If you are reading this article, chances are that you know something about Ryan Deiss and his Customer Value Journey. Ryan literally built a marketing education empire on the concept of this framework.

It’s so important to the DigitalMarketer community that he even has the original napkin version framed like a relic to be viewed like the Mona Lisa.

My name is James Bullis. I am a Marketing Technologist / Webmaster with over 25 years in the industry.
I remember when I first learned about this concept around 15 years ago.

It was originally called Customer Value Optimization and had an entirely different structure. I’m a web designer and when I started working in this industry I started out in marketing.

When I became a web designer, I didn’t understand that a business web design is a part of a business’
marketing plan. After learning more about marketing, I realized how I could put these concepts into the website and use them to create a better website experience for my customers’ website visitors.

Then the along came the Customer Value Journey (CVJ) which was a fundamental upgrade and made the entire foundational framework make more sense. It essentially closed the loop and created an endless flywheel of customers if applied correctly.

It really played well in helping to understand how a business website should be laid out so that the traffic could be funneled through the Customer Value Journey.

The CVJ is not the only part of this foundational framework. It is usually accompanied by an Ideal Client Avatar and the Before & After exercise. Essentially, you need to understand who you want to help and be able to empathize with them to discover how you can bring value by easing their pain.

But there is a real problem when it comes to the CVJ that I have noticed over the years. It seems to me that no one will sit down and do it.

Do I know this for a fact? No. But, I can guess with some authority that most people who have learned this framework skip over it in practice.

This became obvious to me some years ago inside of DigitalMarketer Engage – the Facebook group of people who have spent some time and money with DigitalMarketer to engage with other members to talk about the frameworks, get advice, and learn from each other.

You could always tell when a fresh wave of members would join because the same questions were asked repeatedly.

These were questions that could simply be answered if they took the time to go through the process of completing these exercises for each new campaign or business that they started to work on as marketers.

I don’t know why people skip over these foundational steps. The framework itself along with the worksheets probably make the concept seem simple and insignificant but it is a powerful exercise that will save you a ton of time, money, and resources.

Years ago, DigitalMarketer invited people to a conference in Austin to learn some amazing new concepts that were going to change the way we thought about digital marketing.

I was excited. I packed up. Headed to Texas. Arrived at the event. Sat down. Excited to learn something new when the guys came out and began talking about…the CVJ. The avatar. The before and after exercise.

I was a bit dumbfounded and a little bit angry at myself when I realized that this framework…was the secret. And I realized that I was not taking the time to do these exercises.

I realized that I wanted to spend my time learning about these frameworks and exercises but I myself was not implementing them. I did something drastic when I left that event. I went home and disconnected myself from everything DigitalMarketer and I decided that I wouldn’t invest in learning any new concepts until I started with these fundamentals.

For years, I worked on numerous projects, and I took a stand to make sure that we sat down and did the work. This is what I discovered.

Why the Customer Value Journey Is STILL Essential

The CVJ is essential because it answers the most important questions that everyone who works with a
business needs to know:

1. Who Do You Help?
2. How Do You Help?
3. Why Does It Matter?

It’s also important because it puts this information in a format that can be shared with anyone who works on a business including sales, marketing, and technology. If my clients already had a CVJ for their business when I started designing and building a new website for them, it would be so much easier to create a website that actually gets results.

If the information that is contained in a CVJ were given to a graphic designer, marketing contractor, customer service rep, sales rep, consultant, anyone…this would make working the clients and ensuring their success so much easier. We call it greasing the skids because it makes it outlines everything that needs to be done in a simple to understand and comprehend format.

After using this framework on any new projects, I don’t know how I could realistically provide value to my clients if I didn’t help them create their CVJ.

The CVJ Is an Experiment in Marketing

Everything that we do in marketing is an experiment. Every little decision we make is a series of experiments that lead us to always be optimizing. No matter how far we’ve come, we can always do it better. For that reason, the CVJ is more of a living document that changes over time as the campaigns that you work on. A business can have multiple CVJs.

Think about it. You can get this process wrong because chances are you and your customer are just guessing about what will work. The more you do it, the easier it will be for you to ensure your customer’s success, but chances are, if you are creating a CVJ for a customer, they probably never completed one before and these concepts are new.

You can get it wrong. In fact, you can get it wrong and waste time, money, and resources by targeting the wrong people. Last year, I did a session with a client where we went through the process of mapping out their Ideal Customer Avatar, Before & After Exercise, and CVJ.

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For months we created content, updated the website, and ran social media campaign. It wasn’t until we expanded on these exercises with AI that we realized that we were targeting the wrong prospect. Now we can avoid that.

The CVJ Is Easier To Create Than Ever with AI

If I were to ask a group of marketers why they did not use a framework to conduct their marketing, I would imagine that the main consensus would be that the act of sitting down with your client and getting a full understanding of these concepts is not something that you or your client really want to do.

In the mind of the client, you should just know this information (by some miracle). The reality is that every business is different and while you may be able to repeat the concepts in these exercises, having the exercises completed and documented will save you a lot of time and heartache in the long run.

I love the quote from Lincoln that says, “If given six hours to chop down a tree, I would spend the first four sharpening my axe.”

This concept is true in so many aspects of business but as I said before, if you take the time to document the CVJ, ICA, and Before and After exercise, you will be so far along that you’ll make your life a lot easier.

Well, now we have this thing called AI. And what I have discovered about AI is that it is really suited to help solve this problem. In fact, now that I have started to use AI to help create this foundation, I can’t help but generate the concepts, expand on them, and make some of the most focused content that speaks directly to the prospect.

The CVJ framework is essential to success as a marketer. Now with the help of AI tools, you can take any framework and inject it with steroids to create comprehensive marketing foundation that can literally transform your marketing campaigns.

Not only can you generate expanded versions of these foundational frameworks, but you can now use them to reference when creating content to build awareness and increase engagement with your audience.

The dawn of AI in digital marketing is an exciting one, offering boundless opportunities to strengthen and streamline the strategies we use. Leveraging the capabilities of AI, the creation and application of foundational frameworks such as the Customer Value Journey (CVJ), Ideal Client Avatar (ICA), and the Before & After exercise, can be profoundly amplified.

Gone are the days where marketers neglect these critical steps due to their time-consuming nature or the perceived complexity. With AI, we are able to enhance these processes, reduce the margin for error, and ultimately deliver more targeted and impactful content.

In my personal journey as a web designer turned marketing technologist, I have seen the value these tools bring to the table, but also witnessed their neglect. Utilizing AI, we can change this trend, ensuring that these valuable resources are used to their fullest potential.

By taking the time to implement these tools properly, we not only provide immense value to our clients but also create a better experience for the end user, leading to more successful marketing campaigns.

As digital marketers, we have an exciting path ahead of us. Armed with the transformative power of AI, we can take the wisdom encapsulated in the CVJ and other frameworks and unleash it on a grander scale than ever before.

In an era where every business decision is becoming data-driven, the advent of AI ensures that the nuances of human insight remain central to our marketing strategies.

It allows us to balance the scales between data and empathy, between efficiency and effectiveness, and, ultimately, between the business and the customer. So, as we step into the future of digital marketing, let us remember to carry these valuable lessons forward, and embrace the tools that AI provides to augment our journey.

The post AI Has Made the Customer Value Journey More Powerful: Here’s Why appeared first on DigitalMarketer.

Today, consumers have an increasing number of options for how to interact with your brand. These include virtual channels like social media and influencer marketing.

While it’s great that technology has provided us with plenty of new methods and marketing tactics, it also means you need to up your game. As a result, customers are placing a higher value on the overall shopping experience than ever before. 

The way your brand presents itself at various touch points is a major factor in conversions. Customer journey optimization works to raise overall customer satisfaction (CSAT) and promotes growth in your business. 

What is customer journey optimization?

Optimizing the customer journey involves mapping out and analyzing every touchpoint in the buying process. You can then improve the buyer’s journey by eliminating friction at each of these.

This encompasses all available touchpoints, including digital advertising, content and social media marketing. Customer journey optimization improves processes behind the camera, so to speak, so your brand, team, and products can be the stars of the show. 

Benefits of customer journey optimization

When you optimize the customer journey, you stand to gain several benefits.

Save money

Mapping out the customer journey paints a clear picture of your current marketing and sales strategies. You can easily identify redundancies and remove these by analyzing them from an outside viewpoint. Long story short is that you’ll save money on operational costs and labor. 

For example, simple customer actions like order tracking might be better and more efficiently managed by a virtual receptionist, freeing your team up to work on tasks that are more obviously profitable, such as sales.  

Increase productivity

Customer journey optimization helps you cut out the fat. A well-trimmed buying process is much more efficient when it comes to how your team members’ time is used. By focusing their efforts on the most valuable touchpoints and prospect interactions, they’ll be able to generate more leads and conversions in less time. 

Part of this optimization might mean investing in software that gives the customer more control over their journey. For example, if you offer co-working spaces, you may wish to invest in coworking space management software that empowers users to book and pay for rooms without having to speak to a team member in person or over the phone. 

Better teamwork and collaboration

The results of the 2021 Statista survey shown above found that inter-departmental siloing is the biggest challenge when optimizing the customer journey. This is where customer journey mapping rises to the challenge.

With a big-picture view, those working at the top of the funnel will better understand where their prospects are heading, meaning they’re more able to prepare them for their next interaction. Likewise, salespeople working in the middle of the funnel can give feedback on the quality of leads and help prospecting teams adjust their strategies accordingly. 

How does optimization increase customer satisfaction?

Many business benefits arise from customer journey optimization. 

Reduces Friction

Customers may encounter friction at every step of their journey. We’re not talking about Newtonian physics that explain how your car grips a road; we’re talking about obstacles to conversion that are built into your buying processes.

Customer friction is something you must overcome for the consumer to take the next step. Common causes include:

• Lack of empowerment. Do customers have their preferred channels available to them e.g. live chat and self-service options?
• Unreasonable/uncertain duration. Are wait times reasonable, and are they communicated to the customer?
• Lack of identity. Is the customer known and recognized at each touchpoint, or do they have to repeat themselves along the way?
• Lack of transparency. Do customers know what step they’re at in the process?
• Lack of consistency. Does each interaction fit with your brand and provide a positive overall experience?

Let’s take friction caused by duration as an example. You could utilize a service that enables call forwarding or queue callbacks to help lower customer wait times. This would optimize the buyer journey and make it less arduous for the customer. 

An often overlooked tactic is to focus on the obstacle causing the friction rather than the nudge itself. For example, you can make conversions easier so your prospects can sprint their way down the sales funnel.

In the early part of the journey, this might include optimization by way of marketing and communication channels. If your target audience is Gen Z and Millenials, for example, forgo traditional channels and build brand awareness on the social media platforms they use instead. 

There are many eCommerce marketing strategies that can help you optimize interactions and reduce friction.

Focuses on pain points

An optimized customer journey gives consumers a more streamlined experience. Rather than being distracted by unnecessary steps, it ensures just the right amount of interactions and information. 

This type of focused effort from your sales and marketing team means you can spend more time singing the benefits of your products or services. More importantly, it ensures each experience focuses on the specific pain points of your buyer personas. 

Personalizes the customer experience

Part of the optimization process is building customary journey maps that achieve a high level of success. Each one should focus on a different buyer persona. These custom journeys are just one way that optimization personalizes the customer experience (CX).

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Building interactions for each segment’s preferred channels increases customer satisfaction. You can also use CRM solutions, customer journey management platforms, and marketing automation to hyper-personalize every interaction. This might range from having live agents and chatbots with access to customer account information to suggesting products your buyers will be interested in. 

How to optimize the customer journey map

1. Define your business goals

Optimizing the customer journey can help you achieve various objectives, but it’s best to set your sights on a few specific goals for your business. This will help to guide you.

The following are some examples of business goals:

• To stamp out weaknesses or redundancies in the customer journey
• To gain more insight through increased customer feedback
• To increase conversions at bottlenecks in the sales funnel

2. Define your buyer personas

Buyer personas help you segment your audience according to their attitudes, values, behaviors, and demographic information. The first step is to identify your best buyers and your least valuable customer types.

When building your customer avatars, you should find common factors or indicators to help with optimizing customer journeys and areas like lead qualification. 

3. Pick your target personas

To get started, pick the buyer persona that most closely fits your business goals. If this is your first time refreshing the customer journey, you’ll likely want to focus on the personas that represent the best lifetime value. 

4. Start drafting a customer journey map

Now you have a better understanding of who your customers are, it’s time to start visualizing the purchasing journey. You need to map out every customer touchpoint or interaction from beginning to end. 

This includes every channel that’s used to create brand awareness, from Instagram and Facebook marketing to email newsletters and word-of-mouth referrals. It also includes third-party channels like affiliate marketing and other partner programs.

From here, you can start optimizing and connecting actions to build a customer journey that’s robust and efficient. 

5. Start optimizing

With a rough draft of the customer journey in place, you can begin to make alterations and improvements. Eliminate redundant or friction-building interactions, and map out pathways that allow for a seamless transition from one touchpoint to another. Ensure these make sense for the buyer persona involved. 

For instance, when nudging Gen Zers from the brand awareness to the subscription stage, you could focus on social media only. This means eliminating CTAs that involve newsletter subscriptions or inbound calling campaigns for this particular journey. 

6. Use the right tools

By now, you should have a close to ideal journey for each buyer persona. These are optimized when friction is reduced and your team is set up for success. The only problem is that nothing is ideal.

No matter how much you prepare, there will always be room for improvement, so you’ll need to arm yourself with the best tools for the job. Customer relationship management software is crucial. Other marketing tools can also help you automate and track each customer’s journey.

While you’re at it, don’t forget about the wealth of digital marketing resources available online. 

7. Optimize, rinse, and repeat

Completing your optimized customer journey map is only the beginning. You’ll need to take this process and repeat it for each business goal and buyer persona. Of course, you can use existing maps as templates for building new customer journeys.

Using marketing tools, you should be able to track the success of your freshly optimized touchpoints and overall conversion rates. Use analytics tools and trusty A/B testing to hone in on what’s working and what isn’t. 

Continue the process ad infinitum and reap the rewards of providing a seamless, frictionless customer experience. 

Optimize the customer journey today!

Businesses like yours desire their operations to run as smoothly as possible. Your customers will hold you to these same standards during the buying cycle. Now, at least, you should have the tools and team to identify what your customers want. 

This is the time to map out and optimize your customer journeys. That is, unless you’d rather wait around while they flock to competitors that offer a painless purchase process. Why not start improving your customer satisfaction levels today?

The post Creating a Journey to Customer Satisfaction appeared first on DigitalMarketer.

Most businesses out there are product-focused, i.e. they have a product to sell.

This is how it works:

• Offer a service or create a product
• Find people to sell it to
• Make a lot of money
• Quit selling “offline” or quit their day job

It sounds good (in theory). The problem is that this is like pushing a huge rock uphill. Trying to force a product on a market that hasn’t asked for it can be a long, long process – which nonetheless can be successful, of course. The world hadn’t known they needed computers when they got into the market. But let’s face it. Cases like that are very few. 

There’s another model that a lot of companies are using very successfully, but you just might not know it. It’s called building a “customer-centric” business.

An customer-centric business includes the following typical steps:

• Determine what a market needs
• Build a product that covers that need (or adjust your own product to better fit that need)

These are two fundamental steps but there are many routes you can take to build it up:

• Build a true bond with your “audience”
• Learn what they really need
• Sell products/services that they’ve asked for
• Continue delivering way more value than you “take”
• Provide high value education to a small set of people
• Delight those people and grow your platform (website/blog, youtube channel, email list, podcast subscribers)

Get the Digital Marketing Blueprint…

With a Customer Value Journey that strategically builds a relationship with new prospects and converts them into loyal, repeat customers. Click here

So how to understand what your target audience needs?

Market research can be as expensive and extensive as your budget allows. There are lots of companies offering you a detailed niche analysis, surveying, numbers and stats. This is what corporations are investing into on a regular basis.

The good news is, the Internet offers lots of opportunities to research your target niche for free or on a tight budget and keep it in-house.

The Internet made customer centricity possible for any small business. Here are a few ideas:

On-site analytics

On-site analytics is a traditional way for website owners to evaluate their traffic, its sources and entry pages. But it is also a great way to understand your target audience better. Google Analytics provides detailed demographic information – from gender and age to your customers’ locations (like popular cities people tend to access your site from).

As I am writing this, I am surprised my readers tend to access my site from London – sounds like I need to be doing a better job addressing UK audience’s needs:

Surveying your current (or potential) customers

Asking your customers what they need from your product or service, which features they like best and which of those are not set up the way they can be useful is a great way to align your business to your target audience needs.

When surveying your customers:

• Mind that there will always be people who just don’t like everything. 
• Don’t let yourself get discouraged by negative comments. Remember, it’s the route, not the destination
• Don’t rush to implement changes or add features right away: Make sure to take time to collect feedback, there will likely be conflicting comments: Some people will love the features others hate.
• Don’t just look at stats: Make sure there’s a field for your customers or readers to have an ability to add their own comments. Some of those ideas will turn invaluable and spark your inspiration for future plans.

As to how you create that survey and introduce it to your customers and/or site users, you can use Google Forms (which are free). There are also quite a few surveying plugins allowing you to embed your surveys to your site.

You can also set up a newsletter to reach out to your customers to invite them to help you out. 

This will also let you identify your most active and loyal customers: Make sure to create a segment for those to reach out more, give away special offers and turn them into brand advocates.

It is also a good idea to time your newsletters the way it is more engaging and delivers better results.

Semantic research

When you are just entering a niche, semantic research is one of the best ways to quickly understand underlying concepts and entities. Text Optimizer is the best tool for the job. Run your established competitor’s name through the tool to understand what your future customers associate that brand with:

Keyword research

Traditional SEO-driven keyword research offers a solid insight into what people are struggling with and even the demand (i.e. search volume) for a particular feature or problem solution.

SE Ranking keyword research tool allows marketers to extend their search queries, find related queries, evaluate keyword difficulty and search volume. You can also cluster your keywords and turn them into mindmaps to better understand your target topic.

Just like with Text Optimizer, for market research, consider using your competitor’s product name as a keyword to better understand what their customers are searching for:

Question research

Knowing what your target customers are asking around the web is a great way to create a product and content development strategy that solves their problems.

Buzzsumo is the best way to research niche questions because it pulls data from multiple sources allowing you to get lots of insights at a glance:

Social media listening

Social media listening is a great way to understand your target audience and relate to it. By listening to and participating in relevant discussions you get to build connections, identify who influences them and what they don’t like about the existing products and competitors.

As you may have guessed, listening to your competitors’ customers is just as a good idea as listening to your own. 

Awario offers a great social media listening solution that helps you create alerts that include several of your competitors by using boolean search. For small and local business, the feature allows one to hyper-target their alerts to a certain location:

Social media listening is not just about monitoring brand mentions though. It is a good idea to monitor related questions, discussions and trends. This will allow you to align all your marketing efforts – including blogger outreach, email marketing and seasonal content creation to niche trends and activity.

Customer centricity at every stage of product development

Creating a customer-centric marketing and product development strategy doesn’t have to happen at the launch.

In fact, it is never too late or too early to make your business customer-focused:

• Ask for your customers’ (or social media followers’)  input on your new product or brand name. Namify is a cool tool that can suggest those names and provide an easy way for you to choose the best one.
• Evaluate your customer support activity to better understand your customers’ struggles and develop your content strategy around those problems.
• Use social media listening and keyword research to understand what is missing from your competitors’ offerings and develop a product that covers that need. Keyword gaps can help you in understanding customers’ demand that is not yet satisfied.

Why should you consider building an audience-based business?

So should you consider turning your business from product-based into audience-based? Here’s why you might want to consider it:

• It’s hard at the start, but if you persist you’ll have an loyal audience and a solid platform
• Your product ideas can come from the audience (vs from your imagination)
• It beats chasing transactional sales. You’re making sales based on relationship
• You own the platform – you don’t have to continually beg to “borrow” other people’s audiences

Customer-centricity makes your business safer from reputation crises or changing digital marketing landscape because it fosters brand loyalty.

The post How to Build a Customer-Centric Business appeared first on DigitalMarketer.

The two most important social media platforms in web3 are Twitter and LinkedIn. Listen as Jeff J Hunter, author of Zero to Hero Crypto Guide, tells you why!

Jeff J. Hunter is an author best known for VA Staffer, a 150-plus team virtual-assistant staffing agency. He helps entrepreneurs and startups build and scale remote teams to dominate their brand category and is the creator of the CORE Branding Method and host of the “Savage Marketer Podcast.”

Extra Resources:

What Marketers Need To Know About Web 3.0: https://www.digitalmarketer.com/blog/marketers-and-web-3-0/

Episode 216: How Female Founders Can Disrupt The Future Of Marketing And Web3 With Lisa Buyer: https://www.digitalmarketer.com/podcast/digitalmarketer/216-disrupt-the-future-of-marketing/

Episode 213: NFTs For Newbies And How Digital Marketers Can Take Advantage Of A Brand New Industry With Heather Parady And Rich Cardona: https://www.digitalmarketer.com/podcast/digitalmarketer/212-nfts-for-newbies/

The post Building a Personal Brand in Web3 with Jeff J Hunter [VIDEO] appeared first on DigitalMarketer.

Online markets are over-saturated with brands trying to get a perfect image out there, Lechon explains how to cut through that noise and get your brand seen and respected by clients and customers.

Lechon Kirb, cofounder and CMO at Ofcourse, helps people take the thing they love and learn the mechanism that will help them put it out in the world in a big way.

Extra Resources:

The 1-Page Marketing Blueprint: https://www.digitalmarketer.com/ebooks/1-page-marketing-blueprint-download/?_ga=2.90963091.889771140.1661180624-1429082633.1649706653

It’s Just Marketing: You Can Stop Using The Word “Digital” Now: https://www.digitalmarketer.com/blog/its-just-marketing-stop-using-digital/

It’s Not About Influencers, It’s About Partnerships: https://www.digitalmarketer.com/blog/its-not-about-influencers-its-about-partnerships/

The post Cutting Through the Noise with Your Brand with Lechon Kirb appeared first on DigitalMarketer.

You might be losing business from your homepage and have no clue!

If you’re a service-centric business, listen up! Michael Buzinski lays out how to fix your homepage to properly reflect your services … or rather how to not.

Michael Buzinski (Buzz), President & CMO of Buzzworthy Website Marketing, is a lifelong entrepreneur, digital marketing thought leader, and best-selling author. Dubbed a “visionary marketer” by the American Marketing Association, Michael’s sole mission is to help entrepreneurs avoid the time drain and frustration of managing profitable digital marketing campaigns.

Extra Resources:

The 1-Page Marketing Blueprint: https://www.digitalmarketer.com/ebooks/1-page-marketing-blueprint-download/?_ga=2.90963091.889771140.1661180624-1429082633.1649706653

It’s Just Marketing: You Can Stop Using The Word “Digital” Now: https://www.digitalmarketer.com/blog/its-just-marketing-stop-using-digital/

How To Make Your Website Conversion-Ready: https://www.digitalmarketer.com/blog/google-ads-for-ecommerce-conversion-ready/

The post The Biggest Mistake on Your Homepage with Michael Buzinski [VIDEO] appeared first on DigitalMarketer.