With options beyond our wildest dreams in every niche imaginable, it is harder than ever to not only draw in new customers but also keep them hooked. In order to retain their interest, your brand must have an aligned presence across all channels with consistent messaging that makes sense to your consumers. Think of it as a conversation—the messaging has to progressively build upon itself to a clear point or you risk losing the other person’s interest entirely.
To improve your customer journey, it’s important to take some time to evaluate and strategize your overall messaging strategy to uncover what is working and what may need some adjustments. Read on for simple strategies to align your messaging and boost the effectiveness of your brand’s communication with ease.
Understanding Your Customer Journey
In its simplest terms, a customer journey essentially describes each interaction that the customer experiences when interacting with your brand from start to finish. Instead of looking at just one singular transaction or experience, the customer journey documents everything from their initial exposure to an ad to the point when they reach your final desired action, like a purchase or subscription. Some go even further to examine follow-up contacts to examine whether or not they become a repeat customer.
By carefully tracking the entire customer journey, you can uncover valuable insights as to where your messaging misses the mark and customers disappear. For example, if you have 10,000 users landing on a page and only 500 moves to the next step, that may indicate a red flag in your messaging, page design, or functionality—resulting in the loss of major opportunities for your company.
Once you pinpoint what isn’t working, it’s time to assess what adjustments need to be made.
Putting Alignment into Action
The most important part of finding alignment is to dive deeper into building out the customer journey. It’s not enough to have a simple buyer journey that looks like this: Buyer hears about our company, buyer requests more information, buyer purchases product. This type of thinking will get you nowhere fast. To truly improve your customer journey, you need to track every detail like, who is involved at each step of the journey, how long each step takes, what information the buyer is looking for at that point, where they go to find it, and perhaps most importantly, who they trust in each phase.
To create a cohesive message and get the results you want, you need to first, define exactly what you want the customer to do on your site. Maybe you want them to purchase a ticket to your latest exhibition or make a monthly donation to your organization. This goal will inform what kinds of messaging make sense and fits the customer journey.
Then, you have to work backward to create a foolproof path that each customer will follow. One way to do this is to actually put yourself in your ideal consumer’s shoes and follow the path you’ve set. Try going through the experience of your site from start to finish and ask yourself: Did it make sense? Were there obvious holes? Did anyone reach out after you completed an action? The answers to these questions may help illuminate if what you’re creating is in fact, successful.
Once you feel that you’re aligned in your messaging, it will also be crucial to communicate with the entire team and inform them of any needs. For instance, if your sales team does not know that the marketing team added a landing page to generate leads, how will they know to access this information and put it to use? When both your team and your messaging are aligned, you can say hello to serious boost inactivity for your brand.
STAUFFER in Action: Client Success Story
The perfect example of alignment in action is when we were working with a successful health club to revitalize its online presence. Part of this process was to examine their customer journey and how it could be improved. With careful examination and tracking, we were able to discover that customers were falling off at the landing page. Why? Because their messaging alignment was off.
This health club was widely known for its amazing tennis program and professional-quality courts. When consumers clicked an ad for the club highlighting their gorgeous courts, the landing page had nothing to do with tennis. Thus leading consumers to feel misled and quickly move on.
We decided to put a stop to this with one simple change: adjust the photography and messaging to fit the users’ expectations from clicking on a tennis-themed ad. Voila! They saw an instant boost in their online conversions (sign-ups).
Conclusion
When all is said and done, the consumer is the one ultimately making the buying decision. Your job as a business is to make their decision as straightforward as possible through a seamless messaging strategy that lights their way to conversion.
If you can effectively nurture your consumers from the discovery stage through to the buying stage, it should be a breeze getting them to choose your brand again and again. With a cohesive messaging strategy brands are able to hold genuine conversations with consumers to develop a relationship with your consumers, and even anticipate their needs before they know them rather than coming off as overly sales-y.
If it’s time to examine your customer journey and improve your messaging strategy, STAUFFER can help get your brand’s messaging aligned to make your marketing more effective
