Improve customer journeys. Marketing for five steps in the sales journey.

Customer journey. Allround Creative helps to improve marketing strategy by identifying when, how and why the market looks for products, then making it easier for prospects to buy.

Allround Creative helps companies to improve marketing throughout the customer buying journey by identifying when, how and why they engage with products. The aim is always to make it easier for prospects to buy, by providing the right information to help them pass from one buying phase to the next.

The way people buy has fundamentally changed in recent years and people resist overt sales techniques. 

Stop selling! Help customers to buy.

You will find it refreshing to take a simple, common sense approach to marketing and its relationship with sales.

An objective for any company is to become well known within its sphere of influence, whether regional, national or international. A company also needs to build understanding of its purpose, capability, products and services, which cannot be achieved in 'one hit'.

The buyer’s journey from the time they’d never heard of you.

So, how do you take prospects who are UNAWARE of who you are and what you do to a state where they are AWARE of your company or product names?

Too often good companies and good products are well kept secrets. However, there are simple, structured activities to achieve awareness, which can take many touches in various media before someone remembers you.

How do you build the buyer’s understanding of your product?

Once a prospect has basic AWARENESS, how do you generate COMPREHENSION?

That is, what information or persuasion can be supplied to help someone to understand what it is you do?

Then, as a prospect moves closer to their buying decision, how do you move them to a CONVICTION that you are the right supplier with the right products or services to meet their needs, and finally to the point where they PURCHASE?

Discrete marketing steps on the path to converting a customer.

Each of these steps in a prospect's relationship with you is different and requires a marketing strategy that moves them from one stage to the next.

Marketing and sales must work together to facilitate the prospect's progress from unknown person to customer, from unaware to purchase. Awareness may begin with an ad or direct contact; Conviction and Purchase, certainly in B2B sales, usually require something more tailored that speaks directly to the prospect's immediate circumstances.

Prospects research online and take the first buying steps on their own.

The availability the internet means that many prospect's will, by searching online, travel part way along the marketing-sales journey on their own, and satisfy themselves that you are just the right supplier for them, if information is available to help them.

Prospects qualify your product in or out.

A self-selection journey allows people to move from the early Awareness and research phases to a point where they are comfortable to pick up the phone or commit to an order.

If people are searching for you online, then content strategy and inbound marketing will be an essential part of your marketing strategy.

It’s not over until it’s over: nurturing uncommitted prospects.

Unconverted opportunities are the responsibility of both the Marketing and Sales departments.

Sometimes these functions are carried out by one person or department; ie., Sales is held responsible for doing its own marketing. However, usually, if a prospect has a genuine need, they are going to buy sometime, so you have to stay on their radar effectively.

Marketing is responsible for generating Awareness and Comprehension, after which, if the sales team fails to convert opportunity for any reason, the lead should go back into a marketing nurturing programme.

A nurture programme means scarce sales resources can concentrate on winning orders while marketing nurtures prospects to keep them interested and warm about your company.

Allround Creative has twenty years' experience working on marketing and sales strategy with international companies and pioneering SMEs.  

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