Navigating the Customer's Journey: What Small Businesses Need to Know (Part 2)

A customer or buyer’s journey is the process a customer takes from first finding out about your brand to becoming a loyal customer, follower, or hopefully advocate. It is important to think ahead about each of these steps and find where the customer might have questions, or worse, decide to leave or give up on the journey. Your end goal should be for your customers to follow through on every step and become a loyal supporter or your biggest fan by the end of the process.

These are the steps of a customer's journey:

Awareness: This is how customers will find out about your company. Will they find you through a search on Google, a hashtag on Instagram, or a group on Facebook?
You should show up in multiple places online, but make sure they all lead back to your home base, which is your website. Even if you sell your products on a different site, you should have your own website.

Interest: What will make your customer want to learn more about your business or company? You should have something that creates interest in your product or service. For example, you could have stunning product photos and a thorough and engaging description or explanation of your products or services. You could provide valuable content and resources to share through your social media.

I highly suggest blogging, even as a small business. Having valuable long-form content like blog posts, podcasts, or videos demonstrates that you’re an expert in your field and that you are there to serve your audience. This gives your audience something to interest them and a reason to trust you or your brand because you clearly know what you’re talking about.

Desire: After becoming interested, what will make them want to buy from you? You should show real people using your product or services with reviews or tagged photos, as this can help entice a buyer. You should clearly explain what makes your product or service different from other brands and prove that what they buy from you is worth their money.

While you are giving valuable content like blog posts, the ultimate goal is to get the customer to buy your products, so make sure your content contains references or links to your products or services. Everything should lead to the buying stage. Use a “call to action” in your blog posts or other content. A call to action is a clear and easy step that they can take next if they are interested.

Action: What convinces them to actually make the purchase? Is the process for buying quick and easy? If applicable, you should explain to them how to make a return or how long it takes to ship your product. You should also give them clear steps that they should take after they buy from you.

At any point, you should have clear directions towards where to buy your product or service. The last thing you want is for a customer to be thinking “I’m in, sign me up!” and then not to be able to find where to click buy! Make the process easy without being too pushy. You should also have a clear plan of action for the customers that do buy from you. This could be having them sign up for your newsletter or follow you on social media so you can advertise future products to them and hopefully entice them to buy again.

Experience: Will your customers get everything you promised them or have you oversold your product or service? Will they write a review (good or bad)? Will they spread the excitement through word of mouth? Will they come back for more?

This part is what I like to call “fandom.” If you have done your job right, they should be a huge fan of your brand. They should be supporting you and telling their friends about you, ideally buying from you again in the future.

You want to impress the customer with every step so they are left with no buyer’s regret and so they will brag about how great of an experience it was to buy from you. If you can afford to, give customers a discount code for future purchases. Customize your packaging or consider adding a free sticker with every purchase. Try to get creative! Think of an affordable but unique way to impress your customers.

Throughout this entire process, you need to make sure they are having a great time! Show your personality. Guide your audience through each step with easy links or clear directions of what to do if they want to take the next step. You need to be proactive to make sure there are no spots where they will trip up or hesitate. Find a way to answer all their questions and solve all of their problems as they go along this journey.

Read my last post to learn more about what customer success is.

Read my next post to learn more about how you can affect your customer’s journey by incorporating customer success.

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