This article will be the first in a series dedicated to ensuring that your business fully understands the local customer journey and develops comprehensive knowledge of the five phases of a customer experience. Understanding how awareness, findability, reputation, conversion, and advocacy can impact your business — and how to get customers through all five steps of this journey — is critical to your long-term success.
What Are the Five Phases of a Local Customer Journey?
The local customer journey comes in five distinct phases. They are as follows.
Awareness
In a way, this is the hardest part of doing business. With so many demands on your customer’s time and attention, awareness simply means that a customer is aware of your business and may have some knowledge about what you do and how your services can impact them. Building awareness requires an appropriately calibrated marketing strategy that accurately targets potential customers.
Findability
Anyone looking for your business — including your social media, phone number, or website — should be able to find it. Appropriate findability demands that your website has appropriate SEO tools and that your other online content is easy to discover.
Reputation
In this phase, a customer is aware of your business but wants to know the experiences of others. As such, they will check out online reviews or ask their friends about what kind of service you were able to provide.
Conversion
A customer knows who you are and what you do. Thanks to the reputation you have built, they have faith in your ability to get the job done. As a result, they are now ready to move from a prospect or lead to a sale.
Advocacy
Your customers are the best advocates for your brand. In this phase, customers encourage others to use your business. As such, customers leave positive reviews and tell their friends about the benefits of your products or services.
If a customer hits the advocacy phase, you should respond to these efforts and reward them. Doing so may mean something as simple as thanking a customer for their positive review or going out of your way to financially reward customers who do what they can to help your business grow. Even a small gift card can go a long way to encouraging a business advocate.
Why Does This Approach Matter?
There is no question that every business has a different approach and uses marketing tools throughout these five phases. However, achieving business alignment with these five phases can be vital to your business’s success. This means you ensure that all marketing and sales tools are aligned with these five steps to boost sales and enhance business growth.
How does this specifically impact your business and the tools you use? Consider the following:
- Different tactics require different sales tools and technological platforms. If you have the appropriate sales tools at your disposal, you’ll be able to connect with customers at different phases, meet them where they are, and ensure that you are approaching them the right way.
- Advanced online tools allow you to target customers based on their current position in their local customer journey. However, you must have the right technology to match the tactics to the customer.
- You can use this approach to detect marketing problems. For example, if you can’t convert customers once you have built a solid reputation, you may discover something wrong with your brand. This information can better inform your advertising and marketing efforts.
Are you ready to learn how to maximize your business’s local customer journey? Book a 30-minute call today to learn how our fully integrated, all-in-one marketing platform can help advance your business and improve your customer experience and sales journey.
Image credits: By Cytonn Photography on Unsplash.