Have you visualized your customer journey? Do all the elements in your customer journey work to drive maximum revenue to your business?
Your customer journey starts with the first impression your brand makes on your target audience, whether through search engine presence, paid advertising, or digital PR, moving down multiple touchpoints that your brand creates. Finally, your target audience becomes a customer and your brand’s loyalist.
Watch Overdrive CEO, Harry J. Gold map and visualize a complete Account-Based Marketing (ABM) customer journey from banner ads through nurture, all the way to close.
Video Transcript
“But this is not what the world sees, right? This isn’t what your customers see. What your customers see, what your customers travel along, is a customer journey. And this is what we’re going to talk about. This is at the heart of Always-On ABM (Account-Based Marketing). ABM is not just a single ad pointed at a targeted consumer or targeted business consumer. ABM and Always-On ABM is about a customer journey and an always-on customer journey. So here’s an example of a customer journey.
Here is Anna. She’s a chief information security officer or CISO leader. And we are advertising to Anna on behalf of RSA with paid search, display, and of course, LinkedIn. And we’re offering a report on the state of cybercrime. And you know that RSA is one of the largest and most well-known, best-known security brands out there. They run the RSA Conference, or they started the RSA conference. So, if they put out a cybersecurity report, people typically want it. It’s a good mouth-of-the-funnel asset
We land Anna, our CISO leader, on this landing page where we’re showing the cover of the report. And obviously, we’re encouraging her to fill out the form. And then something magical happens. The first time your target audience lands on your website, it’s an important moment. Why? Because we’re shaking hands with them for the first time. We’re setting all these cookies on their browsers. And, of course, we’re tracking the clicks.
Anna lands here, we set all these cookies, she fills out the form, and then we give her this nice Thank You page. We’re not just like, hey, here’s the white paper, or we emailed you the white paper, you can go now. We’re like, no, here’s the white paper. Oh, and by the way, here’s an engaging video. Here’s more navigation. Let’s keep Anna engaged. Let’s not have her go back to Google and click on our competitors’ ads, right?
After that, now the sort of customer journey starts.
We automatically fire off an auto-reply email from sales. And then, of course, all that information goes into the stack.
Anna does not respond to phone calls or emails from the sales reps. So, what do we do now? We’re going to nurture her. And it’s not just any nurture; it’s not just nurturing Anna with email. We have a cookie on Anna’s browser, and we have her email address. So now we can do retargeting and custom audience targeting and LinkedIn and places like that. We’re really surrounding Anna with our brand and our content. She is getting emails, she sees LinkedIn ads, and she sees display ads. It’s a real always-on ABM program that’s pulling Anna into our brand embrace and surrounding her with our brand and content.
And what are we doing? We’re selling the conversation to Anna. We’re trying to get her to request a demo.
Now, Anna does finally say, okay, after watching some videos and consuming different white papers, I’ll request a demo. She goes to this demo landing page, she fills out the form, and now the sales rep can go look at our whole engagement history and lead score, have the meeting close the deal, and loop that backs into the stack and put it in a nice dashboard.
This is an entire customer journey- I know it seems like a lot. But a lot of these higher-consideration technology products have a long sales cycle. You really want to stay with your prospect in an always-on way.
There’s another thing that I want to talk about here. When you do journey mapping like this, sometimes you’re standing up a new journey, but sometimes you go in, and this journey might exist, but it might have been already built by someone who’s not even at the company anymore.
So, when we lay out these customer journeys, a couple of magical things happen.
- How everything integrates together is instantly revealed to you.
- The high points of optimization are going to jump out at you where your media can be better? Where your landing pages can be better? What emails aren’t getting high open or click-through rates? What banners aren’t getting high click-through rates
All these things can be A/B tested and can be done across your customer journey.
This is how you get amazing results. Not just doing one optimization action but by doing cross-channel optimization, looking across your whole journey and saying hey, what can I improve right now? Also, the things that are broken, are going to jump out at you right away. And I’ve never seen a journey that wasn’t broken very often. Pages aren’t rendering, content is obsolete, APIs between MarTech isn’t connected, so your tracking isn’t working, or your leads aren’t flowing into the right place, or they have not been auto-segmented. There are so many things that can go wrong.
What we do for our clients is usually go in, map out the whole journey, and then see what can be fixed very quickly. And what this provides are early wins, which can be rectified immediately. You are already improving things by fixing what is broken and applying best practices to those high points of optimization.”
Want to analyze your customer journey or learn how our SEO services can maximize annual revenue? Let Overdrive interactive audit your customer journey by breaking down the essential ingredients that take a prospect from impression to sale and recommend what tactics you can employ to improve campaign performance and sales velocity. Click to request a Customer Journey Audit.
