As an online marketing consultant who specialises in improving your customer experience, I know exactly how important it is to ensure that your marketing talks about and promotes your Brand, Purpose and Asset.
When I speak to prospects about their marketing goals, it always comes down to “conversions”. Each time they want more leads and more sales.
It’s not often someone contacts me and says, “I need help fixing some gaps in my automation process.” So, when it happened this week, I was astonished.
Wow! When I get a request like this, I know that it translates to:
“I need help fixing some gaps in my automation process so that I can increase my leads and sales, and keep my customers happy.”
WHICH MEANS (if you haven’t already picked this up yet) that they need to plug the gaps in their Customer Journey.
So, as an Online Marketing Consultant of over 12 years, I have seen all different types of ‘broken processes’. Everything from delivery of a product or service, to no follow-up, and worse.
What brings down the reputation of all Digital and Online Marketing Consultants is when people in this industry sell a solution to help a business “grow conversions using automation”, and it ends up being not so spectacular.
There are several reasons for this, but I would say one of the BIGGEST reasons why the attempts to improve leads and sales using Automation fail, is that the online Marketing Consultant doesn’t have enough experience in the Customer Journey, or how all the different elements impact the outcome.
Let me explain it a different way.
A consultant may offer you specialised services in creating email campaigns. That is their speciality, and they are really good at creating emails for a specific purpose.
If that consultant only ever focussed on email campaigns, they would not see the Brand, the Positioning, the Customer Journey, the Awareness stage and all the other stages of the Customer Journey EXCEPT for the one that they focussed on, the email campaign. They would have ‘blinkers’ on.
Their speciality is just that one thing.
Similarly, if you went to a knee specialist about your knee, you wouldn’t ask them to look at your eyes and tell you what’s wrong with your eyesight.
Does this mean an Online Marketing Consultant needs to be a Generalist? In a sense, yes; because you will be getting a far broader level of knowledge from them to understand all the elements involved, and hopefully they will be skilled enough to create a strategy for you.
Then, they could employ the services of a specialist to fulfil that one function of writing brilliant email campaigns, alongside the other marketing and automation work going on.
You would have an end-to-end strategy and online marketing system built – rather than just focussing on one thing in isolation.
What does this mean in terms of the Customer Journey?
Quite simply, if your Online Marketing Consultant is worth hiring and keeping, you should ensure that they are improving your Customer Experience.
The technical aspects of setting up your marketing automation should be secondary or complementary to the overall goal of improving your Customer Experience and making it a seamless end-to-end experience.
Otherwise, the hard-earned dollars you spent on Online Marketing Consultants will be thrown into the wind, along with all the other things you’ve spent money on in the past and done nothing with or made no money from.
In other words: it’s a ‘spray and pray’ approach. Hopeful at best. Almost wishful thinking!
Your Online Marketing Consultant should be improving your Customer Experience to optimise the Customer Journey, map the gaps, fill in the gaps, and ensure value is unlocked for both your customer AND for you.
Your Customer Journey should be your priority as a business owner, and the strategy around that needs to inform the technology that is set up as a result.
If you don’t have a clear plan about your Brand, Purpose, Asset and your Channels, then you’ll be locked in the starting gates while the other horses have bolted.
So next time you go to hire an Online Marketing Consultant, ask them questions about how they are going to optimise your Customer Journey, and what their methods are for finding all the gaps in your Customer Journey.
You want their focus to be on your entire Customer Journey; not just on one aspect of the whole process. This is especially true if you have never looked at your Customer Journey before or mapped the gaps in any way.
When your Customer Journey has been mapped, the gaps closed, and the entire journey built out to reflect your Brand, you will soon find the rate of new leads and sales will rise.
If you need more information on how a marketing consultant can help improve your customer experience, contact us!
