If we’re honest with ourselves, we’ll acknowledge that the ground beneath us began to tremble at least two years before the coronavirus appeared and since its arrival, the instability has intensified. Unquestionably, the economic landscape has changed. As the global economy hungers for signs of a robust post-pandemic recovery in 2022, business owners and leaders have no choice but to adapt to the new reality in order to survive and thrive.

You are not in Kansas anymore. The assumptions and practices that were considered prudent even three years ago will fall flat today. Forward thinking business owners and leaders are taking a fresh look at every major aspect of their organization—sales, marketing, customers, operations, finance, HR / staffing and technology-—to reassess how each job function contributes to sustainable profitability, the brand and the values, vision and mission of the company.

Define the purpose of your products and services

We’re accustomed to communicating benefits—-use this or do that so your boss and colleagues will think you’re a genius and your company’s customers will be happy that their needs are being met. But defining purpose is subtly different.

To figure out purpose, you’ll need to understand the pain point, goal, or challenge that compels prospects to search your website and look for information they hope can move them forward. If you want to provide the information they’re looking for—-and you’d better!—-you must know what prospects have in mind, basically know what they need to resolve, when they reach out to your organization.

Define your customer segments

Regardless of the product or service based solutions that your company provides, there will nevertheless be differences among those who buy from you based on factors such as motivation, budget, maybe age or gender, maybe also geography or education level. The more you can discern those differences, the more successful you’ll be in bringing business to your door, both new customers and those you’ve retained.

Expectations and the journey

Marketing research experts agree that customers have high expectations these days; they’re quite used to getting what they want, the way they want it and when they want it. Maybe the expectations started with next-day deliveries? Whatever, it’s a thing now and you have to keep up. Your only option is to make each customer touch point with your company seamless, that is, easy, fast, meaningful and pleasant. You’ll only achieve that nirvana by:

1.) accurately communicating the purpose(s) of your products and services

2.) knowing the motivations and other defining characteristics of the various customer segments

The customer journey that your company presents requires intentional creation. So much is at stake, and first impressions matter. The information and call-to-action you devise to showcase its presence influences the prospect’s decision to further engage (or not), depending on its perceived relevance to the problem or goal the prospect wants to address.

Info that supports the purpose and efficacy of your products and/or services will be contained in a white paper, case studies, archived newsletters or blog posts, customer testimonials and your website’s “About us” page. Does the information that you make available effectively support the purpose of your products and services? If it doesn’t, rewrite or replace.

The Yellow Brick Road known as your customer journey must be seeded with a series of positive and relevant encounters with information that demonstrates your expertise and builds trust. Trot out the info equivalent of the Mayor of Munchkin Land, the Wizard of Oz and Glinda, the Good Witch to persuade prospects to do business with you.

Digital support

The very thought of incorporating digital tools can be intimidating but you can start small, so long as you start. Don’t imagine you must immediately dive into the digital deep end. You’ve been clicking on chat bots for 5 years, so why not put that AI-powered tool to work on your website?

Do that and visitors to your site will be favorably impressed with the sophistication of your company, which is a confidence-booster, and if you know your customers well enough to program in answers to the 6-7 questions they’ll most likely have, you will contribute positively to the customer journey. Other AI/ digital tools can take the form of marketing analytics that you sign up to access. As noted in a December 2021 post, Micrsoft Excel or Power BI, Python, Jupyter and Apache Spark are among the most highly rated data analytics tools.

Thanks for reading,

Kim

Image: Dorothy and Toto, the Lion, the Tin Man and the Scare Crow take the Yellow Brick Road into the Emerald City in The Wizard of Oz (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1939)