All of the different things you’re putting out online to market yourself, whether it’s your website, social media, online ads, whatever… they’re all part of your customer’s journey and perception of your brand.
Have you ever thought about all of the different things or events that your customer may go through before they actually end up doing business with you?
I want to talk about customer experiences, or customer journeys.
When I meet with people, business owners, marketers or whomever, usually they want to talk about a certain part of their marketing toolbox. They may want to talk about their website, they may want to talk about search engine optimization, or they may want to talk about social media. That’s great and all, but where I see them fail so often is, looking at all of their marketing from a complete and holistic point of view, from the customer’s perspective.
A lot of us don’t pay attention to that fact that our customers are actually on a journey, and seeing many different things, interacting with our brands in many different ways before they actually end up completing a transaction with us. This could lead to a fragmented, inconsistent experience, and ultimately destroy any chance you have of building trust with people.
I want to share a quick example why.
Let’s say you’ve got an ad campaign on Google, promoting a certain product. Let’s say you’ve got a social media strategy promoting a different kind of product with red and blue as a colour scheme for your products. Now, this person will come to your website and see, well the color scheme doesn’t match the banner I just saw, the social media ad was talking about a spring event, and the website is talking about winter, am I lost?
I was looking at a Spring Event banner, and why am I seeing winter boots on this website? Why are they on your homepage? What’s going on? This must be the wrong website!
That’s just a small example, there’s so many other ways we can talk about this. What I am trying to drive across is, your priority should be on delivering your customers with an awesome customer experience. Not ONLY a great website experience, not ONLY a funny social media post, or not ONLY a newsletter that gets great opens. Those are all great small objectives, but your overall goal, has to be to deliver an amazing and consistent customer experience for your clients and prospects so that you can build loyalty and trust with them, which will make it a lot easier to close the deal and could actually save you money.
There are so many people out there that just “want to put a sale on”. They don’t look at the journey. Look at the journey, figure out what you can do to build trust and loyalty with the customers you’re interacting with all over the Internet, on any channel, even on non-digital properties and try to build that journey so that they have fun, they like your brand, they trust your brand and the decision to do business with your brand becomes a no brainer because they actually just want to work with you naturally, without you talking to them.
