We know we want to go faster and automate everything!

Though, before you start considering ways to automate your business, you first have to decide exactly where your priorities are.

But really, you only need to think what is the important spaces you need help in right now? and How this aligns to your goals and strategy.

It’s important to create specific goals and make an automation strategy.

Once you do this, it’s easy to figure out exactly what you need automated and how you’re going to go about doing it.

Though, there is a critical part of the process that you need to identify before you go and start automating.

This is your Customer Journey. 

The way to do this is to identify which parts of the sales process you want to automate, and exactly what goals you hope to achieve. 

Broadly speaking, there are four key phases of the sales process that the customer goes through Awareness, Consideration/Engagement, Conversion and Retention. In simple words, Let’s consider each of these separately.

Awareness: Finding You

The awareness phase of the sales process is where you spread awareness of your brand to potential customers. 

The idea during this phase is to simply get the word out and lead people to want to find out more.

At the awareness stage, you don’t have customers yet. 

You have website visitors, store foot traffic, people watching advertisements, and so on.

This is the equivalent and doing flyers in the street, the main difference is that we want to be very effective and share our expertise at this stage.

These people are coming into contact with your brand and your content for the first time. They’re exploring, not buying.

The focus here is to Educate.

Things that you might automate in order to spread awareness of your brand could be blogging, social media, keyword placement, driving web traffic, forms on your website where visitors can sign up for your email list, and so on.

Consideration / Engagement: Talking to You

This phase of the sales process is where potential customers are “kicking the tires.”

From the initial awareness phase, you bring these leads closer to the sale by providing them with information about your products and services and engaging with them on a personal level.

A good example of engagement is connecting and communicating with prospects through social media. 

When you provide content to your potential customers through posts or shares, you’re engaging them. When they feel that they are ready to buy the products or services you offer, they’re likely to buy from you.

There are many opportunities for marketing automation here, from sending follow-up emails to having online schedulers making the process of talking to you super easy!

If you’re providing content, freebies, and deals to customers through an email list, every aspect of this list will be automated. Landing pages, sign-up forms, requests for information, and content creation and distribution can be automated.

Here we want to make it easy to talk to you! Usually an appointment system.

Conversion: Buying from You

The conversion phase is simple. It is here that you transform prospects into customers. 

This is where your prospect takes action. By this time, the prospect has developed a strong interest in your product or service by interacting with your content and more likely you!

A conversion could be a sale or a phone appointment, or it could be a click-through, a re-post, a share, or whatever other action you want your prospect to take. 

More importantly, here we want to make sure it becomes easy to buy from you.

At this phase, you can automate your call-to-action, landing pages, forms, contact lists and databases that automatically send out emails with offers, lead scoring and reporting.

Retention: Your Deliver

Finally, post-conversion, you have to follow up with your customers and maintain a relationship with them in order to generate repeat business. 

Not only that but to engage your client so they consume your program and get results!

At this stage, the prospect is now a customer and you need to keep them engaged and interested.

You can automate customer retention with social media, new offers, email marketing, new content, up-selling, and so on.

The key part here is to automate the results, online courses, weekly sessions bookings, sessions rescheduling, videos, forums interactions, etc. Whatever you can think of to make your customer get results.

As we go through each category of automation, keep the different phases of your sales process in mind since you’ll need to decide how you’ll apply automation in different ways.

The customer journey is often taken for granted and businesses often resort to social media post boosts and other shortcuts, but they’re never effective. This is why it’s important to understand your audience and how they interact with your brand. This is what will take your business to the next level.

Action Point:

Go through these steps, understand it and then prioritise.

For example, if you are getting a ton of leads and low conversions, then maybe the conversion system needs some work.

Or you are getting flooded with clients and the delivery is starting to suffer, then we work on this.

Or you have no leads, then you work on how to maximise your time on getting people to find you!

So, what is your customer’s journey? Share it with me!