Marketing Your Small Business to New Customers

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SPEAKER: At its core, marketing is an ongoing effort
to create meaning for your customers.
It answers questions like why should my customers
buy from my company?
What's in it for them?
What makes your product, services, and company great?
Why should they listen to your advice?
What's your back story?
Storytelling helps impart meaning
to your products and brand.
It can connect customers with your business
on an emotional level.
When customers buy from you, you want them to feel really good
about their purchase.
Your marketing should be about building relationships,
developing trust and credibility so that your customers
want to buy from you.
Staying in touch throughout the customer journey
will help them think of you first.
It's useful to think of marketing
as a funnel, a process to take people who are unfamiliar
with your products or services and turn them
into paying customers.
Overall, a main goal of the marketing funnel
is to help a business accomplish their goals,
whether that be for profit, revenue,
new customers, or something else important to your business.
The first benefit of this framework
is that it considers the customer journey.
Instead of trying random marketing strategies
or sticking with a plan that focuses only on sales,
the marketing funnel encourages you
to consider the experience a buyer has with the brand.
The customer journey is the sum of the experiences
consumers go through when interacting with a brand.
Awareness is the first phase, when a potential customer
discovers you, maybe through word of mouth, a Google
Search, or an ad.
Next, they may move into the consideration phase.
This is when consumers weigh whether they'll
buy from your competitor, whether they'll
buy your type of product or something similar,
or whether they'll buy at all.
If the consumer decides to become your customer,
they move into the conversion phase.
They may buy one thing or many things
over a lifetime, which brings me to the final phase, loyalty.
This is when customers are so thrilled with their experience
that they turn to your brand first
and they recommend it to others.
For this course, we're going to focus on a four-stage marketing
funnel--
awareness, consideration, conversion, and loyalty.
Your job as a marketer is to influence customers
at every phase of the customer journey.
At the awareness phase, your marketing
is focused on reaching consumers where they are.
So they become aware of your brand.
During consideration, your marketing
is about engaging potential customers
by answering questions and building relationships.
In the conversion phase, your marketing
is about influencing your leads, converting them
into paying customers.
And lastly, sustaining contact with customers
who had a good experience can build loyalty and turn them
into brand advocates.
At every phase of the customer journey,
you have the opportunity to persuade
them to move forward with you.
The better the marketing, the greater
the influence and the longer the journey.
The customer journey may begin when someone needs something
and they turn to a Google Search.
Awareness could also be triggered
through word of mouth, advertising, trade show
marketing, or other types of communication.
No matter how your customers find you,
they'll likely continue their research
by searching for your business online.
To reach prospective customers, you first
need to understand who they are so you know how to reach them.
Start by identifying who needs your products.
Then build a brand that sparks their interest.
Once you've defined your ideal market and built a solid brand,
get your business online.
Once consumers discover your brand,
some move into the next phase of the customer
journey, consideration.
Here you can guide customers through the process
of evaluating your brand, engaging and influencing
them to learn more about you.
During the consideration phase, customers
are deciding whether or not they want to do business with you.
They're evaluating your brand compared to other choices
and gathering information to help
them decide what or if to buy.
Your marketing strategy is to provide answers
to their questions and other details
to help them in their evaluation.
Engaging your customers during the consideration phase
is crucial.
Learn about their needs and wants by listening to them,
asking questions, and having meaningful conversations.
Spend time communicating and delivering valuable information
and content to your customers.
Your goal during this phase is to build interest and desire
in your customer so they want to develop a deeper and longer
relationship with your brand.
Once your marketing has addressed the awareness
and consideration phases of the customer journey,
you should have some leads who have become prospects
and are ready to become paying customers.
In this phase, your job as a marketer
is to influence these leads and prospects to become
paying customers, a process called conversion.
To convert customers, you need to figure out
which leads are most likely to become customers and focus
your marketing efforts on them.
To do this, you need to identify the key customer actions that
lead to conversion.
Then share the right marketing messages
in a timely call to action to encourage the purchase
with those ready customers.
Finally, you'll convert more customers
when you streamline the purchase process
and make it as easy as possible for them.
We are now on the final phase of the customer journey, loyalty.
As in the other phases, you can influence your customers'
actions through focused marketing that
sustains loyalty and encourages them to recommend you
to others.
By giving your customers more to consume
and making their experiences great,
you can sustain their business and earn their loyalty.
Loyal customers think of your brand over all others.
This will help encourage them to promote your brand and products
to people they know, helping you reach new customers.
All customers are not created equal.
A customer who stays interested and engaged with your brand
and continues shopping with you has a lot of value
to your business.
So how do you create more of these types of customers?
By providing more value to them.
You might do this through consistently excellent customer
service, new products, as well as different programs
and incentives.
Ultimately, you want to keep your customers happy,
engaged, and buying from you.
Happy customers will often naturally tell
others about their experiences.
But you can also nudge them to do this more
with some focused marketing.
You can identify customers who are ready for this phase based
on their conversions, how long they've been a customer,
and if they're speaking out on social channels
about your brand.
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