This article will be the third in our series dedicated to ensuring your business understands the local customer journey and develops comprehensive knowledge of how that customer journey will impact customer experience. Specifically, this article will discuss the findability stage of the customer journey. This second stage focuses on ensuring customers can find your business when looking for it.
- Why Your Local Customer Journey Is Critical for Success
- Uncovering the Awareness Stage: Maximizing Your First Impression with Potential Customers
What Is Findability?
Findability is the second of the two stages in a local customer journey. This five-step cycle determines your customer’s awareness of your business and how likely they are to use your products.
In the findability stage, a customer is aware of your business, although not necessarily ready to start giving you their hard-earned money. However, they may be looking for you and doing this both in person and online. If a customer can’t find you when they are looking for your business — or even if they are looking for a local business in your industry — they will ultimately be unable to buy your products. You increase the odds of earning their money by making it easy for a customer to find you. In the long run, doing so will boost sales.
How Can You Increase Customer Findability?
To increase your findability, you must ensure business alignment over various areas of a customer’s sales journey. To achieve this alignment, you need the right marketing tools and sales tools.
Findability usually (but not always) refers to customers finding you online. Perhaps nothing is more important to your findability than increasing your search engine optimization. Increasing your SEO means your website has to be appropriately tagged with the correct keywords and metadata. This allows search engines to find your website.
Local business listings are a critical aspect of the findability stage of the local customer journey for several reasons. Firstly, they provide customers with a comprehensive and up-to-date directory of businesses in their local area, making finding what they are looking for easier. By having a presence on local business listing platforms, businesses can ensure they are visible to potential customers searching for products or services they offer. Secondly, local business listings help improve the accuracy and consistency of a business’s online information, boosting its visibility in search engine results pages. Finally, local business listings also offer customers valuable information such as business hours, contact information, reviews, and ratings, enabling them to decide which businesses to engage with.
However, SEO is about so much more than the right pieces of information. It also refers to ensuring your content is fresh, constantly updated, and geared toward customers looking for you. These days, local search has become much more important for business growth. Individuals are much more likely to find search results based on their area. You must ensure a local audience can find your website with the right content. Local search also makes it easy for customers to find your contact information.
What Do You Need to Increase Findability?
Increasing findability is all about using the right tools and expertise. As such, you need to ensure you have the following:
- Robust knowledge of who buys your products and services. You must know what your ideal customer looks like, what messages they respond to, and what social networks they spend their time on.
- An understanding of optimizing your SEO so these customers can find you.
- Appropriately targeted social media content on the networks where your ideal customer will spend most of their time.
As you can see, increasing findability is about much more than having the right technology. You also have to build the right knowledge base about who your customer is, where you can find them, and where they can find you. So, are you ready to learn how to maximize your business’s findability and learn more about how it impacts your local customer?
Book a 30-minute call today and learn how our all-in-one marketing platform can help increase your findability. In so doing, you can learn more about how customers can move from awareness to findability and become regular customers and brand ambassadors for your business.