How Marketing Gets Customers

By Robin Anderson

Marketing can feel somewhat ambiguous. And sometimes, it may seem rather obvious. Yet everyone talks about how important it is to market your product. Post on social media, run a few promo spots, send out a few emails. What else is there? 

Taking action to get your message out helps to drive awareness. The question is - who are you reaching? Is this your target audience?

Persona

Knowing your audience is the first step to driving an effective marketing strategy. The ability to effectively target and reach your audience is like finding a needle in a haystack when you don’t know your primary persona. 

A persona is a semi-fictional character that describes your target customer. Sometimes called a user, marketing or buyer persona. 

The important elements of your persona include behavior patterns, pain points, their goals, and general demographics.

The benefits of knowing your persona include: 

• Your whole team will understand and focus on who your customer is

• A deeper understanding of customer needs and behavior

• Allows you to tailor marketing messaging and sales specifically for your customer

• Results in a better solution because you can customize your product

• Helps to identify where they spend their time so you can be there too

Now that you know your persona, it’s important to understand the steps your customers need to take to go through your buying process. To ensure they have the best customer experience possible, map your customer journey. Remove any obstacles that may get in the way. And use a variety of marketing tools to nurture them along the way.

A customer journey map is a visual representation of the process a customer or prospect goes through to achieve a goal with your company. With the help of a customer journey map, you can get a sense of your customers' motivations — their needs and pain points.

Mapping the series of steps your customer experiences as they begin to interact with your company, from their first engagement through purchase. What you want to look for is any friction the customer may encounter along the way. Improving this customer experience will help your customer as they consider the alternatives to solving their problem.

The benefits of mapping your customer’s journey includes:

1. You’ll have a better understanding as to what is helpful to your customers and what is not

2. You can further refine your persona based on interests and needs

3. You can leverage this to improve your customer experience from their first interaction through a sale

4. It’s cheaper to keep a customer than attract a new one. A positive experience will be shared with others who are in similar situations looking for a solution.

The three main phases of a customer’s journey include Awareness, Consideration, and Decision. 

• Awareness: Customer realizes there is a problem and begins researching the problem

• Consideration: Customer has clearly defined their problem, researches all available approaches to solving their problem

• Decision: Customer has defined their solution, researches data and endorsement to make a final decision.

To map your marketing to ‘Emotional Eric’s’ customer journey, consider the following marketing activities:

And to make the best use of your investment, it’s important to take advantage of your analytics. Whether you use a large-scale automation system, or Google Analytics, it’s critical to spend a little time viewing the numbers to understand your marketing activities designed to drive customers to buy. 

In relation to your website, you will want to look at:

1. Awareness - Where are your customers coming from

2. Behavior - Once there, what are they looking at and how long are they spending on any particular page

3. Conversions - How well is does your buying process work

Track the popularity of your marketing efforts. How effective is your email? Opens, click-through rates to your website, bounces? How about marketing reference materials? Downloads. 

Take a few minutes to analyze your marketing efforts, you’ll learn what is really attractive and working with your customers and what is not. Understanding what is performing and what is not, you not only spend less money and less time marketing, you’ll improve your customer experience as you will be giving what your customers want.

While adding a few posts to your social media, or sending out an email here and there may seem to be the easiest way to reach and communicate with your customers, it’s important to first have an understanding as to who they are so that you can reach them. Focus your efforts on addressing their biggest challenges, engage with them. That will then help you to drive interest and move them through the buying process to conversion.

Need help defining your persona and more? Take a look at our Marketing Growth Program.

Fun Fact

Back in the 1930’s mapmakers used to add fake towns to maps for the sole purpose of catching copycat map makers. Forgery was a problem, and was fairly common. Adding a fake town to a map enabled the creator to prove copyright infringement. Agloe, New York, was the first fake town to appear in a map by the General Drafting Co. It later appeared in maps created by Rand McNally. Someone had started a business in the Agloe, New York spot and named it ‘Agloe General Store’, thereby making it a real town.

Source: Smithsonian Magazine