Taking your customers and clients on a journey may sound silly, but it’s the best way to build your business and it’s the best way for generating awareness. Why? Because when you understand and utilize the Customer Value Journey, you can turn customers into raving fans who will go on to sell your products or services for you—not because they are getting paid to do so, but because they believe so wholeheartedly in what you do. The stages of the customer value journey—eight of them in total—happen both before and after you make an initial sale. In this series of blogs, we’ll go more deeply into what each stage entails. First up, generating awareness.
First, Make Sure Your Brand is Solid
Before you begin generating awareness of your company, you need to make sure your brand is solid. There’s no point in guiding prospects to an outdated website or directing them to a Facebook page with an old logo and no posts since 2021. If you don’t have a website or your website needs a refresh, focus on that before you begin the CVJ. If you’ve not audited your social media pages in a while or if you’ve slacked off on posting, address these issues prior to launching stage one as well. If you do stage one properly, you’ll have a lot of new people looking at your business online so you need to make sure you’re presenting a solid image.
Ways to Generate Awareness
Once you have a solid brand, it’s time to start directing your prospects to your social media profiles, your website, and your place of business (if you welcome customers into your location.) Here are a few ways to generate awareness.
1. Advertising
Advertising both on and offline is an essential part of this stage. If you want to go the traditional route, you can try billboards, mailers, radio ads, newspaper/magazine ads, or television ads. Whether you decide to try these or not, you should also incorporate online marketing into your strategy. This could be in the form of display ads, video ads, retargeting campaigns, and mobile ads. The method you choose should line up with your customer avatars and where they tend to spend their time online.
2. Social media marketing
Your social media profiles are powerful tools in stage one of the CVJ—that’s why it’s critical that they are up to date, accurate, and have recent content that incorporates the principles of Engagement Equity. If your prospects go to your profiles and find useful, entertaining, or educational content, they’re more likely to develop confidence in your brand and take the next step. To market with social, you need to engage your viewers. Try to get them to answer questions, make comments, or share your posts with others to spread the word about your brand and up your awareness.
3. Search marketing
Search marketing is gaining awareness from search engines via both paid and unpaid methods. Your goal is to show up high on the page when a prospect searches for companies that offer your products or services. For example, if you own a landscaping company in Omaha, you want to come up on the top of the page if someone Googles “best Omaha landscaper” or “Omaha yards”. You can do this with organic SEO, local SEO, or Google Ads.
Getting Professional Assistance
Confused by any of the above terms or wondering when you’ll make time in your schedule to generate awareness while still building your business? Don’t worry. Working with an experienced online marketing and branding company will not only take the stress off your shoulders, it will also ensure that your efforts generate the awareness you’re after. If you want to start creating your CVJ, reach out to the talented team at Pixel Fire Marketing. We’d love to tell you more!
