FIGURE 1-12: Create a customer journey road map for at least one of your core offers.

Optimizing the Customer Journey

      It’s good that you’ve documented your customer journey, but just because you’ve written it down doesn’t mean you’re done. When you understand the customer journey, and after you’ve built it for your business, it’s time to optimize it. The customer journey isn’t something you laminate upon completion. It’s not something you set and forget. If you want your business to grow — to truly be set up for success — you’ll want to revisit and hone your customer journey as your business and customers evolve.

Avoiding an Optimization Mistake

      As you begin to optimize your customer journey, your instinct may be to approach it from the beginning and start with Step 1: generating awareness. But that’s not where you want to start. In fact, the awareness stage is the last place you want to start when optimizing your customer journey.

      Why?

      If you start from the beginning — as the saying goes — you’re pouring more water into a leaky bucket. All the work you’re doing to optimize the beginning steps of the customer journey will be for nothing if you have holes later in the journey that are causing your customers to get stuck or not convert at all.

      To avoid this pitfall, you don’t want to focus your optimization efforts on the beginning of the journey. Instead, you’ll start toward the end of the journey.

      When optimizing your customer journey, it’s best to start at the ascend stage (Step 6). Start here with the perspective of, “How do I increase the average customer value? How do I remove the bottlenecks that are causing the customer to get stuck?” By plugging any holes in the ascension stage, you’ll be able to maximize your profit. And with more profit, you’ll be able to invest more into your journey (and not send leads and customers into a leaky bucket).

      When you’ve maximized the ascension stage, work backwards.

      After you’ve worked backwards and optimized all of the beginning stages of the customer journey, you then turn your attention to optimizing the final two stages — brand advocates (Step 7) and brand promoters (Step 8), looking for ways to generate more of each.

Chapter 2

      Choosing the Right Marketing Campaign

      IN THIS CHAPTER

      

Defining the goals of your digital marketing

      

Utilizing the three main digital marketing campaigns

      

Learning which digital marketing campaigns you should employ, and when

      Digital marketing is a broad term that can mean anything from posting an image of your product on Facebook to crafting an email subject line to optimizing a blog post for search engine traffic. Digital marketing involves many seemingly disconnected tactics, and that’s what makes this chapter so important.

      This chapter helps you understand what a marketing campaign is. We explain the three different types of campaigns and how and when to use them so that you can use these strategies effectively in your digital marketing campaigns.

      Every business is interested in generating leads, making sales, retaining the customers they have, and selling them more of the company’s products or services. Achieving each of these goals requires a different approach, however. In this chapter, we help you decide what you want your digital marketing to accomplish by identifying your business objectives, because those objectives are what should dictate the campaigns you construct and, ultimately, the tactics you employ.

Establishing Marketing Objectives

      Before you start a blog, open a Pinterest account, or start gathering email addresses, you need to choose your business goals. When you know what you want to accomplish, you’ll be able to direct your energy into the right marketing campaigns and employ marketing tactics that move the needle on the right business metrics.

      Here are six common goals that your digital marketing strategy can affect:

       Increasing problem and solution awareness: Your online marketing can help prospective customers become aware of something they need, an effect called problem awareness. Your marketing can also make prospective customers aware that your company provides a solution to a problem — called solution awareness. Your objective is to help people realize that you can take them from the “Before” state, in which they have a problem, to the desired “After” state, in which they have obtained a positive solution. (We cover this idea in greater detail in Chapter 1.)

       Acquiring

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