To rise to the top of a highly competitive market, you need to perfect your lead-generation strategies.

And whichever you prefer, they should all involve one remarkable tool: the customer journey. This road map encompasses the entire experience that the public at large, prospects, and current clients have with your brand—from initial awareness to the final purchase and beyond. By crafting your own version according to the unique intricacies and challenges of your organization, you can effectively find, nurture, and convert leads into loyal consumers who go on to refer your business.

Stages of the customer journey

The first step is to understand the general levels of the customer journey. Though you’ll want to fine-tune yours based on the products or services you offer and whether you sell B2B or B2C, the following generic framework will help give you a baseline of where to begin.

1. Awareness
   This is the stage in which potential customers first become aware of your brand or product. It could occur through any number of means, such as by interacting with your social media, finding you on a search engine, hearing about you via word of mouth, or viewing your advertisements.
2. Consideration
   At this stage, prospects have identified a need or problem they have and are exploring possible solutions. They may compare different products or services, read reviews, and seek recommendations before choosing a business—ideally, yours.
3. Acquisition
   Congratulations, you have a sale! This stage involves a customer not only making a transaction but also providing you with valuable contact details so you can stay in touch with them.
4. Onboarding
   During this phase, you welcome your new customer with emails or a product kit, offering helpful information about utilizing their purchase to the fullest and assisting them wherever there may be a learning curve.
5. Engagement
   After buying from your business, some clients may cease all contact. But those who proceed to this stage choose to stay in touch with you, whether by calling customer support, reading your follow-up emails, following your social media, or, most pivotal of all, returning to step two to contemplate making additional purchases.
6. Advocacy
   Once they reach this stage, one-time clients have become loyal patrons, joining your rewards programs and sharing your social media posts with others. They have gained value from your products or services and enjoyed using them—so much so that they encourage others to experience these perks for themselves.

Naturally, any business would hope to guide prospects from the initial stage to the final one, but, of course, that doesn’t always happen. While you can’t control every individual, you can adjust your practices to enhance the customer journey, boosting your ability to transform noncustomers into dedicated clients and even referral machines for your organization.

Applying the customer journey

Once you map your journey, utilize the categories to strategize specific lead-generation efforts. Here are a few top tactics that may enable you to capture and nurture prospects more effectively.

Catalog key touchpoints
Every touchpoint with a client is an opportunity to convert them and cement their loyalty. List the ones that occur at each stage, identifying which prove to be most effective and which you may need to tweak for better results.

For example, a lawn-care service may send follow-up emails to its clients indicating that they’re due for service (with the intention of guiding them from the onboarding stage to engagement). Its marketing analytics, however, may show that these emails have a poor open rate, meaning they are ultimately ineffective. To improve this, the company could tweak its subject lines to be more engaging and move the delivery times from morning to evening. These adjustments may better entice customers to read the emails and, in turn, schedule repeat services.

Likewise, review the common touchpoints in your organization, including phone calls and in-person sales, to identify the challenges of each. Then brainstorm ways to make your content, sales verbiage, timing, and other aspects more impactful, enhancing their ability to move customers down the funnel.

Leverage data
Breaking down your customer journey can also better equip you to shape your marketing strategies at every stage. Take the first phase: awareness. Using your map, you can identify all the different ways prospects could possibly learn about and begin interacting with your brand. Then review various metrics, such as your post rates and click-through rates on social media sites, to gauge which currently garner the most engagement. You can obtain this information in other stages as well, such as by asking customers “How did you hear about us?” when onboarding them. Once you have this data, funnel your lead-generation efforts and marketing budget toward the most effective channels—or even toward enhancing the weaker ones.

Additionally, you can gather details about how existing customers stay engaged with your company postpurchase. For example, collect feedback from onboarded consumers about shortcomings in your customer service or products to discover how to improve stages three and four. Afterward, reach out to these clients again with “We heard you out!” messaging to help move them into the engagement or even advocacy phase. Continue to collect major metrics like these, and you may find myriad opportunities to strengthen the client journey and polish your marketing efforts.

Tailor your messaging
Customers these days gravitate toward businesses that offer a personalized experience, making it essential to customize your marketing efforts based on where they are in the journey. While those in the consideration stage may enjoy reading informative blog posts and consumer reviews, clients in onboarding might prefer to receive ongoing support emails featuring helpful user tips or links to landing pages that suggest related products. As for email marketing, you can segment messages into follow-up, ongoing customer support, news about upcoming sales, and more. Tailoring your language in this way will help you better communicate with prospects according to their unique needs, helping you push them forward in the customer journey and make it a smooth ride from start to finish.