Effective Marketing Starts and Ends in One Place

“Marketing isn’t important.”

“Oh really? What’s important then?”

“Effective marketing is important.”

“So, effective marketing begins with a good product?”

“A good product is important, but effective marketing starts and ends with customers.”

The Most Effective Marketing Starts and Ends With Customers

Yup, that’s it. Your marketing strategy starts and ends in one place. And that place is not your products, it’s not even inside your business.

Consider who your prime prospects are and what they need. What problem are they trying to solve? Using an outside-in perspective converts your marketing from expensive noise into a value-creation machine.

It’s also important to recognize that your prime prospects are on a journey.

Most of the time, they aren’t interested, so they won’t see your marketing. Sorry. I know that this is scary, but all the marketing activity in the world won’t change a customer’s need state. When their needs change, when their interest in the category increases, they will become aware of your marketing activity and your competition’s marketing. You want to be there when they are ready with the right message.

To accomplish this, you need a simple marketing plan. This is also essential for an effective business website.

Let’s dig in and review what this means.

Know Your Customer Base

Among your existing and potential customers, a smaller group drives most of your revenue. These best customers are not regular customers. They are heavy category users with a significant need for what you sell. They know the category, they know your offer and your competitors’ offers, and they pay closer attention to marketing than the average buyer ever will.

Understanding how they differ from the majority is the foundation of everything that follows in this post. The tool for capturing that understanding is the customer avatar, a one-page profile built on four connected quadrants.

Focus is your friend in this work. In each quadrant, capture what separates your best customers from average ones, not what describes everyone in the market. “Women 18 to 49” is not an avatar. It’s a census.

One avatar usually isn’t enough, either. Your prime prospects typically include two or three subsegments with meaningfully different needs. Build an avatar for each, and since they’ll share plenty with the broad profile, spend your effort on the differences.

I walk through the full template, quadrant by quadrant, and with examples, in our guide to the customer avatar.

Map the Buyer’s Journey

Mapping the buyer’s journey is a vital but often overlooked step. A customer journey map helps you choose what to say and when to say it. Consider the direct marketing axiom,

“Get the right message to the right person at the right time.”

Without a journey map, your marketing efforts are throwing content and hope against the wall. This isn’t a plan. Basically, your marketing is, at best, a dot among many that swirl around your prime prospects without notice.

So what happens? What’s the trigger event that brings your potential customers’ needs to the forefront?

This is the beginning of their journey.

What information are they looking for? If your marketing is designed to resonate with this initial event, your marketing will attract more customers to the top of your marketing funnel.

Assess the steps they go through on their journey to purchase. What challenges (obstacles and objections) need to be overcome? What questions need to be answered? Document the events over their entire journey.

For more of the journey map, read our post, Mapping the Customer Journey.

Use the Avatar and Journey Map to Build a Non-Icky Marketing Funnel

The avatar and journey map give you all the information you need to craft a marketing strategy, often called a marketing funnel, that’s designed to attract the right customers for the right reasons. 

Using the Customer Avatar

As mentioned above, the customer avatar has four quadrants.

• Demographics help you choose media channels.
• Characteristics set the tone for ad design and copy.
• Pain identifies the problem you will focus on.
• And Gain tells you what your lead offer should be.

Using the Journey Map

The journey map gives you the guidance you need to draw your prime prospects into a series of increasing-value interactions that build knowledge, like, and trust.

For example, your top-of-funnel tactics and messaging should address the issues and questions your prospects are considering as they begin their journey.

Mid-funnel tactics and messaging support the transition from consideration to decision. If the top-of-funnel tactics are designed to attract, the mid-funnel tactics should be designed to nurture.

Bottom-of-the-funnel tactics should be focused on reinforcing the value proposition and providing the incentives needed to take the next step.

A marketing plan designed in this way will attract more prime prospects and build relationship equity throughout the buyer’s journey. You want the purchase decision to be the next logical step in their journey. It shouldn’t be something you need to convince them to do. Why is this true? I’m glad you asked.

The Most Important Sale Isn’t the First Sale

If the marketing funnel has done its job, the first purchase is the next logical step in your prime prospect’s journey. But your job isn’t over. Your customers’ interest is still high, and they are still very aware of your marketing and your competition’s marketing.

They are looking for reinforcement. 

Have they made a good choice? 

Do you value their business?

Your sales funnel contains the promotional tactics you have in place that are designed to nurture the relationship with new customers and get them to purchase from you again. This is important because customers who buy from you twice are much more likely to buy from you in the future. 

Repeat purchases are the engine of business growth. This is easier when the marketing strategies that brought them to your solution focused on building the relationship.

Effective Sales Funnels

The best marketing strategies include a plan for post-sale value creation. Share valuable content with your new customers. Use the e-commerce thank you page to give new customers information about the product or service they’ve just purchased. Use email marketing to demonstrate how much you value their business. Automated email marketing campaigns and transactional emails are perfect for this. Remarketing using social media advertising is another way to reach recent customers and give them a way to buy from you again.

These are proven techniques. RFM targeting results in successful marketing strategies because it’s based on the proven idea that the customer who bought from you most recently, who buys from you most frequently, and who spends the most with you is the customer most likely to buy from you again. RFM marketing strategies are extremely effective.

What you do immediately after a purchase, especially the first purchase, builds relationship equity and creates loyal customers. Have a marketing plan in place that takes advantage of this opportunity.

Let’s circle back to an idea introduced above; your best customers are likely heavy category users. They have an above-average need for what you are selling. Customer marketing strategies won’t put them off. In fact, they will value the information and the attention.

Is this effort worth it?

How Best Customers Bring Value to Your Business

Loyal customers bring value to your business in five ways.

1. The ROI increases the longer they stay
2. They know how it works, so they cost less to service
3. More efficient marketing because they are more likely to buy again
4. They see the value, so you don’t need to bribe them to buy again
5. They advocate for you

This is true for all your customers, but the impact is magnified if you’ve attracted heavy category users.

Conclusion – Customer-Driven Marketing Strategies Drive Growth

Marketing begins and ends with your customers. The customer avatar captures who your best customers are, how they think, what problem they’re trying to solve, and what they gain from you. The journey map tells you what to say and when to say it. Together, these two planning tools drive every funnel decision: the channels you choose, the tone you set, the problem you lead with, and the offer you make.

The most important sale isn’t the first one; it’s the second one. ~ James’ism

Keep creating value after the purchase, because a customer who buys twice is far more likely to buy again. Marketing built this way attracts the right customers for the right reasons, then turns them into the loyal core that grows your business. That’s the outside-in perspective at work: marketing converted from expensive noise into a value-creation machine.

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