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.
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.
This post is the second in our 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. This article will focus on the importance of the awareness stage, the first stage in the local customer journey.
Awareness is the first phase of your local customer journey that will lead to business growth. This journey refers to the experience of all customers as they transition from being completely unaware of your business to becoming its most prominent advocates.
In the awareness phase, a customer knows who you are and what products or services you sell. This awareness means the customer understands the most basic information about your business. This information may include what you do and where you are located. With the right information, customers are more likely to move further along their local customer journey with your business.
How Can You Increase Customer Awareness?
Once upon a time, building awareness was a matter of having a big billboard on your local main street. This broad-based ad, combined with other paid advertising efforts in a local newspaper, used to be enough to give a customer an idea of who you were and what you do.
Of course, those days are long gone. New tools, including targeted advertising, Google ads, and online reviews, are all critical to increasing awareness and will allow you to boost sales. Increasing awareness generally relies on at least two specific marketing tactics, including the following.
Establishing a Strong Online Presence
An online presence means you have a powerful website that uses appropriate SEO strategies and can connect with your customers where they are. It also means you have marketing tools to create a robust social media presence. You create value-added and useful content for the right markets, enhancing your business’s awareness among relevant and appropriately targeted customers.
Using Targeted Marketing
You don’t want to advertise to customers who aren’t likely to do business with you. Instead, you want to market to customers who are most likely to buy your products. As such, you use targeted marketing, potentially taking advantage of extremely targeted SEO opportunities or paid ads on social media platforms. For example, you may purchase Google Ads for individuals searching for your product or service if an individual is in your service area. You’d also look at buying Facebook ads for people who have been to your website.
What Do You Need to Build Awareness?
Every business is on a limited budget. Managing resource constraints means ensuring you get the most “bang for your buck” when engaging in a general awareness campaign. As such, you need to consider the following:
What sales tools do you invest in, and how do they operate with your other marketing platforms? You must ensure that your tools will easily integrate with your existing operations.
How are your marketing, sales, and financial planning efforts aligned? Have you achieved business alignment in these areas?
Do you have a consistent idea of who your customers are, where they spend their time, and what messages they respond best to?
Are you ready to learn how to maximize your business’s customer experience and build more awareness among your customers? Book a 30-minute call today to learn how our fully integrated, all-in-one marketing platform can help increase your business and ensure that more customers know who you are as they start their sales journey with you.
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?
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.
In this week’s #EZtransition podcast, we dive into the five phases of the customer journey: Awareness, Findability, Reputation, Conversion, and Advocacy. Understanding these phases is key to aligning your marketing, sales, and customer service efforts for maximum impact and growth.
Here’s a breakdown of each of the five phases and what they mean for your business:
Awareness
This is the first stage where potential customers become aware of your business and what you offer. Establishing a strong online presence and using targeted marketing to reach your target audience is important.
Findability
This is the stage where potential customers search for and find your business online. It’s essential to optimize your website and use local search engine optimization (SEO) tactics to ensure your business appears at the top of search results.
Reputation
This is the stage where potential customers evaluate your business based on the experiences of others. Encouraging and managing customer reviews, responding to customer inquiries, and providing excellent customer service are all keys to building a positive reputation.
Conversion
This is the stage where potential customers or leads become paying customers. It’s important to offer a smooth and seamless checkout process and to provide a positive customer experience to increase the chances of conversion.
Advocacy
This is the final stage, where paying customers become advocates for your brand. Encouraging repeat purchases, offering rewards for customer loyalty, and providing exceptional customer service are all ways to foster customer advocacy.
By understanding these five phases, you’ll be well on your way to growing your local business and attracting new customers.
Don’t miss this week’s #EZtransition podcast to learn even more about the customer journey and how to align your marketing, sales, and customer service efforts for success! Read all our blogs on reputation management to improve resilience, steady growth, and effective marketing campaigns. #SmallBusinessTips
So you’ve got a massive email list with lots of contact info. The contacts may be from a year-old campaign or one you pumped out last week. Either way, your list is full of great leads, all interested in your products/services. Some of them may already be customers.
But what about those who aren’t customers and those who never even opened your emails? For new marketers, it’s humbling to find what little percentage of your list responds to you, let alone make a purchase. Even for top email marketers, average open rates hover around 20% and are likely much lower for you.
But what if it didn’t have to be this way? What if you could recapture those dead leads and transform them into customers? Well, you can. Using EZtransition’s SMS automation software, you can conduct a reactivation campaign with one click. Let’s find out how.
Why Should You Reactivate Business Leads?
Reactivating leads means you re-ignite the spark between you and the contact. After all, they signed up for your list for a reason, right? Anyone who signs up for your list is interested in what you offer, but they may not be ready to buy, or life gets in the way.
Whatever the reason, they’re on your list, which gives you the right to contact them and connect them with your products and services. For those leads who have never bought from or responded to you, it’s time to hit them with an irresistible offer. Not through email but an automated text message.
How EZtransition Helps You Recapture Leads (SMS Automation)
1. The Offer
Cold leads need something striking to regain their interest. Start by creating an irresistible offer. Let’s say you’re a meal prep business offering a subscription-based meal delivery service. The program costs $100 per week, but you’re offering it for $50 in a “This Week Only” deal.
Now let’s say John is a member of your list but rarely opens your emails and is not yet a customer. For John, you could create a message like this:
“Hey, John, just a quick message to let you know we have a 24-hour only, 50% discount on membership this week. It’s a first come, first served offer, and spots fill quickly. If you’re in, respond with “Yes.”
An offer like this not only offers a considerable discount but creates a sense of urgency and a personal touch in the form of text, which people are much more likely to check and respond to.
2. The Follow-Up
John can either say “yes,” “no,” or not respond to your offer. If he says, that’s fantastic; you’ve netted an extra $50 in sales for the month and hopefully a recurring subscription at the full price. If he says “no” or ignores your offer, you can send a follow-up text 1-hour later.
The follow-up text: “Hey John, just a quick reminder that our 24-hour discount is expiring at midnight tomorrow, and spaces are filling quickly; let us know if you’re in”. Again, John can opt-in, say no, or ignore your message.
For instance, you send your irresistible offer to 1000 cold leads, and 1% of those opt-in on the first round. That’s ten leads, all purchasing your discounted subscription at $50 a head, totaling an extra $500 for sending a text. Not bad, huh? Then say a further 1% accept the follow-up offer; from the remaining leads, that’s another $500 for sending the second text.
Summary
EZtransition makes this process easy, with sophisticated SMS software allowing you to automate bulk SMS messages and automatically use Artificial Intelligence to respond to follow-ups. It’s perfect for recapturing cold leads like John.
If you want to maximize recapturing cold leads or small business marketing in general, check out EZtransition.com, then contact us on the chat widget on the bottom right. We are a marketing agency in Atlanta specializing in digital marketing strategy for small businesses, lead generation, and reactivation marketing. Get started with our free trial today and see how our automated SMS software helps accelerate your sales.
