A customer journey map, helps you understand who want to sell to and their decision-making journey. It’s the way you plan on reaching a prospect and transforming them into a paying customer. A good marketer L-I-S-T-E-N-S to their market. In this video, I explain how you can do that too to increase your sales.

[wd_hustle id=”4″ type=”popup”]Download the FREE Customer Journey Map Worksheet[/wd_hustle]

I know you’d like to increase sales. But do you know who you’re actually selling to? 

Many business owners are still in the mindset of “build it and they will come”. This is not a good way of running your business, and hardly ever works.  

Remember marketing is not about selling, in fact, it’s about listening.  

Every successful business owner knows that in order to become successful and remain relevant, you need to continuously listen to your customers and your chosen target market. This requires building a customer journey map. Again marketing is not about selling. Not anymore at least. It’s about listening. Listening to your market, their challenges, pain points, obstacles, objections and emotional drivers.  

To be truly successful in any business, you need to understand the journey taken by someone with a need/problem that your business solves, how they eventually become a paying customer as well as what happens after the first sale. This process of strategic analysis is called customer journey mapping. And it’s not only important that you understand your customers’ journey, but also the way you engage with them at each stage. To help you do it I’ve created an acronym to make your life a little easier.  

How to create a customer journey map

Like I’ve said before, the best marketer LISTENS. Each of the letters in the word LISTENS represents a stage in the customer journey map. Let me break it down for you. 

[wd_hustle id=”4″ type=”popup”]Download the FREE Customer Journey Map Worksheet[/wd_hustle]

L – Listed 

When your prospects realize they have a problem, how do they begin searching for solutions? Do they search on Google? Maybe ask for recommendations from their friends on social media? This is the initial step in your customer journey map so you need to make sure you are listed on the platforms which they use and are hoping to find you on. That means having a website, social media profiles, maybe even directory listings.  

I – Inbound 

Once they begin their search, you are probably not going to be the only business that comes up in the results. So what persuades that prospect to click through to learn more about you? This is called inbound marketing, or the pull factor. It’s your blog posts, your videos, your photos, your testimonials, your guest blogs, podcasts, all of those things which show your audience you know what you’re talking about, making them want to engage with you. That’s why I’ve said in other videos, that having a website is not enough. You need inbound marketing strategies and content to pull those prospects towards you. 

S – Signup 

When anyone consumes your blog, podcast, video, etc. you actually have no idea who they are and it will be very difficult to reach them again unless you have their contact details. This is why getting a prospect to sign up or subscribe to something of yours is vital. It could be a contact form, a newsletter subscription box, a downloadable guide or pdf, anything. But you want to offer your prospect, something extremely valuable, that they cannot help but give you their email address in exchange for that thing.  

T – Transform 

Take that email address, nurture that prospect, send them valuable information, tips, tricks, guides, steps, hot-to, whatever, and ultimately transform that prospect into a paying customer. This will be the first time they buy something from you. It’s what you’ve been working towards.  

So you’ve made a sale. AWESOME. Does it stop here? Well in my customer journey map, we still have 3 more steps.  

If you’ve been stopping after the first sale until now, let me know in the comments below.   

E – Excite 

First-time customers are awesome because they are excited about this brand new thing they bought from you. I use a customer journey map to build on this relationship. With this, you can excite this customer into becoming a life-long customer, one that buys from you often and doesn’t even consider your competitors. You can do this by sending regular high-value emails, inviting private groups on social platforms, and even physical relationship building by picking up the phone and speaking to them. It’s a relationship-building exercise.  

N – Next 

By continuously exciting your customer you can potentially benefit from their next purchase, and the next and the next. You now have a customer for life, that comes to you and only you to make their next purchase. This is also the perfect opportunity to upsell or cross-sell other products and services in your range that they could benefit from.  

S – Share 

At the final stage of your customer journey map, you should have such a happy returning customer, use this advantage to get a referral or reference from them. Actually ask them to review you online, give you a referral to someone else they know who could benefit from what you offer. In essence, you are asking your customer to share the word about their relationship with you increasing that physical or digital word-of-mouth, which will feedback to the first step for the next new prospect to see.  

I urge you to think about your customer journey map and the various platforms, tools and communication strategies you need at each stage of the journey to make it successful and generate more money.  

[wd_hustle id=”4″ type=”popup”]Download the FREE Customer Journey Map Worksheet[/wd_hustle]

If you have any questions please drop a comment below or schedule a call with me.