Robert Rose, CMI chief strategy advisor, loves to reset his audience’s brains with a truth bomb:
The purpose of a business is to create a customer.
This 60-year-old quote from management great Peter Drucker reminds marketers that their work – creating demand, generating traffic, prompting social shares, or even gathering leads — is in service of this one clear goal. It’s a refreshing pause button on all the distracting possibilities available.
Sulte Group CEO Teju Owoye takes the customer-creation concept one ambitious step further.
Your content can create a self-replicating referral engine, as Teju shares in her Content Marketing World presentation Accelerating Growth by Hacking Your Conversion Journey.
To get there, though, you first must help users learn to love the product or service they just signed up for.
Don’t stop building relationships at conversion
In the conventional sales and marketing funnel, marketing teams work on building awareness and nurturing prospects so some become leads and some eventually purchase a product or service. It’s tempting to celebrate those wins.
“It’s super exciting that you’ve got the customer to purchase your product, your service, engage with your platform,” Teju says.
But, what most marketers call “conversions” are truly a relatively minor transactional event that signals the start of a change. What happens next can determine who does the bulk of your future funnel-filling work — you or your happy customers.
“Marketers need to be intimately involved post-conversion to make sure that the customer is not only utilizing the product, but they become evangelists — and they’re referring their counterparts, their friends, their family, whoever is in their sphere of influence,” Teju says.
To boost growth, Teju suggests you guide the newly converted (through personalized content delivered at key moments) to become a different kind of customer – an active user who gets so much value from your product or service that the impulse to share it with others is almost irresistible.
Change how you view the buyer’s journey
What if, instead of applauding a conversion, a transaction, or a sale, you view a new subscriber or buyer as beginning the journey? What if you devoted the same measure of consideration and resources to new customers as to your red-hot leads? The traditional funnel changes to something more like this:
The right side is what Teju calls “our new job as marketers … making sure that the consumer has a delightful experience and is unlocking value at critical points while using your product.”
Get inside customers’ hearts and heads
To understand how best to guide your new customers toward this value, ask these familiar questions:
- What is it about our favorite product or service that make customers really love it?
- How does it make their lives easier?
- How does the brand respond when they have questions or problems?
- How does the product or service assimilate into or effect other aspects of their lives?
Then add a new, somewhat mind-bending question:
- Does their behavior change because of how they feel about the user experience? Or do their feelings change because of the new behavior once equipped with the product?
Good consumer sentiment prompts behavioral change. It’s no surprise that when customers feel a…
