Reach is the first stage in the progression of consumers. The aim her is to create awareness and develop interest in your product or brand.
Marketing material relating to the product or service needs to be relevant to your audience, located where they can find it and catches the attention of your audience.
Thorough research of brand content, reviews reports and detailed analytics will help you decide what platforms are best to invest in.
First impressions only exist once.
Buyer journeys aren’t linear. There are now a vast amount of digital technologies and are choice driven, the behaviour of consumers are now increasingly more complicated and are challenging to understand on the web.
Stage Two: Acquisition
Understanding your brand, intellectual property, products and your business identity is important. This will then dictate what products and services you offer and what type of individual that you are aiming them to.
Reaching potential customers with marketing will only go so far, offering meaningful messages, comments, interactions and advertising tailored to your identity, will give your community something to invest in.
With regards to digital marketing; transparency is the key. Consumers will often gravitate towards, products and companies that hold similar values and views to themselves. Occasionally, you can find someone who doesn’t fit with that description.
Once the targeted consumer we’ve reached understands the identity behind the product, there is a higher chance they will then stay within the influence sphere of the organisation.
Stage Three: Conversion
When the potential customers we have reached begin to believe in our brand or product they then buy from us; Conversion has happened.
Once the initial purchase has happened, it is very important to then build and maintain a relationship. Ensuring, of course, that the initial purchase was a happy and satisfying experience.
Typically some information is retained from the customer, which then provides a basis for developing the relationship further.
Continuing to develop the relationship, we can consider what other products/services they might be interested in, thus giving the opportunity for further purchases. Feed back from the first purchase can help with this, customers like to be heard and like their opinion to be valued.
Conversion is the fine line between pre-purchase and post-purchase stages of the customer lifecycle, quite possibly the most important stage as we are now optimising the customers experience.
Stage Four: Retention
Once we have sold our initial product, we will want to retain a relationship with the customer and ideally continue to sell other products and services to them.
Sending relevant and meaningful messages to the consumer related to their initial purchase will aid the retention and interest. Avoid irrelevance.
Companies use marketing emails and personalised logins as a form of retention and data management.
If we consider that retention begins with satisfying a customers needs, then continual care and cultivation of the relationship is paramount. We can aim to work on this via feedback or from an associated service.
The aim is to make the customer ‘feel’ part of the service, that they are more than just a part of the process and that the business values their interest and time and that we want to continue to sell to them.
This is a big deal! This type of trust is invaluable and makes sense when we consider crowdsourcing and kickstarted projects.
Stage Five: Loyalty
Once retention is reached, we would then like the customer to be more than a customer. Ideally they would then become a ‘Brand Advocate’, in digital marketing we refer to these customers as influencers.
Due to their positive experience, influencers or advocates will actively recommend the product or service to their wider community audience as well as friends and family.
Spreading awareness among social circles and filter bubbles outside your target market is hugely beneficial.
The customer lifecycle is both nonlinear and circular. The goal is to retain the customer and keep their loyalty. Ideally this then feeds back into the first stage of reach and builds awareness of your brand or product.
Building your brand or products reputation is easier when it speaks for itself and customers advocating positive experiences in user stories, helping more people to buy. Remember – People shout just as loud when things go wrong, in fact they shout louder!
