Marketing to Support Your Client Journey

Your client journey is simply the route they take from discovering you to working with you. Once you start seeing clients, they naturally follow a path whether you realise it or not. Having clarity over this will help you focus your marketing efforts.

You may have heard the terms ‘sales funnel’ or the ‘flywheel’. These are simply models marketers use to map out how prospective customers progress through the business to becoming customers.

Sales Funnel

Imagine a funnel, wide at the top and narrowing as it goes down. The idea is to move people through the funnel from one stage to the next as smoothly as possible. Especially when you’re marketing online, you need a lot of people going into the top of the funnel to create a few paying customers at the bottom. It’s a numbers game and most marketing effort goes on attracting people to the top of the funnel.

Flywheel

This model moves your focus away from spending your energy trying to attract the attention of people who don’t know you. It moves you towards building relationships and connections which then turn into referrals. It helps your happy clients become your best marketers to grow your business.

Stages of the Journey

Clients and prospective clients are at different stages of being ready to work with you. You need to bear this in mind when deciding on your marketing activities and how you communicate with them.

Practitioners who need to find clients quickly will often focus their marketing efforts in the wrong places, for example on strategies that build awareness like social media or PR. Most marketing strategies take time to mature and deliver results which won’t help if you need to fill your diary now. These long-term strategies are like planting seeds, you must nurture and tend to them, so they grow and blossom into something worthwhile.

Having clients who are ready to work with you now and having people warming up to work with you in the future will build a flow of clients and create a sustainable business.

Cold, Warm, and Hot Leads

Remember the children’s game where you hide something, and you assist the person trying to find it by calling out different temperatures? Cold is when they’re nowhere near, and hot is when they’re close.

This is the same with your prospective clients or leads. When they’re cold, they don’t even know you exist, when they’re warm, they’re getting to know you, and those who are hot are the most likely to work with you.

Understanding your client journey will help you to focus your marketing activities and ensure you’re making their progression through the steps as smooth as possible.

Marketing to Attract Attention

When you’re trying to attract attention, you are communicating with people who don't necessarily know you exist or how you can help them solve their problems. You need to work hard to get noticed and build relationships so that these people come to trust you.

A great way to find out what marketing is working to attract attention is to ask every enquiry how they discovered you. This will help you to know what marketing is working.
Awareness marketing activities include:

• Social media
• Advertising
• Practice leaflets
• Public relations
• Online directories
• Blogs, podcasts, videos

Engage with Prospective Clients

At this stage, it’s about being really helpful and demonstrating your expertise. You are turning strangers you’ve attracted into clients who want to work with you and know you’re the best person to help them.

Engaging marketing activities include:

• Email marketing
• Social media
• Networking
• Collaborations
• Blogs, podcasts, videos
• Speaking and talks

Delight Clients

Clients who have an amazing experience from working with you will become your best marketers. How are you maintaining your relationship with these people?

Happy clients love to share their experiences. Think about when you’re looking to buy something, you’ll ask your network for ideas, and check reviews - you want to know you can trust your choice. You want to capture this trust to help you build your business efficiently.

To nurture your clients, consider these activities:

• Personal emails
• Referrals
• Handwritten cards
• Phone calls
• Meetings
• Social media

Map out Your Client's Journey

Understanding the journey a client takes, from discovering you to working with you, is powerful knowledge. It will help you to build connections and relationships through your marketing, streamline your communications, and focus on what works.

Keep it simple and determine how you attract and communicate with your clients at each stage of their journey.

Consider the following:

• How do people discover you in the first place?
• How do you continue to engage with prospective clients?
• How do you keep current and past clients engaged with you and your business?

Reflect on Your Client Journey

From your review, are there any stages that you’re not communicating effectively with prospective and/or existing clients? Make sure your marketing builds trust and supports clients at every stage of their journey.

This exercise will help you to identify the gaps in your marketing and also notice if there are areas that can be streamlined to remove any friction for your clients that could be stopping them from booking with you.

Get Help!

If you’re struggling to market yourself and find clients, it’s time to get help. Having a support network that will help you figure out how best to market your practice, provide hands-on support, and keep you accountable will make a huge difference to the rest of your year. The doors are open to join my Holistic Hub Mastermind for the next four months - an exclusive community of 8 like-minded holistic practitioners, all passionate about making a difference and creating a successful business. Get the full details here.