You’ve probably never seen a Tesla commercial and probably for the longest time you’ve never seen an Apple commercial. Probably the case was that you saw someone with an iPod or an iPhone, Airpod, or driving a Tesla and they communicated with you in one way or another about it. In the case of Tesla, whose owners report 100% customer satisfaction, by them simply driving their cars they are advocating for the company.

By people simply wearing their EarPods, or talking on their iPhones, they become advocates, increasing awareness and reach, and as a result sales. When we do a good job, when we adequately engage the customer at each of these points their advocacy becomes almost assured. This is the point where word of mouth starts to drive the story. This is the point where our customer becoming our champion and assists us in creating awareness for that treasure because they’ve obtained value from it and can attest to its merit.