The Customer Journey: From Prospect to Repeat Customer

Any small business digital marketing campaign aims to move the audience through the customer journey—the sixth pillar of BizHack Academy’s proven Lead Building System™.  

You do this through a clear and impactful call to action. 

The call to action puts each element of your digital marketing campaign into practice. While each pillar is important in its own way, the call to action sets your campaign in motion and helps every detail of your online ad—the audience targeting, the video, the messaging—work together to reach your campaign objective. Your online ad’s call to action encourages your prospect to transform your company from simply a blip on their news feed to a long-term relationship. 

Let’s face it— your digital advertisement’s call to action, likely a simple button that leads to a lead form or landing page, is the beginning of your prospective customer’s journey with your small business. As the culmination of your hard work constructing your digital marketing campaign, this simple button is important, and getting your customer journey right is even more critical. 

Here are BizHack’s tips and tricks for mapping the customer journey and moving your prospects and customers through that journey. 

TL;DR: Map your customer journey and move it forward. 

You need to understand your customer journey in order to move prospects through it so they become loyal customers. 

Use these tips to understand and map your customer journey:

• • Your customer’s journey with your company consists of all the touchpoints they have with you as they transition from prospect to purchaser, and on to evangelizer. It takes an average of 7–13 touchpoints before a prospect is even ready to make their first purchase. 

• Touchpoints can take a variety of different forms. Use in-person meetings, phone calls, advertisements, social media posts and referrals to grab your prospect’s attention and incite their engagement. These different methods can correspond with different stages of their journey.

• Write-out your prospect’s journey with your company and your plan to convert them. This gives your business a step-by-step plan for connecting with potential customers. 

You will move customers through their journey through calls to action. Each call to action should encourage your prospect to take the next step with your company, whether it be to fill out your lead form, check out your website or visit a landing page. 

Overall, your ad’s call to action works in tandem with your customer journey to increase your business’ operational efficiency. This means that your company is generating leads while controlling expenditures, a critical balance that must be maintained for a small business to survive and thrive.

The Stages of a Customer Journey

A customer journey consists of all the touchpoints a prospect has with your company as they transition from being a stranger to making their first purchase and becoming a long-term customer.

There are three major stages that a customer experiences as part of their journey:

• The point when they first come in contact with your brand, a stage that is usually initiated when they see a Facebook ad, visit your website hear about the company through a partner, referral or at an event. 

• The point when they make their first purchase, a stage that constitutes their conversion to being a customer of your company. 

• The long-term journey they take to becoming a loyal client of your company, a process that might take as long as a few months and usually results in your client referring their friends and family. 

In order for your customer to make their way through each of these points in their journey, they need to be exposed to a variety of content and outreach methods that tell them more about your company. These methods might include an in-person meeting, a phone call, a social media post, an e-newsletter, an advertisement or a referral. As a prospect views these pieces of content and interacts with members of your team, they learn more about your company and transition into a stage where they are ready to make a purchase. 

As you consider your customers’ journey with your company, remember that the series of events and actions required to convert a prospect to a customer may be different for every individual you interact with. For each persona you market to, consider their individual characteristics and use this uniqueness to map a customer journey that is customized to them. 

The Call to Action: Kick Off the Customer Journey

Calls to action are how you move prospects through their customer journey. Each call to action should encourage a prospect to take the next step with your company. 

Usually, the customer journey is kicked off by a call to action in an online ad or another piece of content. 

Oftentimes, the call to action sends an online user to a lead form or landing page, thus completing the first stage in a customer journey and integrating this individual into an in-depth marketing plan. 

But what happens next? 

In reality, this initial online engagement with your business is only the tip of the iceberg. After this point, there may be an average of 7–13 more touchpoints that they experience before they finally make the decision to purchase a product or service with your company. Along the way, calls to actions must drive them to continue researching and engaging with your business. 

Mapping Your Customer Journey

Once you have considered the potential pathways your customer can take through a series of calls to action, you can begin crafting a comprehensive customer journey. This series of steps can be distinctive to your company and should illustrate your in-depth plan to market to a specific persona and convert them to a loyal customer. 

In many circumstances, small business marketers can mark a prospect’s online exposure to their company through an advertisement or website as the initial step that kick-starts their journey. Participants in BizHack Academy’s Digital Marketer’s Edge Course, conduct a real-life campaign using Facebook ads. A customer viewing a small business Facebook ad is the first stage of the customer journey developed during the course.

From this first exposure to a prospect, you can categorize pieces of content and outreach methods into the different stages of the customer journey. This is how you progressively expose your prospect to your company. 

Use authoritative calls to actions to move customers through the awareness, consideration, conversion and loyalty stages of the marketing funnel. 

The key to a well-rounded customer journey is follow-up. Don’t let your prospect forget about your company! Your goal in this series of engagements is to receive a clear answer from your potential customer—either “Yes, I’d like to do business with you,” or “No, I am not interested.” A “maybe” is simply a no that lengthens the marketing process, so aim to keep your customer journey as concise as possible. 

Once you have analyzed your customer personas and the marketing funnel in terms of your digital marketing goals, we recommend writing out your customer journey and working out any kinks. Online software like draw.io and Miro offer high-quality flow chart templates to make this process cleaner, but most people find it easier to quickly sketch this out by hand. 

With the implementation of an established, clear and simplified customer journey, your small business can work to streamline, simplify, delegate, automate and integrate your business processes. You will also be able to invest in better tools that make your daily lead generation operations run more smoothly. 

Tips and Tricks for an Effective Call to Action

While constructing a comprehensive customer journey is an important part of crafting an effective call to action, there are still some challenges to keep in mind and work to remedy. 

Common challenges with calls to action:

• Both the first sale and the upsell will have a period called the “messy middle.” This is when the customer is still researching your company and deciding if they would like to make a purchase. During this stage, aim to encourage your prospect to make an explicit decision as to whether they wish to engage with your business. This will help avoid dragging out the conversion process. 

• Remember that each persona has their own map. Keep in mind your prospect’s specific characteristics and implement these into your strategy. 

• Include all of the typical touchpoints before a customer makes a purchase. Make sure your prospect is exposed to all the information they need to make a decision quickly and easily. 

• There is no such thing as the “ideal journey.” The customer journey isn’t linear, as many customers return to early touchpoints to evaluate conducting business with your company. Remember that your prospects’ engagement may not be typical or by the book, and that’s okay. 

• The customer journey for B2B companies may be longer than for B2C companies. Some prospects may take 6, 12, or even 18 months to convert. Keep in mind that the size of the potential sales warrants a little extra effort on your end. 

One of the most important benefits of implementing a customer journey map with clear calls to action into your marketing strategy is the preservation of operation efficiency, which refers to a balance between lead generation and healthy spending practices. This metric is critical to keeping your business’ doors open.

As you implement the Six Pillars of the BizHack Academy Lead Building System™ into your small business marketing, keep your digital marketing campaign organized and focused using calls to action and your customer journey map. With your digital marketing benefitting both your customer and your business, you’ll have the tools and support to ensure that your company is not just surviving, but actually thriving.