The Funnel and You: Your Customer Journey
There’s a good chance you have heard of the mysterious *Marketing Funnel*. It’s shaped like an upside-down volcano, sales teams are often very concerned with how healthy they are, and marketers are prone to raving about the abundance of tofu in their very intricately constructed funnels.
So what exactly is the marketing funnel? What metrics should you be paying attention to? And why is sales always asking about them?
The funnel
Previously we reviewed the different kinds of media you can leverage to reach your ideal customer. Owned, earned and paid media includes everything from the website you build and the content you publish, to the ads you place, the PR coverage you receive, how you show up at a conference, to the comments customers or influencers might make about you, among other things.
While it’s helpful to understand a menu of things you can do, the marketing funnel is a tool to understand how you can organize these activities to get results that support your business goals.
The funnel includes three main parts:
Tofu stage. When prospective customers learn that a solution like yours exists.
Mofu stage. When customers learn how your solution will provide value to them (preferably better than the competition).
Bofu stage. When final evaluations and assessments occur so that they can officially become a customer.
The funnel has the shape it does because typically not everyone who becomes aware of your product will opt to continue learning about it, and fewer will actually turn into customers. At some point you will want to understand these conversion rates and how you might influence them.
The funnel is an excellent tool for marketing to share how they organize their efforts to drive results. Sales teams, for example, are usually very excited to see the marketing funnel mapped out in great detail. Tofu marketing activities typically result in lots of new ‘leads’. Mofu gets those leads excited about the product, which results in sales having more productive conversations. And effective bofu activities confirm that more new customers are imminent.
Your customer journey
So what exactly is marketing doing in these different stages? How are they attracting new leads in tofu? What are they teaching people in mofu? And what is going on in bofu during that final evaluation? These questions can be answered through the customer journey.
The customer journey is a unique experience that your customers go through as they learn about your solution and make the decision to purchase it. Within each of the main stages you’ll want to explore:
What marketing and sales activities are happening?
What questions are the prospective customers asking?
What content or resources can answer those questions?
What metrics show that the prospect is advancing successfully through that stage?
When you perform this assessment, be sure to talk to anyone in your organization that will have useful insights. Of course this includes marketing and sales, but also consider customer support and whoever manages the trial experience, finance and legal teams that help process contracts, and product teams that manage feature requests. Anyone who interacts with customers–before, during, or after they sign a contract–will probably have useful information that will help you create a more comprehensive map.
Below is a template an organization used to map their customer journey. In this example, the team was interested in finding ways to increase their lead conversion rate as well as expand feature usage within existing customer accounts. For this reason, they also explored phases of the customer experience.
As you map your customer journey, consider your higher level business goals. Think about all parts of the customer journey, and be honest about any places where conversion rates are low. This is your opportunity to understand how to have more effective conversations with leads and customers.
Putting them together
Now that you understand the marketing funnel and have mapped your customer journey to it, you can:
Evaluate lead conversion rates and consider activities that would influence them
Understand what questions leads are asking, and what resources will answer them
Better prioritize what content your team can focus on
Gain insight into the specific media, community groups, and conferences where your ideal customer hangs out
Ultimately, with this information you can begin to build an editorial calendar and strategize more effective campaigns. As you can see, when you plan strategically you can make a big impact with limited resources.
This is one post in a series focused on marketing to developers. Check back soon for more posts that will dive deeper into creating marketing campaigns and managing an editorial calendar, among other things.
