Think of your customer as the hero on a journey. Use content to guide them to your solution.
LIKE AT FIRST SIGHT
The people you’d like to reach are going about their business, chatting with friends on social media, shopping online, reading the news, etc. when your SEO savvy pays off and they see your content, which has an irresistible call-to-action that links to your site. BOOM! This is your opportunity to make a good first impression.
FRIENDLY NUDGE
If your visitors liked what they saw on your website, hopefully you enticed them to share their email address in exchange for some valuable content. Treat that email address with the greatest respect. Don’t annoy its owner by sending an unsolicited sales pitch, and by all means, don’t ever share it without permission. Do follow up with any requested information and leverage that interaction to entice them with something else they might need/want.
KEEP CONVERSATION GOING
Continue to personalize communication as much as possible based on your audience’s specific goals and interests. Make sure your marketing, sales, and support teams have worked together closely to define when a lead gets passed off from marketing to sales to customer relationship management.
AUTOMATION CAN HELP OR HINDER
There are lots of technology tools to facilitate communications and analysis and keep teams aligned, but only if the processes have been thoughtfully planned with everyone’s buy-in upfront. If you can’t map out what you want to do on a whiteboard, then no technology is going to help. Customer (or partner) journey management starts and ends with understanding human behavior and how to break big goals into small tasks.
