Notes From The Talk

In this podcast, we’re addressing some of the most common problems that come up in digital marketing

1. Spending lots of money on a campaign with a very little conversion
2. Or running a great campaign that generates great interest but then for some reason customers turn away and don’t pay because someone else has made the sale and we have no idea why…

Why we need Customer Journeys? – The fact is that the way we make purchasing decisions has completely changed over the last decade. – In the past, we used to go to the store, speak to the shopkeeper, understand what they had, get more information from the retail person and make a decision inside the store. – That behaviour has completely changed since the iPhone. We’re humans, we still need that information and we still need to understand what’s on the market and some of us still like going to the store, but what has changed is WHERE we make that decision to buy or not to buy. – According to Google, in 2016 only 12% of people were making their purchasing decision in the actual store. Only 12% guys and that was in 2016…. 4 stages of online shopping:

1. Something sparks their interest and the product or a service comes to their awareness. Whether it’s a marketing campaign or a recommendation, something comes to their awareness circle.
2. Once customers are interested, they start searching for it more proactively
3. And then once they find the selection of providers, the more detailed research comes in which is more around reputation and reviews, confirming the last couple of options that they are thinking about and this is really when they make their decision to purchase or not to purchase. This happens online a lot but can also include visits to a physical store if there is one to ask questions and get a feel and touch of the product.
4. The actual purchase online or in the store is basically just a transaction now, it’s not that point where they’re making that decision. You’ll see this very commonly in JB-HiFi. People walk into the store and within 5-10 minutes they’re walking out with a brand new MacBook. You don’t really think they made that $3,000 decision within those 10 minutes, do you?

– So what does this mean for digital marketing? It means that your online presence is no longer just about having a store and running a campaign but it’s about understanding your customers’ behaviours on a deeper level to make sure that you’re there when they’re making their decision. Customer Journey Definition – And all a Customer Journey is, is a collection of steps customers take along the way when interacting with your business and/or a brand. As marketers, we want to know this journey In details so that we can have the right message delivered at the right time along that journey… 3 KEY THINGS that make the difference to customer journeys… First thing – You MUST understand how your customers make decisions. -To build an effective Journey that will help you convert at the end of it, you MUST know and understand how your customers behave and how they make decisions. Example

• A couple of years ago, I was helping one of the big banks improve the way they were acquiring a certain segment of their customers which they were calling young adults. It was mainly people at uni or fresh out of uni.
• Now they are a bank so their marketing budget was quite high and they were doing all of these cool things with big budgets but somehow they weren’t converting enough customer and out of those they converted, there was a huge proportion of people who didn’t use that account at all. It was free, so there was no cost involved for the student. However, the costs for the bank at this point were quite significant. They spent money on a cool campus lounge, Facebook advertising, email marketing, SEO etc. and all of these were featuring young people and something ‘cool’ that they thought people were interested in… and yet, very little result….
• So with a bit of research, I got to the bottom of it and helped them understand why.
• It turns out that when these customers were going through their research journey there were particular things they were looking for. They were mainly millennials so of course, they were looking to be connected and have an easy app to do that. But it turns out that was almost everyone by then. And the next 2 things they were looking for were nothing any of the big banks were marketing for and that was some sort of contribution to the society and easy access to foreign money. You see, it turned out that the big banks started to lose a huge amount of new customers to credit unions and independent providers because they were communicating contribution to the society and were offering free withdrawals overseas. So one of the recommendations, of course, was to offer those free overseas withdrawals to this particular segment or communicate how to avoid those withdrawal fees because otherwise, people weren’t going to stick around. And when it comes to community service, I know, the big banks don’t really have that great reputation when it comes to being seen as ‘good’ and that’s not so easy to change, however what was super easy to change was the communication of the fact that all bank employees were given some time, I think it’s 1 week/year or so to do community work and as a result, it created a huge contribution to the society these students had no idea about. And that was super easy to change. Rather than focus on attracting young adults on their journey through something ‘cool’, understanding how these people make their decision was critical to the success of the campaign.

– In the world of Customer Experience, we also call this type of understanding Outside-in viewpoint. – You see, lots of businesses are building customer journeys to improve their ROI and in their mind, they think that they’re following customers’ decisions, but instead they’re building what we call touchpoints, which is a sequence they can control. Second thing – OK, the second thing you must learn and incorporate into your customer journeys is the understanding of your customers’ significant events and how are they feeling in relation to these events. There are 4 main ingredients: the Event, Pain, delight, opportunity (for you to add value) – What you basically need to do is understand the main milestones of when you (potential) customers are feeling pain, when they’re feeling delighted or happy and how could you connect to them at those particular milestones to really make them see that you can add lots of value. Whether it’s removing the pain or acknowledging the delight. – This will help you to really make a difference with your marketing campaigns and help you make your competitors irrelevant in the battle for customer acquisition. Example – Our main customer is Sally, who is engaged, has no kids and wants to do something with her money but she doesn’t know what to do and how to do it. – So what we want to do is build an effective customer journey for a customer like Sally that would give us an understanding of how we can add value and address Sally’s pains and delights. – In this case, we would first look at the first milestone when the relationship with Sally is coming into the picture. After doing customer research and speaking to customers who are just like Sally, we find some patterns and here they are:

1. First promotion at the age of 25, very proud, celebrating with family, but also disappointed that after tax the money is not that different.
2. Purchasing the first property at the age of 28. Very excited about that and about independence but it turns out that there is a major pain- property was quite expensive and in the heat of the auction moment, she paid more than she wanted to initially….
3. Another major promotion at the age of 32. Promotions are no longer fun and it’s normally too little a little too late.. she’s fed up with the corporate world and looking for options to get out asap…

– And whilst there are many ways how to address these milestones with different channels, messages, tools and offers, what is really important to understand here is that these are the milestones that are important to our customer in this case and you need to understand what are those milestones for your customers, when they feel pain, when they are happy and think about how the business you’re working for could add value. That dramatically increases how you connect with your customers. Third thing – And the third thing you must learn and incorporate into your customer journeys is the understanding of the end to end customer relationship with your business – You see the problem businesses face quite often is that customers go through the whole new purchasing journey with them, the steps we talked about before- awareness, looking for a provider and doing their research but then at the very end, they decide to go with competitor who pops up at the very end…. All marketing effort lost, effort was thrown out, basically campaign paid for a competitor… – The reason why this happens is that in the past, businesses are traditionally departmentalised… So you have someone looking after pre-purchase (usually that is the marketing team), someone else looks after the purchase or a closure (that’s normally the sales team) and someone else looks after the post-purchase (which is typically the operations team or the customer service team). – And this departmentalisation is getting people to work in silos and getting people to work on their small part of the business which traditionally worked quite well but it doesn’t anymore. – And the reason why it doesn’t anymore is very simple- customer reviews. You see in the very last part of the customer decision-making process is checking the credibility of the provider and one of the ways how they do that is through customer reviews. And your campaign might be the best ever but if the customer is coming with you all the way and then suddenly comes across reviews they don’t like, the whole effort is basically donated to your competitors. – This means that in the past, it was the customer service job to look after customers and it was the marketing and sales job to sell and they were not that affected by one another, but these days, it doesn’t work that way anymore. – A few years ago I came across a B2B software client who had amazing marketing campaigns. But their fulfilment wasn’t so great because they were always focussing on customer acquisition and as a result, they had some terrible and I mean terrible reviews… these reviews were preventing them from acquiring the number of customers they were after… so what did they do? You’d think that they decided to fix their service but no, they decided to pump more money into marketing and make their campaigns bigger and better which temporarily increased their flow of new customers but because they couldn’t deliver on it, they had more bad reviews and the circle continued just got bigger…. Can you see my point here? You really need to understand the end to end relationship and work with your fulfilment team together closely to make sure that you’re looking at an end to end customer journey and not just your little bit. So it’s really important that when you’re creating your campaigns and customer journeys that you collaborate with all the parts of your organisation – not just marketing and sales. Just a small recap. The way people buy has completely changed. People no longer make their decisions in the store. They make their decisions online and therefore digital marketing is your #1 weapon you need to operate with. In order to make your digital marketing as good as possible, you need to understand your customers and the easiest way to do that is to build Customer Journeys. All a Customer Journey is, is a collection of steps customers take along the way when interacting with your business and/or a brand. The 3 things you need to know about building customer journeys are:

1. You must understand how your customers behave & make decisions. You need to think from outside-in perspective which is the customer perspective. You need to understand “What value is the customer seeking that’s critical to their decision-making process and we’re not offering it? “
2. You must understand how your customers feel and when are they feeling it. Your journey needs to incorporate major customer milestones, pains and delights. This will help you understand how you’re adding value and how to position your marketing message.
3. You must understand what the end to end customer relationship with your business. There is no point of running a marketing campaign for your competitors. So make sure you understand what happens after your campaign and that customers are delivered what they were promised.