Curating Impactful Customer Journeys for Brand Loyalty
Season 4, Episode 18
In this episode, host Emma dives deep into the art of customer experience orchestration and marketing. Emma outlines how every detail, from customer engagement to brand promises and emotional connections, shapes the customer journey. She offers strategies for setting clear brand expectations, building connective experiences, and maintaining brand consistency. This episode is packed with insights on how to ultimately transform customer touch points into loyalty and revenue, making it essential for any business owner looking to enhance their digital marketing strategy.
Access the Customer Journey Workbook Template
Transcript
Picture this: There’s two coffee shops on the same street in your town or city. Similiar prices, and they both serve coffee and food, so they kind of serve the same purpose.
Step into the first café and there’s plush armchairs that invite you to sink in and stay a while. They offer different milk alternatives, at no up-charge, and have a weekly matcha special. The pasta dishes and salads are house-made and you regularly see the staff bring out a new platter as they empty each one. There's a full menu to order from, and the ambiance is super homey and cosy.
Another day you walk into the second cafe and you notice they chose plastic chairs, the kind that keep you moving, pre-made sandwiches and slices in a cabinet, one milk option, and a menu that screams 'fast'. The lighting is a little harsh, the music is a little bit too loud, and the staff aren’t running but they’re not messing about either.
Two completely different experiences, and completely different brands. How they market themselves should be equally unique.
Quite frankly, you might have made some assumptions about their revenue, or profit, from what I just described, but both could be making the same amount. It’s just a different experience, and the customer will choose which they spend their money in. They might even frequent both on different types of days, depending on what they’re in the mood for.
This cafe analogy is one I use with clients all the time. I wouldn’t use it if they actually ran a cafe, but otherwise it helps them get out of their head and focus on the elements of the brand, by comparing it to what is a pretty universal experience.
Part of marketing is setting expectations, that accurately portray the experience of your business. Good marketing also provides something to attach to, emotionally, physically, logistically, whatever. That connection allows for more memorability that eventually turns into loyalty. But the connection must happen first, and the expectations must be met.
One of the ways you can be sure to set expectations is to have clear brand promises. This could be around there being some form of guarantee or refund or return policy. It could also be as basic as stating when you dispatch orders, or as minor as posting photos of your entrance and reception area so they know what they’re walking into. Where you put these depends on the promise, and when they should find out about that.
All we want to do here is to curate the experience, not to control it. Through your content, the topics you talk about, the ways you engage people, how you reply to their comments and DMs, the calls to action you use, even how you position your pricing, can all become moments of varying sizes that culminate in the customer journey.
In this episode, I’m going behind the scenes of customer experience orchestration in marketing. It’s the art of making every touchpoint feel intentional, aligned, and irresistibly 'right' for your brand.
Welcome to the Digital Hive Podcast where we talk all things digital marketing. I’m Emma, a marketing strategist and coach for business owners who aren’t short on ideas but want support with the strategy and tactics to get their message out into the world.
What is the Customer Journey?
It’s the complete experience a person has with your business, from the moment they first become aware of a problem or need, all the way through becoming a loyal advocate for your brand. They might find you on social media, or through an ad, follow you and see a few more posts, see something teased that’s on your website so they find the link in your bio to go there, browse a bit, sign up for your emails, read a few newsletters over time and ultimately end up buying something. That could take place over days, weeks or months, and the average of that timeline will be unique to your business.
By being true to your brand throughout that whole journey, from the mood, to the design to the topics to the feelings you evoke, you either draw people in, or show you aren’t the right fit for them. It’s essentially inclusion and naturally some self exclusion through brand and marketing.
This is why we marketers harp on about brand not just being a logo. It’s the whole enchilada and I don’t know where that saying comes from but I do love Mexican food, so I’ve never wanted a half an enchilada.
Just like any relationship, it has phases, the meeting, getting to know each other, deciding to commit, and then nurturing that relationship over time. But there’s a million little parts of that which shape your brand and the experience your customers will have.
Many business owners only focus on that "sale" moment, but that's like only caring about the wedding day while ignoring the entire relationship that leads up to it and the marriage to follow.
Where people drop off or disengage is where the most opportunity is. It might be a time that makes sense for people to drop off, like when the decision to purchase comes up. Ideally, they stay in your brand’s periphery, but don’t buy just for now. If people engage on social media, but your email signup is low, the incentive to sign up might need some work. If people purchase once, but never again, it could give you some insight into their expectations or whether the product lives up to the hype. This can be especially true when the product is an item they could purchase on a regular basis, or are signing up for a monthly subscription but later cancelling, especially if the timing becomes common.
Whatever is working well, could be something you can replicate somewhere else in the process in a way that makes sense for those interactions. This will require some trial and error when you don’t know exactly what part might be working, so make sure you create a test that will get a result, no matter what that result is. We want the truth more than to reinforce your latest theory.
Why Does This Matter So Much?
Studies suggest that it costs 5-7 times as much to acquire a customer as it does to retain one. In my experience, that’s on the cheap end, and acquisition is only getting more expensive over time.
When you guide the journey properly, you're building a relationship and connection that generates multiple purchases, either from the same person, or from them sharing their experience and your business with others.
Your Customer’s Experience is your Competitive Advantage.
In today's market, products and prices are often similar, we have multiple options, so that experience is what sets your business apart.
Growing A Connection
Kendrick Shope, who is a sales coach I worked with, says all things being equal friends buy from friends. All things being unequal, friends still buy from friends.
When we allow people to connect with you and your team on a personal level, with them either being in content or by creating a personal brand, there is more possibility of that friendly connection being made. When you tell them about your business, why you started it, tell them some stories they can relate to, letting them in on the behind the scenes, show them some social proof and remain consistent throughout their experience with you, you solidify that know, like and trust that we need, to ultimately move forward to a sale.
Personal brand can be incredibly valuable in humanising your business, by not removing yourself and holding them at arms length. As the face of the brand, it’s beneficial to decide where the line is, of what you will and won’t share. You can easily share your origin story, why you started the business, but there might only be a part of that which you share around your personal life at that time. This personal side can help you to share your values, especially those which are most relevant to the business, but it doesn’t need to become your personal diary.
You can lose revenue when there’s a gap or disconnect in the journey. Often we talk about a broken link or something but this friction can also be a point on the journey that doesn’t really vibe with the rest of the experience.
If we get deeper into the nuance, what small elements would make this the greatest thing for your perfect customer, or a turnoff?
Excluding broken links, one mans’ friction is another man’s local. By that I mean that you might prefer a softly lit wine bar with jazz music, while the boys down at the pub with their darts, rock tunes and craft beers are having the best night of their week. What might feel right for one person, will feel wrong for another. You have to decide who to appeal to since it’s impossible to appeal to everyone.
People who connect with the experience are more likely to tell a friend to tell a friend because they have something to latch onto, some part of it that they know their friend would like. The opposite can also be true, but often worse, where they might tell 5 or more friends about the bad experience they had. And if that bad experience is because they thought the place they were going to was a thing that it isn’t, that’s bad marketing, and with some self awareness it’s almost always avoidable.
In fancier words, your customer journey directly impacts your reputation and organic growth through word of mouth as well as whether or not people decide to stay engaged.
When I work with my clients, I make a conscious effort not to tell them what to do. I’m sure there are some people out there that want to be told what to do, but that isn’t me and it isn’t my role in our client, service provider relationship. I’m there as a guide, so I’ll present marketing options and we’ll talk them through, but I won’t just pluck a recommendation out of the ether. I try to make that clear in my marketing. There is no “so and so did this so if you follow my framework, you can too” because my framework is to help you make your own decisions. It’s not my personality to dish out rules, but I genuinely believe it helps these business owners more in the long term. I understand that my service is literally time with me and my brain, and the client has to put in the work to get results, so I need them to understand that too, so we’re on the same page. The clients who are a good fit want that guidance but want to have the experience themselves, so it isn’t something I would ever hide or gloss over. They won’t be working with me forever, and they need to be able to adapt their marketing plan as the outside world shifts and they get feedback. A large part of this is in the technical understanding of any analytics or what have you, the things that should tell them it’s time to change something, or that helps them spot an opportunity. The rest is empowerment. If I tell them what to do, how will they gain the confidence in their own knowledge and make those decisions in a year, or two or five? This influences how I do every part of my marketing. It’s clear on my sales pages, it’s through my content, where I talk about how they can find their own route, their own approach, and that following what someone else has done probably won’t work for them. I talk about how to make decisions, and explain the factors of something that effects their marketing decisions.
I understand that that could start to feel too loose and uncertain. When I have a discovery call with someone, I tell them how the service will function, and that’s also documented in the proposal. I want them to feel somewhat certain in how the process will go, partly because the result, and the things we might try along the way, are unknowns to start with. That figuring it out is too inherent in the process for us to know ahead of time.
Because of that, I’ve gotten feedback from clients that they knew they were making an investment and there was a small amount of uncertainty there, but they could see the structure we would follow, and that they knew what to expect.
I’m realistic that people have hesitations as they go through any sales process, but I think it’s our responsibility as marketers and business owners to understand those doubts and share information that is relevant to our customers.
Sometimes the way to stand out is simply by noticing what your competitors don’t do well and highlighting the opposite that you do. Sometimes you learn this because their customers come to you and they tell you what went wrong on the other side. Other times it’s in their reviews, or something that they promote that you just inherently know your customer wouldn’t be aligned with. These things can help you stand out in the market in a way that is directly comparable.
For so many businesses, there is an opportunity to provide value before asking for anything in return. This can be a freebie or discount customers receive when they sign up for your email list. It could look like a free webinar, the value you deliver on the discovery call, or the value you provide through content like a blog, podcast or even in your portfolio. The choice is yours, but this opportunity can allow you to gain their trust before they make a purchase. What could you do for your customer?
Why Should We Get This Journey Defined and On Paper?
It’s easy to unintentionally evolve your marketing in a way that draws you away from alignment with your brand. It can be a distraction. Sometimes it’s you getting swayed, other times it’s someone you hired adjusting what they’re doing for what they like, what the audience is reacting to regardless of your brand, or making assumptions. Consistency and conscious evolution is the goal. This documentation helps you to check in, and spot the small things that genuinely could do with some improvement, instead of mindlessly tinkering, or doing that thing you heard about the other week.
When we have a simple guide to check our ideas against, we can be more consistent with messaging, audience, flow, the brand elements, and tie everything together with those common points.
In this trend heavy online world, your defined brand can help you to choose what makes sense for your business and what doesn’t.
The real question is what do we define.
The episodes I have created on the marketing and sales funnel might help you to cover all of the various stages throughout your customer journey, and I’ll link those below but today, we’re filling in some of the gaps on how we make your customer’s journey unique, so that the interactions in that funnel feel on-brand.
I’ve created a workbook to help you break this down in writing. You can find that linked in the show notes as well.
Brand-Aligned Experience Design
When you’re thinking about who your target customer is, it helps to understand where you’re at in your business. In the early days, that audience is an idea or a concept, something you have in your head. Over time, it morphs into who actually buys your products, services, or courses. If you are breaking out into a new audience, possibly by creating a new offer, a new conceptual audience might be added.
Either way, whether it’s getting to know your real customers through their engagement or surveys, or doing research in online forums, getting to know their needs and wants is crucial to how you market your offer.
If your ideal customer is you a few years behind, or an audience you’ve been working with for a long time, its still important to learn about what is new in the space. Are there factors that didn’t exist back then, which make it easier or harder on your customer now?
To define what you want your customer’s journey to be, we want to think about your customer's emotional state before they discover your business. If your business solves a problem, it’s likely they have some kind of emotions around that problem in feeling frustrated, overwhelmed, confused or stuck, but you can get way more specific depending on your customer and your offer. Then as they move through the funnel with your brand, the feelings they have in connection with your content will evolve.
In the Discovery phase, they might be curious or inquisitive.
As they read any content that might be educational, you might want them to feel confident, as they start to understand more around this topic.
By the time they’re choosing whether it’s the right fit to work with you, you might want them to feel excited, and certain. When they purchase, you want them to feel satisfaction, confirming their decision to purchase, with validation.
You can equally document feelings you don’t want them to have, as something you want to avoid. For example, while many businesses choose to create a false sense of urgency, you might choose to avoid that to remedy any regret or buyer’s remorse. That might motivate you to setup an automation to welcome them into your program within 5-10 minutes, or to state the shipping timeline on your order confirmation email.
There are often interactions where people will receive a varying quality of an experience. This often happens in ones that work on a 1:1 basis, rather than a one to many basis. In a retail situation, everyone might shop in the exact same way online, but their in person shopping experience could vary. In a service business, the experience might differ depending on how strictly you are documenting and following certain processes, or which member of your team they work with. These interactions are just as important to monitor and improve upon. Sometimes you can standardise the process by having a standard operating procedure. Other times it’s about facilitating the experience through how, when and with who that experience takes place. This should be part of the audit process on a semi regular basis.
At some stages in the funnel, the more interactions someone has, the deeper that connection will become. That can include reading more emails, or having more blog posts or podcasts available for them to consume. If you’re running ads, a higher frequency of brand awareness ads might be needed. This is where the compounding effects can come into play with one individual. Having more blog posts allows for more search opportunities, sure but one person could also click around and read a series of them.
Building The Brand Through Experience
Through the journey, you still want to make sure you’re building authority, gaining trust in the investment they will ultimately make, and show that you can deliver on your promises. You can do this through the recommendations or advice you provide, and the stories you tell.
Every interaction is an opportunity to shift their emotional state into a positive direction, which they then associate with your brand. When someone lands on your website feeling overwhelmed by the choices they have, your job is to help them feel guided and understood. When they're worried about making a mistake, you help them feel confident they're in safe hands.
This turns into the language you use, the imagery you choose and the topics you discuss, and essentially the vibe of your business and how it differs to other options on the market.
Your jargon isn't just vocabulary, it's your brand's personality made audible. When you consistently use certain phrases, technical terms, or even slang, you're creating a linguistic fingerprint.
The stories you tell repeatedly become your brand mythology. If you always share stories about overcoming obstacles, you become the "resilience" brand. If your anecdotes focus on innovation and creativity, that's how people will categorise your business. Each story is like a brick, building your brand's reputation, and they stack up to create an overall impression of what you stand for.
People might not see every single thing you put out there, but their experience can still be consistent.
Your topics become your editorial position. What you choose to talk about, and what you avoid, signal your brand's priorities and values. A business that constantly discusses sustainability creates a very different brand perception than one focused on efficiency and profit, assuming they back that up with their business practices.
When we share the behind the scenes of the business, it’s important to do it through the lens of a customer as much as possible. So many people have a tendency to share about their experience in a way that doesn’t relate to their customer. Instead it is relatable for other business owners who offer the same service. That could theoretically become a new audience for you, with new offers, but that might not serve your ultimate goals. Is the story you’re telling relevant to a customer, or to other shop owners? Is it a story of transformation for your course students, or about how you improved your course? Because unless your course is about running courses, it might be irrelevant. But the story about a learning experience you had or a course you took, and how something about it was good or bad, that you wanted to bring into or improve in your course, would be more relevant. That’s a story about improvement that shows your customer the value they’re receiving and the effort you’ve put in. Same as a story of how you responded to feedback. The situation could be the same, but it’s how you tell the story.
There is then a compounding effect through the consistency across the journey. People experience your brand through those patterns and repetition.
By working to curate this journey, you can see tangible improvements through your analytics. Each improvement can compound towards more revenue and more word of mouth, but the work we can often do in marketing, is in the small details.
I challenge you to work through the worksheets and audit your touch points this week, although but you don’t need to work on any just yet. The audit can be a big enough task to start.
It might feel like there’s a lot that could use some attention when you first go through this process. Remember that this is a game of minor tweaks. It’s not something you want to rush, because you want to see the improvements as you make them in your analytics, to ensure you are actually moving the numbers in the right direction. Listen for feedback along the way, comments, responses to emails, and those numbers and see what they can tell you. Even when something doesn’t quite work how you thought it might, it’s still a learning that moves you forward in some other way.