Here at Youbee Media, building strong customer relationships is at the heart of what we do. As your external marketing team, we find it best to not only provide an excellent service, but to also build a strong relationship with you and the people within your business. When we like and trust each other, we’re on the road to creating joy – and that’s what we love to do!
When we start to work with a new client, one of the areas we’ll look at is your customer journey. What processes have you put in place already, and how do you build trust with your potential clients in order to convert them? Your sales process is intrinsically linked to marketing. Therefore it’s crucial that we work with, and not against your existing processes. If new, or improved processes could be put in place to support your customer acquisition or retention process – we can offer guidance on this too.
To help you make the best start on your marketing and growth journey, we have laid out 7 key steps to consider in your customer journey.
1) Awareness
Customer awareness is the very first step in their relationship with you. This is where we would help your potential customers become more aware of your brand, your ethics, your proposition and service. The awareness stage should be educational and clear, so that your new clients understand why they should work with you or buy your product. When it comes to social media marketing, you never know when new customers will come across your messaging. Therefore, awareness should be a regular part of your communication strategy.
2) Nurturing
Once you have struck interest with a potential customer, you would nurture that relationship so that they feel more inclined to engage in a conversation with your business. This could be where your potential client would book a discovery call or reach out to enquire about your product or service. The potential client will learn to trust your business and begin to feel as though they can continue to build a relationship.
3) Desire
As part of the customer journey, it’s important to identify a client’s pain points and demonstrate the ways that you can help them or their business. The client will gain a desire to work with your business as they will see how your product or service saves them time, money or solves a problem that they have.
4) Purchase
When the customer feels confident that your business meets their needs, they’ll be ready to buy. It’s taken a lot of hard work to get your new customer to this stage, so it’s crucial that you continue to display the same trustworthy traits. Whether your potential client buys from you once, or signs a contract for the long term you want to demonstrate gratitude and reassurance that they’ve made the right choice.
5) Support
Supporting your client is about how you engage with them at the early stages of their purchase. Whether you send them an onboarding email, receipt of their purchase or confirmation of what happens next, the language and style of this communication should match the traits you showed during the early awareness stages. By this stage, the new client’s trust should be really high.
6) Loyalty
The customer loyalty stage is one of the most important, and rewarding stages of the journey. A loyal customer engages with your team regularly and is happy to discuss any feedback – regardless of whether it’s good or constructive. They are likely to continue working with your business and you may find new opportunities to upsell or cross sell your other products or services.
7) Advocacy
Happy customers become an advocate for your business. They recommend you to their friends, family and business contacts by praising the great service they received. It could be that they’re happy to be featured in a case study or testimonial, providing you with a great piece of marketing material to share in your communications. A customer that becomes an ambassador for your business helps you to remove some of the awareness and desire stages from your customer journey – and help take new clients directly to the purchase stage. This means that you don’t need to work as hard to find them and they too are likely to stay loyal.
If you’re unsure whether your customer onboarding process is achieving all of these points, or want to understand how your marketing communications can support your sales function – get in touch with our marketing consultancy team. We can help you to understand your offering from a customer’s point of view and highlight any areas that you could work on to gain more new, loyal advocates for your business.
Youbee Media is an award-winning marketing agency based in Leeds, providing strategic, creative and hands-on marketing support to businesses of all sizes. They specialise in helping organisations build stronger brands, reach the right audiences and achieve measurable growth through a mix of consultancy, training and done-for-you marketing services.
Their work spans digital and traditional channels, combining strategic planning with content creation, social media expertise and practical guidance that empowers clients to market more effectively. Alongside offering tailored marketing consultancy, they also deliver engaging marketing workshops to upskill business owners and teams, and provide full social media management to handle content, community engagement and performance reporting on behalf of clients. Known for their personalised, collaborative approach, Youbee Media focuses on delivering clarity, confidence and results for businesses at every stage of growth.
