Part 4 of Build Your Marketing Plan Series
July is Build Your Marketing Plan month on The Marketing Spot blog. This is part four of an eight-part series on how to build an exceptional small business marketing plan. Each "lesson" of the series contains a background article, down loadable worksheets and a slidecast. This information is part of my full-day workshop, DIY Marketing for Small Businesses.
(See Part 1: The Brand Promise)
(See Part 2: Your Signature)
(See Part 3: The Customer Experience Theme)
*Note: The next live, DIY Marketing workshop is September 24 at the Houston Small Business Development Center.
"Marketing only begets trial. It is the daily, one-to-one activity that occurs inside your own four walls that creates compelling word of mouth and repeat business."
-T. Scott Gross, Positively Outrageous Service
The most important marketing you do is actually at the point of contact with your customer. What happens at this point creates word of mouth and instills customer loyalty. It should not be left to chance. Your customers' experience should not be meandering trip of exploration. Instead, think of the customer experience as a guided tour in an exotic destination. And you are the tour guide.
Suppose that today you are leaving for summer vacation. You are driving to Destin, Florida. The thing is, you've never been to Destin. Logically, you pull up Google Maps and get directions to take you from your front door to the sandy beaches of Destin.
Now let's look at your business. Everyday you ask customers to start from their front door and end up at your check-out counter (Destin) to make a purchase. Are you asking them do it without a map? Are you asking customers to navigate the treacherous waters of retail without directions? I'm not talking about physical directions to your storefront or website, I'm talking about emotional, relational directions during the customer experience.
Consistently great customer experiences don't occur by chance. They are carefully planned. Yours should be too. With this installment of the Build Your Marketing Plan series, you will use The Marketing Spot's Customer Experience Map to design a remarkable customer experience.
But just like a guided tour of The Vatican, a remarkable customer experience is not just about going from point A to point B. No, it's also about those little unique moments you retell later to your friends and family. I call those Magic Spots, and they need to be sprinkled throughout your customer experience.
To map out your customer experience with magic spots, download the two PDF worksheets below and print them off. Just right click and save them to your computer.
Then watch the slidecast below for details on how to use these customer experience tools.
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Watch the slidecast below after you have printed the worksheets. If you cannot see the slidecast in your reader, click here.
Additional reading on building your marketing plan:
spotlight...ON MARKETING: Writing Customer Stories
What a Country Music Superstar Can Teach You About Marketing
A Remarkable Customer Experience
If you have questions or comments, click the comment link below.
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3 comments:
Jay, This is a remarkable and compelling post, Thank You, Planning out the Touch Points of the Customer Experience certainly helps shape the outcome. Lots of things to think through here, but execution may well be quite the challenge. I would add that this also extends to Post Sale too, which begins to blur with Customer Service, but isn�t it, shouldn�t every Point of Contact with the Customer be Marketing Driven?
Eric, Yes, this is probably the most challenging portion of the plan because it does take a lot of work. Which is why, more often than naught, it is done poorly.
But the payoff is there. As was pointed out in the previous installment (Experience Theme) of the series, the experience is the most important factor in customer loyalty.
I realize there is a lot to digest. A 9 minute slidecast does not do justice the amount of effort needed to build a remarkable customer experience.
Thanks for the great article Jay. I've found that as you begin to map out the customer experience, you often find yourself with a long list of "experience attributes." Because it can be overwhelming to coach to all these attributes from the start, I typically segment them. One great model that illustrates the segmentation of experience attributes is the KANO model. This model characterizes experience attributes as either:
1. Performance Attributes
2. Basic Attributes
3. Excitement Attributes
The model in it's entirety takes quite a bit of room to illustrate, so I'll let those who are interested look it up, but it really is both simple and extremely helpful in the process of mapping the customer experience and prioritizing which ares to focus on first.
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