With thousands of tools and platforms available in today’s marketing technology landscape, the potential for digital marketing tactics are endless. So, how do you decide which tactic will accelerate growth for your business? At Reload, we create tailored digital marketing solutions using carefully selected strategies and channels. This article provides an insight into how we help our clients achieve their business goals, with practical guidance and actionable tasks for recreating this process with your ecommerce brand.
1. Understand your Customer and their Journey
Before you can choose the right marketing tactic for your business, you need to define your customer. Do you describe them by demographic (e.g. age, gender, relationship status, location) or by behaviour (e.g. life events, interests, whether they shop online or in-store etc.)? Whilst traditional advertising mediums such as TV, print and radio have largely been limited to targeting demographics, modern approaches to digital marketing allow us to combine this information with emphasis on specific behaviours that drive purchase decisions. This means that it’s now possible for brands to target the right person (your customer), at the right time, on the right platform, with the right message, and send them to the right page with a clear next action.
Here’s one approach you can use to define your customer:
It’s likely you’ll have more than one customer segment, so make sure you understand who all of your segments are (e.g. working women, mums, teenage girls) and assign an importance percentage to each of these. For example, you might assign 80% importance to the working mum who has a higher disposable income and is most likely to purchase from you. You should concentrate your marketing efforts on your top two customer segments, as this is where you’re going to have the biggest impact.
Next, use analytics to understand your customer’s purchasing behaviour (e.g. do they research during the week and purchase on weekends?). Also be aware of any trends that apply to your particular market. For example, is your market seasonal? Do your customers purchase around Christmas? Do they purchase for themselves or as a gift?
Once you’ve narrowed down the demographics and behaviours of your top customer segments, you can start mapping their customer journey. Use the below flowchart as a guide and download the worksheet at the bottom of this article to map your own customer journey for your business.
2. Identify Gaps Within your Customer Journey
Now that you’ve mapped out your customer journey, you need to get an idea of how you’re performing at each stage. Look at your conversation rate and customer lifetime value to determine areas where you’re doing well and areas where there’s room for improvement. For example, you might be getting a lot of people to your website but they’re not making a purchase. This means there’s something going wrong at the Alternatives or Sale stage of your customer journey.
3. Align the Right Marketing Tactics to your Customer Journey
Once you know where you need to focus your marketing efforts, you can select the right channel and marketing tactic to improve your customer journey. For example, you could target your customer segment at the Need Recognition stage using Facebook to find an audience similar to your current customers. Alternatively, you could use Google Ads to get in front of people who are looking for an immediate solution to their questions during the Research stage of the customer journey. Take a look at the slides below for some common marketing tactics used at various stages of the customer journey.
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Regardless of what stage you’re focusing on, make sure you’re confident of what a ‘win’ looks like. If you’re heavily advertising at the Need Recognition and Research stage, don’t expect these tactics to result in immediate conversions. Reach, frequency and click-through rate are more realistic success metrics for this stage of the customer journey. If you’re focusing on the Alternatives and Sale stage, make sure you’re working towards a specific return-on-ad-spend, as this is highly tailored for conversion.
4. Continuously Improve through Reporting
You’ll probably have some key focus areas the first time you examine your customer journey, but it’s likely that these will change over time. This is why reporting is so important. At Reload, we use Data Studio to measure the success of our client’s campaigns and ensure we’re aligning the right marketing tactics to the customer journey for each specific brand. As you continue to add to your marketing mix, make sure you always revisit your customer journey to determine where this campaign will fit and how it will contribute to the overall growth of your brand.
If you need help growing your ecommerce business with digital marketing, contact a Reload digital marketing expert HERE or enter your details below to download our worksheet and map your own customer journey.
Download Reload’s Customer Journey Mapping Worksheet:
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