It is not enough to simply create a great product or service that customers love. To be successful, you have to also create an effective strategy based on the three unique stages of a customer’s journey to attract and convert prospects into paying customers. Unfortunately, too many business owners think that their product is so great that all they have to do is simply place their offering into the marketplace and it will create its own gravity and sell itself.
Some time ago, I read a book by Donald Miller called Building a Story Brand, which looked at how prospects can become engaged with your brand. The lessons from the book spawned a series of blog posts on how stories create a memorable and relatable narrative to attract and enlighten prospects about your brand. So, when I came across Marketing Made Simple by Miller, I added it to my reading list. What I discovered was a simple-to-understand framework that every marketer needs to understand about the customer’s journey.
There are three singularly different stages of a customer’s journey that they need to go through to build a proper relationship with your brand, so they ultimately buy from you. The three stages of the customer’s journey are:
Curiosity
Enlightenment
Commitment
Your goal as a marketer is to guide the prospect through each of the stages, in the proper order, so you can make the sale. Let’s explore each of the three stages of the customer’s journey in more detail.
Curiosity
The first stage in a customer’s journey is to create a level of curiosity in them that will make them want to learn more. Curiosity is a snap judgment a prospect makes when they first encounter your messaging, and they endeavor to determine whether or not it can help them in some meaningful way.
At the curiosity stage, the prospect is only making an either/or choice. The human brain is hardwired to subconsciously make a quick decision to either explore your marketing message further or discard it and move on. During a typical day, a prospect encounters about 3,000 marketing messages. The overwhelming majority of the marketing messages get discarded, but a few will get through and pique the prospect’s interest to dig deeper.
Most often, that decision to explore further can be influenced by connecting your product or service offering to one of the prospect’s basic needs. Basic needs are the bottom two levels of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, defined as Physiological and Safety needs, and include such things as food and water, sufficient rest, clothing and shelter, overall health, and reproduction. Your goal as a marketer is to appeal to one of the prospect’s basic needs to create the necessary curiosity to get the prospect to want to learn more.
For example, if you’re selling men’s razors, you can generate curiosity by making the point that a well-groomed man is more attractive to women, thus appealing to their physiological needs for sex. Or, if you’re offering insurance, you can generate curiosity by pointing out that with the proper insurance, you can protect them and their loved ones from a catastrophic loss by appealing to their safety and financial security needs.
To create curiosity, the headline of your website, the subject line of your email, or the elevator pitch for your idea must express how you can help customers meet their basic needs.
In Donald Miller’s other book, Building a Story Brand, he discusses the value of creating a story gap to connect the curiosity stage to their desire to learn more, and move on to the enlightenment stage. While curiosity gets the prospect to pay attention to your brand, enlightenment invites them into a relationship.
Enlightenment
Once you have piqued the prospect’s curiosity to learn more, they move to the enlightenment stage of the customer’s journey. The goal of the enlightenment stage is to provide the content, so the prospect can learn more about your offerings and how your offering will allow them to thrive and survive or solve a problem or pain point so they can move forward in a way that is important and valuable to them. Basically, you want to prove that you are the one to solve their problem by providing the information necessary to move the prospect to the commitment stage.
Enlightenment is a trust-building exercise. It shows that you actually have the expertise and a plan to solve your customer’s problem. Your job is to anticipate any barriers that the prospect may face before committing to your product or service and to provide the answers to those questions.
During the enlightenment stage, you invite the prospect into a story where you position yourself and your company as their guide.
In the enlightenment stage of the customer’s journey, consider using a long-form sales message, lead generator, live event, drip email campaign, or explainer video to enlighten potential customers about your offering and build trust. Lay out a clear plan of action to make it clear how your offering intends to solve their problem. As Millers says in the book, “Customers will not move into a fog.” So make your intentions for the next step crystal clear.
Commitment
The commitment stage is where the prospect agrees to buy your product or service or moves them further along in your sales funnel. The key to the commitment stage is knowing when to ask for the commitment. If you ask too soon, then you risk scaring off the prospect, and if you fail to make your intentions known about completing the sale, the prospect remains in the friend zone forever. You don’t want either of these if you are a business.
According to Miller, there are two primary reasons he discovered why customers do not move forward and make a purchase:
First, brands ask for the sale too early before customers have gone through the first two stages.
Second, they fail to ask for the sale with a clear Call to Action.
As a business, you have to make your intentions clear to the prospect. When you are unclear on what you want the prospect to do, they will browse around looking for some good information and then leave. Your job is to make it clear what you want the prospect to do, with a clear call to action, such as “Subscribe today,” “Start your free trial,” “Book now,” “Schedule a call,” etc. The goal is to make it abundantly clear and easy for the customer to commit to buying your product or service to move them further down your sales funnel.
Of course, there is a fine line between asking for the commitment and being perceived as too pushy. You need to give your prospect a chance to get to know your brand.
One of the principal scientists in the field of marketing psychology is Dr. Jeffrey Lant, who developed a theory that he calls the rule of seven. The rule of seven states; that to penetrate the buyer’s conscious mind and therefore make any significant penetration in a given market, a prospect needs to see a message a minimum of seven times within an 18-month period before they decide to buy from you. Each touchpoint should add additional value, and each should include a call to action. This is why nurturing a relationship with a prospect is so important.
In his book, Miller says, “To create a good relationship, you must keep in touch.”
Too many marketers worry about people unsubscribing from their email list because they send too many emails or provide too much content. So, instead, they err on hardly ever sending out content at all.
First, if you only sell in your emails without adding value, subscribers are likely to unsubscribe. Each touch point must add additional value.
Second, unsubscribes aren’t always a bad thing. When a subscriber unsubscribes from your email list, you are not addressing their needs. They are helping you by whittling down your list to your true fans or the ones who are actually interested in buying from you.
Subscribers are also a vanity metric. It’s far better to have 100 loyal subscribers that read each email than 1,000 who don’t care and rarely, if ever, read your emails.
Russell Brunson of DotCom Secrets went from sending an email once a month to sending emails to his list every day. He said sure he lost some people, but every time he upped the number of emails he sent, he grew his business and the depth of his relationship with his fans. To get commitment from your audience, you need to continue to nurture a relationship with them.
Conclusion
There is a natural progression that prospects go through. A prospect does not want to be enlightened about something until you have piqued their curiosity. An unsolicited enlightenment message is what we call spam. And until they are enlightened about how your brand can help them, they will never commit to a purchase. Therefore, you must guide the prospect through each of the stages in the customer’s journey in the correct order.
How can you apply the three stages of the customer’s journey to improve and simplify your marketing?
