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.

Are You Ready to Master Social Media?

Become a Certified Social Media Specialist and learn the newest strategies (by social platform) to draw organic traffic to your social media sites.

Click here

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.

To be competitive as a brand, it’s essential to constantly offer value to your customers. 

Customer value is what makes the wheels of commerce go around. It’s what makes your customers buy from you, engage with you, follow your accounts, give you positive reviews, and recommend you to their friends.

If you’re familiar with our Customer Value Journey framework, you’ll already know a lot about how to create and curate customer value. In this article, we’ll zoom in on what customer value is and some ways you can deploy it in your Customer Value Journey.

What Do We Mean By “Create Customer Value?”

“Customer value” is anything that makes your product and/or brand more appealing to customers. By adding value to your brand, product, and customer experience, you bring more decision-swaying benefits to your customer’s journey.

“Value” is anything your customer wants, needs, or enjoys. The most obvious “value” is monetary—getting a quality item for a low price is something every bargain hunter enjoys—but it’s far from the only “value” available. 

Value for your customers can include:

• Great product quality
• Fantastic customer service
• A positive brand presence 
• Ongoing customer support
• Relevant and personalized marketing
• A rewarding loyalty program
• A positive customer experience
• A trustworthy brand reputation
• A caring brand community

Let’s say, for example, that you are a Canadian telecoms brand. You produce the best business phone system in Calgary, but people still buy from your competitors. How can you bring them to you?

Adding value is the best way to turn the tide of customers toward you. You can do things like improve your customer service, add 24/7 support options, tailor your marketing in ways your customers prefer, produce engaging and educational content, add loyalty rewards, and more.

Why Is It Important To Create Value For Your Customers?

Creating value for your customers is crucial because the more value you can offer, the more likely customers are to buy your product, subscribe to your brand, and ultimately become loyal members of your customer community.

Think of every purchase decision in terms of a pair of scales. For a potential customer to purchase your product, its value has to outweigh its drawbacks.

The most obvious element of the purchase decision is the monetary cost. But there’s a lot more to it than that. Things like time, negative experience, and risk also add to the perceived “cost” of your product or service. 

For example, if your website does not look safe and professional, your customer may avoid buying your product because they fear credit card scams—even if they would find your product useful and can afford it.

Similarly, if your buying process is too complicated and lengthy, or your customer service could be better, the purchase-decision scales could tip in favor of taking custom elsewhere.

By creating extra value for your customers, you weigh the scale towards the decision to buy. And the more value you add, the better the benefits get. 

As well as buying your product, customers who get value from you will return again and again. They will also engage with your content, recommend you to their friends, and boost your brand reputation in general.

All in all, creating customer value is well worth doing. So, how do you go about it?

How To Create Customer Value

Use our Customer Value Journey

Our Customer Value journey is a framework that helps you to understand where and how you can add value to help your customers along their journey to conversion and beyond.

It consists of eight steps: Awareness, Engagement, Subscribe, Convert, Excite, Ascend, Advocate, Promote.

You can find plenty about our CVJ framework, but here’s a (very!) brief rundown:

• Aware: Get your target audience’s attention with content that is relevant and valuable for them. 
• Engage: Communicate with your customers/prospects. Let them know that you care about them.
• Subscribe: Try and persuade your burgeoning customers to subscribe to your emails and follow you on social media.
• Convert: This is the point at which your prospect becomes a customer. You can use various value-adding tactics to nudge them through this stage.
• Excite: Build on the excitement of a purchase by throwing in added extras.
• Ascend: Keep up communication and keep adding value to make your one-time buyer a repeat customer.
• Advocate: Ask your happy customer to write you positive reviews, share your content, or recommend you to their friends.
• Promote: Keep encouraging your customer community to promote your brand, and reward them for doing so.

Provide Stellar Customer Service

The quality of your customer service can make or break your customer experience. Great customer service adds a huge amount of value to your CVJ.

What does good customer service look like? Well, it ranges from things as simple as sending emails saying “Thanks for your order,” to more complex efforts, such as having a fully equipped and responsive customer support center staffed with patient, helpful, and friendly operatives.

Another way of offering great value and customer service is by having a product that will offer unique benefits. For example, offering online business cards with a QR code that automatically captures their information so that you can use analytics and metrics to measure your networking efforts.

Build Community

You can easily add value for your customer by making them feel valued. One way to do this is to focus on building relationships and community with your customers.

You can strengthen your customer relationships through things like sending emails on their birthdays, personalizing your marketing content so that it’s relevant for each customer, and generally showing that you are listening to them and you care for them.

You can expand on this by providing space for your customers to communicate with you and one another. Loyalty clubs, social media pages, events for loyal customers, and so on can all help to build a rewarding community that will add value for your customers.

Focus On Quality Over Price

It’s a common misconception that making an item cheaper adds value for the customer. While price is certainly an important consideration in purchase decisions, quality often trumps it.

However low your prices are, your customers won’t be impressed if your product is low quality. Most customers are happy to pay a bit more for a product that works well, looks good, and will last.

Most customers understand that true quality costs more. So, if you drop your prices too low, customers will automatically assume that your product is low quality.

The old “quality vs. quantity” debate is, to an extent, false—but it is still important that your customers have a good experience with your product. And that means creating something of acceptable quality.

So, we recommend focusing on the quality of your product first and foremost, and deciding the price once you are aware of your profit margins. A quality product that costs a little more will gain you more repeat customers than a poor-quality product at a low price.

Play To Your Strengths

Your strengths are where your true value lies. Maybe you have an excellent customer service team, the best quality product on the market, or a fantastic social media following. Whatever it is that you do best, play to it.

Your strengths form your USP (or, at least, part of it). Your strengths are where your value exceeds that of your competitors. So, make the most of them!

Educate, Entertain, & Engage

Producing great content is a quick and easy way to add a lot of value and boost your brand’s presence and reputation.

Blog posts, videos, newsletters, social media posts, competitions, games, and webinars—all of these are great for entertaining, educating, and engaging your customers.

Anything you can put out there that your customers will enjoy or find interesting adds value to your product, no matter what your product is.

Let’s say, for example, that you provide online fax services in Canada. On the face of it, this may not seem like a promising topic, but the right content can bring a huge amount of interest to your brand.

You could produce how-to videos, talk about the history of faxing, run case studies, and more. All of it will add value for your audience and bring in new customers.

Reward Loyalty

A loyalty scheme adds value for your customer and directly encourages repeat purchases. 

You can use your loyalty scheme to add value in a variety of ways. Many retail businesses use point schemes, in which customers get a certain number of points per purchase which they can then use to offset the cost of later purchases.

Other examples of loyalty rewards can include:

• Exclusive content
• Free gifts
• First looks at new product lines
• Discounts
• Privileged access to events, products, and services
• Enhanced customer service

Boost Your Business & Add Customer Value with A Customer Value Journey

By designing a Customer Value Journey, you will give yourself a head start when adding value.

A Customer Value Journey will show you exactly where in your customer journey to add value and the form it should take.

Are You Ready to Master Social Media?

Become a Certified Social Media Specialist and learn the newest strategies (by social platform) to draw organic traffic to your social media sites.

Click here

For example, a speedy and safe website adds value at the point of sale. It encourages people to convert quickly and with confidence.

After a sale, a loyalty scheme and follow-up emails reinforce your customer’s positive experience and help strengthen your brand/customer relationships.

At all points, a positive brand presence, rewarding content, and a quality product are brilliant for adding value for your customers.

So, to give your customers the value that they deserve, sit down and plot your Customer Value Journey.

The post How to Effortlessly Create Customer Value 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).

Are You Ready to Master Social Media?

Become a Certified Social Media Specialist and learn the newest strategies (by social platform) to draw organic traffic to your social media sites.

Click here

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.

Podcasting has become an increasingly popular way for businesses to reach their target audience and build a loyal following. But how can businesses use podcasting as a part of their overall marketing strategy?

I know firsthand as a business owner the importance of creating a targeted and effective marketing strategy that maximizes the value of each customer and builds long-term loyalty and advocacy for my brand.

That’s why I decided to leverage the power of podcasting by launching the Creative Visionaries Podcast as a part of my overall marketing strategy at Creative Marketing.

To create a targeted and effective podcast marketing strategy that maximizes the value of each customer and builds long-term loyalty and advocacy for their brand, businesses can turn to DigitalMarketer’s Customer Value Journey (CVJ) framework.

While it is most commonly used in the development of a marketing plan there is a huge opportunity to align each stage of the CVJ with the podcast marketing process.

Businesses can create episodes that attract listeners, build trust, and ultimately convert them into loyal brand advocates. This approach ensures that every podcast episode provides value to the listener, while also advancing them further along the customer value journey toward becoming a loyal customer.

To better understand how the CVJ framework can be applied to podcast marketing, let’s take a closer look at each of the eight stages:

• Awareness: At this stage, the customer becomes aware of the business and its products or services.
• Engagement: The customer engages with the business in some way, such as by visiting the website or signing up for an email list.
• Subscribe: The customer opts in to receive more information from the business, such as a newsletter or free content.
• Convert: The customer makes their first purchase from the business.
• Excite: The customer experiences the product or service and becomes excited about it.
• Ascend: The customer makes additional purchases or upgrades to higher-priced products or services.
• Advocate: The customer becomes a loyal fan of the business and recommends it to others.
• Promote: The customer actively promotes the business and its products or services to others.

Applying this framework to podcasting, businesses can create and market a successful podcast that guides customers through each stage of the journey.

At the Awareness stage, a business might promote its podcast on social media or through paid advertising to reach new listeners. By offering valuable and engaging content in the podcast, businesses can then move listeners into the Engagement and Subscribe stages of the journey.

Encouraging listeners to subscribe to the podcast and leave reviews can help move them into the Conversion stage, where they become paying customers.

During the Excite stage, businesses can leverage their podcast to deepen engagement and foster brand loyalty. By offering valuable content that speaks directly to their customers’ needs and interests, businesses can generate excitement and enthusiasm around their brand, further strengthening their connection with their audience.

This leads them directly into the Ascend stage, where customers are offered opportunities to move up the value ladder by making additional purchases or upgrades to higher-priced products or services, building a deeper relationship with the brand.

For example, a digital marketing agency could establish authority in their industry by offering marketing consulting services and using a podcast to provide valuable insights and tips to potential clients, ultimately building trust and establishing themselves as an expert in their field.

At the Advocate stage, businesses can use their podcast to create a community of loyal fans who actively promote their brand. This can be done by encouraging listeners to share the podcast with others, leave positive reviews, and engage with the business on social media.

Are You Ready to Master Social Media?

Become a Certified Social Media Specialist and learn the newest strategies (by social platform) to draw organic traffic to your social media sites.

Click here

Businesses can create long-term loyalty and advocacy by promoting their podcast to their existing audience and leveraging the Promote stage of the customer value journey, which involves creating a sense of belonging and community around their brand.

So, we’ve talked about how podcasting can really benefit businesses. It’s a great way to get your brand out there, engage with your customers, and connect with your target audience. Plus, it’s a powerful tool for establishing your expertise and building a strong, recognizable brand.

By incorporating the CVJ framework to guide their podcast marketing efforts, businesses can create a more targeted and effective strategy that maximizes the value of each customer and builds long-term loyalty and advocacy for their brand.

To Create a Successful Podcast, Businesses Should Follow Some Key Tips:

First, they should identify a specific niche or topic that appeals to their target audience. By focusing on a specific topic, businesses can differentiate themselves from other podcasts and create a loyal following.

Second, businesses should produce high-quality content that provides value to their listeners. This can include interviews with experts in the industry, tips and advice, and engaging storytelling.

Third, businesses should promote their podcast through various channels, including social media, email marketing, and paid advertising.

With dedication and creativity, podcasting can be a valuable asset for any business looking to stand out in today’s digital landscape. By creating high-quality content that resonates with their audience, businesses can increase brand awareness, engagement, and loyalty.

Incorporating the Customer Value Journey framework can help guide their podcast marketing efforts and create a more effective and targeted strategy. So, if you’re looking to take your business to the next level, consider starting a podcast today and join the millions of businesses already leveraging this powerful tool.

The post Revolutionize Your Marketing Strategy with Podcasting appeared first on DigitalMarketer.

In modern business, standing out from the crowd isn’t easy. A strong brand-customer relationship is vital, as it drives customer loyalty and engagement. This can be the deciding factor in your business’s long-term success. 

This article will explore the importance of your brand-customer relationship. We’ll explain how the four principles of brand management can help you build and maintain that relationship.

What is a Brand-Customer Relationship?

Your brand-customer relationship is the connection between your business and its customers. It’s influenced by various factors, but is essentially formed through the perception and reputation of your brand. You build this relationship on trust, loyalty, and engagement. 

As well as the quality of the products or services you offer, your company’s reputation is also important. So is the customer’s overall experience with your brand. To put it simply, there are both tangible and intangible aspects to your brand-consumer relationship.  

The tangible aspects include the quality of your products and services, as well as your sales, customer service, and support. We measure and affect the intangible parts of the brand-customer relationship with brand management. 

Why is Brand-Customer Relationship Important?

It’s well-known that customer experience is one of the most critical factors in customer loyalty – and your brand-customer relationship is central to this. A good relationship encourages customer loyalty through engagement. 

Customers who have a positive experience with your brand, and thus a strong brand-customer relationship, are more likely to recommend your company to others and make repeat purchases. This drives higher customer lifetime values and can grow your revenue through word-of-mouth and social sharing. 

In addition, a solid brand-customer relationship helps to differentiate your business from its competitors. Positive associations with your brand make it easier for customers to identify and choose it over others.

The 4 Principles of Brand Management

So, now you know what we mean by a brand-customer relationship. But it probably still seems like a vague concept. Yet, whether you’re aware of it or not, you’re affecting it with everyday business decisions, advertising, and communications. 

That’s why many established businesses have dedicated brand management teams to build consistency across your brand. These four overlapping principles guide brand management strategy. Measuring them will show you the state of your brand-customer relationship.  

1. Awareness

This is how aware your target audience is of your brand versus others in your market. Think of synonymous brands such as Coke for soft drinks or Hoover for vacuums. These are the brands with the highest level of awareness in their respective areas.  

Most businesses won’t become household names, but there are other ways to measure brand awareness. Analyzing organic searches for your brand name, as well as social media mentions, content shares, and so on, can give you a good idea of your audience’s awareness level.

That said, raising brand awareness isn’t just about getting your brand name in front of people. Increasing and maintaining awareness means you must also stand out in the customer’s memory. For brand managers, this means creating a unique brand personality for your business. 

2. Reputation

Your reputation is what customers think about when they see your brand. This might be certain words or emotions they associate with your brand or product or a generally positive or negative sentiment.  

This has a significant overlap with your brand awareness. If you’re not working on maintaining your brand reputation while growing awareness, you can spread negative sentiments and do more harm than good for your brand. 

Building a positive reputation takes time. You can affect it through your communication, service, recruitment, and community projects. Your company culture, mission statement, and guiding principles can also tell external stakeholders about your reputation and values. 

Are You Ready to Master Social Media?

Become a Certified Social Media Specialist and learn the newest strategies (by social platform) to draw organic traffic to your social media sites.

Click here

3. Loyalty

Research shows that loyal customers are five times more likely to make repeat purchases and four times more likely to recommend your business. That’s why customer loyalty is the goal of your efforts to improve your brand awareness and reputation.

Easier said than done? Perhaps. Customer loyalty can be challenging to build, partly because many customers look for different things to get their best experience out of a business. Some customers value convenience and price, while others want on-demand support. 

For example, customers who come to your brand for value might appreciate your customer service measures such as a toll-free number or online text chat for inquiries. On the other hand, those looking for convenience might appreciate a premium-rate line that guarantees instant access to support. 

That means that to increase customer loyalty, brand managers must analyze customer behavior and feedback. Personalization is a major driver of customer loyalty. When you listen to a customer’s needs and make changes based on feedback, you show that you value their contribution to your business.

4. Equity

Brand equity represents your brand’s perceived value. Think of it as the premium customers are willing to pay to access your brand over cheaper competitors. This leads to higher ROI on both new and developed products, as you can incorporate this into your pricing. 

In his book, “Strategic Brand Management: Building, Measuring, and Managing Brand Equity”, author Kevin Lane Keller describes four key steps to building your brand equity:

• Establish your brand identity by identifying your target audience. Then, create your brand assets and stories around it. 
• Define what your brand means. You do this by clearly stating your company values and through the projects you choose to support. 
• Analyze how customers respond to your brand. What feelings and emotions does your brand evoke? Direct feedback and sentiment analysis are two good ways to judge this. 
• Build your brand resonance by developing your existing customer relationships. Use your brand management to form deeper emotional connections with your customer base. 

High customer satisfaction and customer loyalty are key indicators that your brand equity is rising.  

How to Use Brand Management to Improve Customer Relations

Now you understand the principles of brand management, let’s look at how to use this in an everyday business setting to improve your customer relations.  

Start With Brand Basics

If you’re new to brand management, the first step to improving customer relations is establishing a clear and consistent brand identity. This means developing a brand strategy, mission statement, and brand identity that aligns with your business’s values and goals.

You’ll also need to make key decisions about core brand assets like your logo design. Simple assets or slogans can be crucial in reinforcing the emotions and values you want customers to associate with your brand. Give these decisions the time and thought they deserve. 

Share Your Stories

Whether we’re talking about your brand’s origin story, mission, or even employee journeys and customer testimonials, sharing these stories will help you make deeper emotional connections with your customers. 

For example, many companies make support content like video tutorials for their products. But one way to make your customers feel more connected to this process is to share user-generated content with success tips and product guides.  

Optimize Your Online Visibility

In today’s digital age, your business needs to have a strong online presence. Optimizing your online visibility can increase brand awareness and reach more customers. 

This includes developing a website and creating social media profiles, as well as covering other basics like listing your brand in online directories and review sites.

Create an Internal Branding Guide

A strong brand identity is not just built by communicating with customers. You also need to ensure that employees understand and align with the company’s branding efforts. You can achieve this by creating an internal branding guide. 

Use this as a reference for all employees to ensure consistency in tone of voice and other branding markers for all departments.

Focus on Your Customer Journey

It’s vital to understand how customers interact with your brand, from the awareness stage to post-purchase. By understanding the customer value journey, you can identify areas for improvement and tailor your branding efforts to meet the needs of your customers at each stage.

Engage Your Customers on Their Terms

Engaging with your customers on the channels they prefer is crucial to building a strong brand-customer relationship. Whether it’s social media, email, phone, or in-person interactions your audience prefers, make sure they can access your brand on those channels.

Personalize the Customer Experience

While we can fit customers into groups and demographics, each one is also unique. By analyzing a customer’s preferences as they interact with your business, you can give them a customer experience that meets their needs every time. 

This can be small, simple, gestures. For example, give your priority customers access to a separate business phone number to speed up their support experience.  

Analyze and Improve

Finally, to truly optimize your brand-customer relationship, you need to analyze your performance and make adjustments as you go. This includes tracking website traffic, monitoring social media engagement and sentiments, and analyzing customer feedback. 

Are You Ready to Master Social Media?

Become a Certified Social Media Specialist and learn the newest strategies (by social platform) to draw organic traffic to your social media sites.

Click here

By using analytics, you can make data-driven decisions to improve customer relations and drive growth. 

Final Thoughts: It’s all in the Details

Your brand-customer relationship goes deeper than your surface interactions with your customers. When we’re talking about subjective factors like emotion and engagement, the little details can make the biggest difference. 

Even seemingly unrelated decisions like your choice of website hosting providers can have a knock-on effect. Does your domain name reflect your brand? Is it instantly recognizable to customers? When we think about it in these terms, it’s easy to see why a choice like this can have repercussions for your brand. 

Effective brand management means you don’t have to fret about the small details of every decision. Having a clear brand strategy and documents like an internal branding guide help ensure consistency, even up to the decision-making level.  

The post Key Steps for Building Strong Brand/Customer Relationships appeared first on DigitalMarketer.

Up until now, any “promotion” your customers have done has been passive. But in the promotion stage, your customers actively spread the word about your brands, products, and services. They tell stories, make recommendations, and share your offers because they truly believe in them.

Active promotion may be an affiliate or commission relationship—or just a free offer for sending some new customers your way. The point is, it’s a win-win for both of you.

One thing worth mentioning before we dive in; Happy customers don’t promote, SUCCESSFUL customers do. 

Our biggest question in the Promote stage is: How are you going to turn your BEST customers into your marketing partners? 

If you don’t have a referral program, an affiliate program, or a valued reseller program … who is willing to drive your message to the organization you need to build out these programs? This is word of mouth marketing, and it is very important so start thinking about how you want to build this. 

Look to your most successful customers, they’re going to be the people who actively promote for you. But then, let’s think about our customers who already have our prospects but are offering a different product or service. 

At DigitalMarketer we are a training and certification company, we are not a services based company. What that means is we don’t compete with agencies or consultants. This also means that there is an opportunity for us to work with agencies and consultants. 

When we realized this we decided to launch our Certified Partner Program, which you can learn more about at DigitalMarketer.Com/Partner. This program lets us work with the largest segments of our customer base, who have customers that we want but they’re providing a solution that we’re not providing. 

When we train our customers, they are able to use our company frameworks to work with their clients. If their clients want to learn to do their marketing themselves? We’re the first education company they see.

So who is that for you? Remember, it’s not the happy clients that refer, it’s the successful clients. If you want to create more promoters, make sure that you’re doing everything that you can as a marketer to ensure that you’re marketing great products so you can see great results. 

How can our example companies accomplish this?

For Hazel & Hems, they can add an ambassador program to grow their instagram following and increase credibility with viral posts. 

Ambassadors can earn affiliate commissions, additional boutique reward points, and get the chance to build a greater following by leveraging the Hazel & Hems brand.

For Cyrus & Clark, they can offer discounted rates to their existing clients if those clients are willing to refer them to their strategic partners. 

For construction companies, this could be a home builder recommending Cyrus & Clark services to the landscapers, real estate developers, and interior designers that they work with to serve their customers.

The post Promote appeared first on DigitalMarketer.