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Before they became strong supporters and lifetime customers of your business, they were, at one point, leads. Later, you took them through a journey of trust, deliverability, and good services at first hand. Then, finally, you were able to capture their attention. As a result, you now have your previous leads as your customers; that happened just because you took them through a smooth journey, and they were finally convinced to become your customers, which is what we call a lead-customer journey.
To address the issues or problems of your customer or lead, you need first to understand their journey clearly. Trying to get to know their journey deeply involves knowing why they want your products and probably why they have chosen you and not any other.
Once you understand aspects rotating around your lead and perhaps what they want from you, you will have them as your customer. One thing that you need to understand as an entrepreneur is that customers love people who guide them with truth and honesty but rather not look at the profit bit of your side as a business person; creating light during a customer’s decision-making process is very important and would gain you more leads which will ultimately become customers so long as you take them through a journey that is truthful and honest.
Of late, customers take long to approach the company directly or the people who work in the business. Customers currently always have information at hand, so they already know what they are going for by the time they approach your business. Perhaps they are almost coming to their last decision and more so the internet has made it easy for customers to easily find the best service providers and the kind of products they offer and maybe even how these have been performing on the market and what other people have to say about them therefore by the time customers come to you perhaps they consider you to be among the best service providers and have a broad knowledge of what you offer or your services.
A well-planned customer journey helps you as an entrepreneur to build trust with your customers at an early start, and this helps you dig deep to know what their interest is all about before they even come to you for further negotiations or consultations.
To gain a deeper understanding of what the customer journey means, let us first define what exactly customer journey means; customer journey refers to a process by which a customer interacts with a company to achieve a goal. Of late, to maintain a customer and walk with them through a successful journey requires you to do lots of follow-ups and not limited to sending thank you messages, follow-up emails about the performance of a product.
For example, if they bought something from your business and get feedback and what you do with your feedback (improving the product or maintaining that).
It’s been said here and there that you can’t just guess a customer’s journey but rather ask them because they are the ones who hold the truth and not you, the entrepreneur; knowing what your customer’s interests, physical experiences, and needs are will help you have a successful walk with them so long as their needs are addressed accordingly. One way of addressing customers’ needs is by getting your services and products just right before them; you could do this by creating an attractive website and opening up various social media platforms, and then advertising just right before the people you think are your immediate or target customers.
Turning a lead into a customer is a process. Understanding a customer’s journey sometimes might require you to map it; this helps you to know where they started from up to where they are now, and that way, you will be able to capture the magnitude of their problem and, of course, what the customer wants exactly and what you can do about it personally.
Stages Of The Customer Journey
1. Awareness
At this point, a lead gets to find out that there is a gap in their needs. This pushes them further to look for a solution to bridge that gap, which calls for thinking harder to find a person or a business that can address the challenge. In cases where an individual can’t work out something by themselves, they ought to look for a solution provider. This is where they source the power of Google and other search engines. As an entrepreneur who wishes to capture the attention of that specific lead checking through your website, and social media platforms, you can start drawing closer to this lead by reaching out to them through blog posts, email subscriptions, and newsletters through the social media posts by commenting and liking, sharing more of the educational content, additionally you can send them reviews of your previous clients and how they have been helped this will help to pull customers closer and closer to your business.
2. Consideration
This is a point where an entrepreneur elaborates more about their products to impress the leads. At this point, there are perhaps very many other organizations and businesses offering the same products just like you do. So a prospect is considering you and your other competitors; this needs you to put up high-value content that will capture the whole attention of the lead.
3. Decision making
At this point, perhaps a client has seen very many other service providers who are less likely to offer the same products and services just like you do, and so they are confused between going forward with you or taking on your competitor, therefore calls for your efforts as an entrepreneur is trying to convince this lead that you can actually be the best solution provider this requires you to do lots of things to impress this person, for example, doing product demonstrations, customer testimonials, and reviews and giving out information to customers that will help them make an informed decision.
Step by Step Guide On Making A Customer Journey For Your Leads
1. Create smart objectives
As a smart entrepreneur you can’t just set out objectives without a vision but rather you set objectives to guide you achieve your goal, to get to this point therefore you need objectives that are specific, measurable, attainable, realistic and time bound. Objectives set that way will help you know who you want to serve, what they do, where they are, how best you can get to them and what their interests or needs are, this will be a guide to achieving your goals.
2. Conduct business research to learn more about your leads, your business performance and customers.
Conducting business research is important for any business because there are lots of issues that you can find out through conducting business research, and a case in point is; knowing your business performance, what you need to improve in your products/services so that customers expectations are 100% met, helps you to find out what your leads or coming prospects expect from you, the performance of your products or services on the market and what people have to say about them in regards to quality and so much more. You can research by either having group discussions or one on one interviews with the people you think are the direct consumers of your product, or it could be wholesalers as well. The research will give you a whole picture of your business and what you need to upgrade or improve.
3. Identify your target customers and pen down your touchpoints
Now you know all your customers and what they want from or what you are expected to deliver to them, it is now time to find out which touchpoints your customers are using to reach out to you. Once you find out these then put them down those that are currently being used and those you believe that customers should be using, this helps to capture what customers are perhaps doing with your website.
4. Define what you want to include in your customer
Depending on your choice as the owner of the business, you might want to talk about your company, this could be in regards to the current state of your business and what is transpiring currently, it could be about what your business holds for the future and what you hope to do as day’s move however this might be solely dependent on current state of the business.
5. Identify the resources you need to use
Because your customer journey is wide and more so likely to include every aspect of your business, you might need to have resources to allocate to every activity that is more likely to take place; some of these suggested activities that are more likely to take place could include; making business research, finding out customer experience and what you may need ahead as you venture into improving your products or services, all those activities need resources and they; therefore, they have to be planned for.
6. Analyze customer journey results
And when you are done doing all those activities, as mentioned earlier, the most important aspect is to analyze the results of your customer journey; this helps to find out areas of weakness that need improvement, where you are doing better so that you can maintain that. Analyzing the results can show you where customer needs are being unmet or met.
7. Take the appropriate actions and make the required changes
You can then make the appropriate changes to your website to achieve these goals. Perhaps this is making more distinct call-to-action links. Or, maybe, it's writing longer descriptions under each product to make its purpose clearer; the chances are that they will be effective as they are directly correlated with what customers listed as their pain points.
In conclusion, customer journey and mapping is a process that might take a bit of time, thus calling for patience while doing the requirements to accomplish your goal.