Do you need to have it all?
It took me a while to come up with a topic to write about for the Perthshire Media Co article this month — not because I’m running out of subjects, but because there’s so many of them. In the end, I decided to take that as my starting point. Many become hung up on the multitudinous little details of marketing and forget the bigger picture. They think they need to be on every platform, come to the top of every possibly related Google search, take advantage of every single social media themed days and have five million positive reviews.
This approach is understandable — it takes a lot of work to stand out in a content-filled internet. But the problem is that it often results in businesses spreading themselves too thinly, either never finishing any tasks because they’re not perfect, or not having the time to do any of them thoroughly. A better way is to have a targeted approach. This involves planning your customer journey.
Your customer journey is basically the route you take someone on that gets them from the start line of finding out about your business, to the finish line of giving you there custom. How best that you do this will depend on the customer themselves. So your first task is to build a detailed picture of your ideal customer, or the type of person most likely to buy your products or services. How old are they? Are they married? Do they have kids? Disposable income? What are their plans, hopes and ambitions? If you feel you have more than one type of ideal customer, you can make several different profiles.
Now that you have one or more detailed customer profiles, you’ll have a much better idea of where you can find them. Where do they hang out? How will they prefer to meet you? For example, if you’ve decided your ideal customer is a professional woman of between 30-45 who enjoys socialising and has some disposable income, you’ll most likely find them on Pinterest and Instagram. Whereas if your ideal customer is a man of between 45-55 who is interested in politics and owns his own business you’ll probably find them on LinkedIn and Twitter. Or maybe your ideal client doesn’t like social media and will use a Google search to find what they need, or look in a local magazine. Once you’ve this figured out, you’ll know which platforms to pour your efforts into to take the first step of finding your potential ideal customers.
The next thing to do is decide what you want them to do once you’ve found them. The next step might be to follow and interact with you on social media. From there you might want them to go to your website, or sign up to your newsletter. And then buy your product or service. Once they’ve done that, you’ll also want to make sure you can stay in touch with them and keep them in your customer journey loop, whether you do that through newsletters, social media content, blog articles or other forms of content that will keep them interested.
Now you know what’s most important to your customer journey, you’ll also be able to filter out some things that aren’t. Do you need to spend ages improving your website SEO, or will most of your clients come from Facebook? Do you need to jump into TikTok if your ideal client is over 40? Should you focus on getting online reviews or does word of mouth mean more to your target audience? Having a complete customer journey in mind can give your marketing focus and, ultimately, more power. It can also save you lots of time!