Three Steps to Simplify Your Customer Journey

In today’s episode I’m walking you through three steps to simplify your customer journey so that you can simplify what ‘marketing’ can look like for you in your business and clarity on what to focus on next too.

And remember: embrace that marketing is a never-ending experiment, but the more you get stuck in the more you will discover what your business needs most to thrive.

So at the heart of a simple and spacious business is a thriving and functioning customer journey.

Because without people actually wanting to buy from us our business will lack the stability that we all crave.

Finding clients and customers can so often feel like the hardest part of business, because the work is never actually done.

You can be booked out, or have a really successful launch, but your mind still may wonder about the next launch or when your current clients finish their work with you.

And that’s where a simplified, effective, and human customer journey comes in.

Solidifying this, and re-visiting it whenever our business intuition guides us to tweak and evolve something too, is one of the most important things we can do in our work.

So if you’re feeling stuck around what ‘marketing’ actually needs to look like in your business, or perhaps you’re feeling like your current approach isn’t working as effectively as you hoped it would, I have three steps to simplify it for you today:

The first step is discovery.

This step is how someone finds or is introduced to your work and may look like a blend of a google search, finding you on Instagram or YouTube if you create video content or perhaps through direct word of mouth and referrals or podcast appearances or maybe even through affiliates of your programs sharing your offers too.

This isn’t an exhaustive list but hopefully gives you an idea of the different ways you can be found and discovered by potential clients and customers. And something to keep in mind is that a thriving business often has a diversified portfolio of ways for someone to find and discover their work - for example in my business people find me through my content such as my podcasts and blog posts, or perhaps they find me through a direct recommendation from a client or person in my audience, or they may stumble across me on Instagram or someone sharing something I post there. I have some clients whose audience has mostly been built through SEO, others through Instagram, others through word of mouth and networking, and many with a blend of multiple streams too.

If you’re unsure of where to focus your energy think about two things:

First: what is already moving the needle that you can dial up?

And second: where are your dream clients and customers already hanging out and paying attention and how can you get in front of them there? So for example are there podcasts they listen to that you can pitch to? Or certain things they’re googling for or searching for on Youtube? This step isn’t about throwing everything at the wall and seeing what sticks but there does have to be some experimentation as we figure out what works best for us.

And then that takes us to step two which is nurturing.

So once people have discovered you this is the meat of the customer journey, the step where you really craft an experience for your potential customers and clients to discover if working with you or investing in your offers and products is a hell yes for them.

Think of this step as nurturing the audience you built through step one and this may look like through your newsletter, your podcast, your YouTube channel, your blog posts, perhaps you have a private free community or free resources that you create or an email nurture sequence to sow those deeper seeds.

Again this isn’t an exhaustive list, and something to keep in mind is that many of our ‘discovery’ channel are also our nurture channels too. So in my business all of my discovery channels are also nurturing channels and that means that I effectively do two jobs at once when creating most of my content, apart from my weekly letters which are obviously for people already subscribed and paying attention.

And then finally step three is the invitation.

This is where we put our lights on and invite someone to invest in one of our offerings and where someone graduates from our free content to a deeper experience with our work.

Putting our lights on may look like: sending sales emails during a launch or sharing our upcoming availability or offers on social media or having an invitation at the end of an email nurture sequence or making an invitation to an offer in our newsletter and linking to our products and offers in our public content like blog posts, YouTube, or podcast.

Something to remember is not everyone in our audience will graduate from step two to step three, or they may be in step two for years before they decide to invest and go deeper. Our job isn’t to try and manipulate their decisions as a customer but instead just make it easy for them to go deeper as and when the time is right for them.

And perhaps you’re now thinking: okay, so what should I focus on next then Jen?

Here’s my encouragement for you:

If you’re having a steady stream of new people finding your work but they’re not sticking around and becoming customer and clients along the way, that may be a sign to pour more energy into your nurturing channels and perhaps explore if the people you’re attracting are truly aligned with what you offer too.

If you have an engaged audience around your content but are they rarely turning into paying clients and customers, that may be a sign to put your lights on more, to make stronger invitations to the ways you can work together, and perhaps explore how you can align your nurturing channels with your offers in a more effective way.

And if you have a really effective nurturing and invitation eco-system but just not enough people discovering your work so that you can have enough clients and customers to make your business sustainable, that’s a sign to focus on step one, discovery, and experiment with new ways for more people to discover your awesome work.

Hopefully by simplifying it like this you can take a birds eye view and start to see the ways you may want to experiment with strengthening and evolving your customer journey in this season of your work.

And the biggest lesson I’ve learned? Our customer journey is never done. It’s always evolving alongside us, and as platforms and customer habits change we also have to evolve and change too.

But when we’re willing to experiment with intention, that’s when we’re able to crack wide open the truly possibilities of our work along the way.

So here’s to creating a simple, effective, and human customer journey so that you can find the freedom, ease, and momentum that you’re craving in your business.

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Jen Carrington27 April 2022