From Awareness to Advocacy: Unlocking Promotional Tactics Throughout the Sales Cycle

Focusing on customer behavior at every stage.

Introduction

As a starting point, most marketing decisions begin with a specific target customer segment in mind. As noted in previous posts, startups should select their early customers based on several criteria, including:

• the importance & urgency of the customer's needs,

• the team's access to the customer,

• the customer's ability to pay, and

• the degree they are dissatisfied with existing solutions in the marketplace.

Your early promotional strategies should be laser-focused on your selected target customer.

Once you have your target defined, consider what you want to communicate at each sales cycle stage. Your messaging comes directly from your product positioning work referenced in the marketing mix post. You must be clear about the offer and how it helps your customer. You should explain why your offer is the best choice for your customer compared to other options in the marketplace. Why is your product better, and why are you the best source to solve their problem? You want to demonstrate your understanding and fulfilling their needs throughout your messaging. 

Another essential element of your customer messaging is to clarify how they can learn more about your offer as needed and how to purchase when ready. You must provide clear calls to action points during the sales cycle. Depending on how much the customer needs to learn before making a purchase, you may need to create an intermediate call to action, such as providing ways to request additional information.

Customer Journey Maps

Creating a customer or buyer journey map is the next step once you have the message to convey to the customer. This journey map identifies all the points you believe the customer will engage your venture, from initial awareness to post-purchase services. This mapping activity is a significant step toward deciding the most effective promotional and channel strategies.

In an earlier post, I outlined the use of customer mapping to help you articulate your assumptions about the customer's experience with the problem they are trying to solve (or job to be done). Mapping the customer experience before being exposed to your solution facilitates your understanding of the customer's problem, experience with current solutions, and what benefits they expect from a better solution. You visualize the steps and actions the customer takes to solve the problem in a specific context, their challenges, and their mindset throughout the process. Experience maps look at how customers are engaging with other brands to find a solution to their problems. This information is invaluable to understanding how customers look for answers, their decision process, and current marketplace options. The focus is on the customer's experience with the problem, emphasizing all the challenges throughout the process. Your solution has not yet entered the picture.

If you applied this mapping activity earlier in your customer discovery phase, you would have a solid foundation to understand better the customer or buyer journey with your brand and solution. Customer (or buyer) journey maps focus on the customer's engagement with your brand at each touchpoint, from initial awareness through purchase and post-purchase engagement. Therefore, you should consider starting with the earlier customer experience map or beginning fresh with the sales cycle phase as the focus. 

Sales Cycle Stages

For a customer or buyer journey map, it is best to outline customer behaviors across a typical sales cycle or funnel framework. While there are many variations, I suggest you start with these four - Awareness, Consideration, Decision, and Post Purchase. You will want to provide compelling content that addresses the customer's pain points, functional and emotional needs, and desired outcomes at each stage. The information at each stage becomes increasingly more detailed. You must provide clear guidance for the customer at each step so they can move through the process seamlessly, gaining confidence in your ability to solve their problem. 

Awareness. When does your target customer become aware that you are offering a solution to their problem? Understanding this starting point can be challenging to identify how this can happen. Are your customers actively searching for a solution? What precipitated the search? Where do they look for an answer? Who do they speak with to learn about possible solutions? You will want to consider possible answers to these questions to determine the best ways to get your offer in front of your customer at the right time. As I will discuss in a future post, your solution will need to be where and when the customer needs it (and you will need to make this happen with large numbers of potential customers). 

A strong positioning statement drives your message to the customer at this stage. You need to concisely let the customer know that you understand their pain points, have an effective solution to their problem, and solve it better than others in the marketplace. The message must be compelling enough to motivate the customer to learn more about your offer. At this early juncture of the sales process, make sure that you provide a clear path to learn more about your products and brand.

Consideration. Once interested, your target customers will seek additional information to help them decide whether your solution is correct. At this sales cycle stage, you want to provide information demonstrating how your product will solve their problem. An in-depth understanding of the customer's pain points is helpful. You want to show that you understand what they are going through and possess what they need to improve their situation. 

During this phase, the customer seeks more details on how your product will solve their problem. You need to showcase how your solutions address each pain point while reinforcing that you have the capacity and expertise to deliver on your offer. The level of detail will depend on the overall complexity of the decision process. In general, customers will conduct more research on solutions that are both long-term and costly. Additionally, if the customer is already entrenched in using an alternative solution, motivating them to switch may take more effort. The proof that you can solve the problem better than existing solutions must be credible and compelling. There are many strategies to reinforce your expertise, including testimonials, case studies, educational content, and the like. Again, your understanding of your customer's experience with the problem, where they look for or who they turn to for information, can drive your content decisions.

Decision. Once your customer is leaning towards going with your product, you want to guide them through purchasing. Nothing is more frustrating to a customer than deciding to purchase something and finding it difficult. I can't tell you how many times I have tried to buy something and found it challenging to complete the transaction. 

As you guide your customer toward closing the sale, make sure that each step is straightforward and as seamless as you can make it. The more complex or costly the decision, ensure you have the proper support to answer any last-minute questions. Remember, the customer is still evaluating your capacity to solve their problem, and any cause of frustration can result in a lost sale. 

Post Purchase. Early startups do not usually focus on selling to the customer and celebrating each successful conversion. However, I consider engaging the customer after the sale even more critical for continued growth and sustainability. Data shows that acquiring new customers is six times more costly than retaining them. So there is a clear economic advantage. But there is a more compelling reason to have a successful strategy to keep existing customers happy. You want your customers to become advocates for your brand, helping you spread the word about the benefits of your solutions. 

Engaging existing customers with compelling content is essential to keep them posted on your venture, current activities, and new products. This outreach should be customer-centric in support of their needs and interests. Don't just pitch new products and services. Please take the opportunity to make them a part of a community, people with like interests and needs. 

Customer/Buyer Mapping

Applying the above sales cycle to map the customer journey provides a valuable framework for your marketing strategies. As noted earlier, you have a great start if you visualize your customer's experience before developing your solution and then validate assumptions during customer discovery. 

Start by considering your target customers' experience with the problem. Next, review your assumptions about the specific issue, the context in which they occur, and what the customer wants as a successful outcome. Finally, with this information as a foundation, you outline critical actions, behaviors, and cognitive or emotional reactions throughout the experience. If you created an earlier version of the map before developing your solution, this is an excellent time to review your initial assumptions. Have your earlier assumptions been validated during customer interviews, surveys, and other market research? 

Pain Points. Hopefully, your discovery efforts have produced a deep understanding of the customer pain points. You should have valid answers to questions like What challenges are they experiencing as they attempt to perform the task/job or solve the problem? And how important is it to the customer to solve these challenges? Demonstrating to your customer that you have a solid understanding of their challenges and solutions becomes an integral part of your promotional message. Your customer wants someone who understands their functional and emotional needs and can fulfill them in the desired manner. 

Messaging/Content. Once you have the above information gathered, you can now address how you plan to convey the value of your solution to the customer. The best way to articulate the benefits of using your solution, expected outcomes, and the steps required to acquire your solution. Your messages to the customer change as they move from awareness to consideration to final decision and post-purchase services. Content should transition from benefit highlights to a deeper dive into how the solution works. Here is when you begin to provide information about how your solutions have worked for other customers to show the efficacy of your offering. Post-purchase messaging can include additional information, including "how to use" videos and ways to stay connected to the brand and customer community. 

Call to Action. An important message to the customer relates to what they must do at each sales cycle step. You are helping them to navigate each step with clear guidance on what they are supposed to do next. In the awareness stage, you should show them how to get additional information to support the consideration phase. In this latter stage, you will move them towards making a purchase decision with information about special offers, discounts, and other incentives to get them to the final step.

Most importantly, you should provide clear guidance on how they can stay engaged with the brand after they have purchased your product. Unfortunately, many startups do little to engage their customers after purchase. This lack of engagement is a critical mistake likely leading to eventual venture stagnation. 

Touchpoints. Now that you have formulated your content strategy across the sales cycle, it is time to determine which promotional channels will be optional for delivering your message to the customer. You should have a pretty good idea of where your customer solicits their information from your customer discovery efforts. Where are their go-to information sources? Who do they ask for advice? Learning how they solve the problem will provide a good starting point for determining where to promote your solution. As with the other promotional decisions, the channels you use to reach and connect with your customer will change as they move through the sales cycle. You may use more outbound strategies, such as social media or Google ads, during your awareness campaign. As you move into the later stages of the sales cycle, you can use a more inbound approach, such as emails and direct messaging. 

Metrics of Success. The last element is what data you should collect and monitor to hit promotional goals. Many of these goals relate to the number of customers moving from one stage to another. For example, if you plan to reach customers using Google Ads, your budget and track how many customers visit your website and how many visitors purchase your product. From this information, you can determine your conversion rate for this particular promotional channel and the percentage of total visitors to your site that become paying customers.

Conclusion

This article discusses the importance of understanding the customer journey and creating effective messaging and promotional strategies at each sales cycle stage. It emphasizes the need for startups to define their target customers and tailor their marketing efforts to meet their needs. The article outlines the sales cycle stages, including awareness, consideration, decision, and post-purchase. It provides insights on engaging customers, addressing their pain points, and guiding them toward purchasing. It also highlights the significance of post-purchase engagement and the benefits of retaining existing customers. Additionally, the article emphasizes the importance of customer mapping, messaging, clear calls to action, and selecting appropriate promotional channels. Monitoring and analyzing relevant success metrics is also highlighted as a crucial aspect of effective marketing strategies.