The Customer Journey Steps for Teacherpreneurs | 26

How do you take your audience from never having heard of you to raving loyal fans? This episode dives into the 5 phases of the customer journey and how a better understanding of the customer journey steps will help you nurture people through your sales funnel more quickly and effectively.

The five phases of the customer journey are...
1. Aware: this is the first 1-2 times someone comes in contact with you and your brand. It can be from simply seeing an IG post or hearing you as a guest on a podcast. Once this person becomes aware of you, they are in your orbit and you can start the process of nurturing them through your customer journey.

2. Interested: as someone interacts more with your content, your long-form content, they will hopefully become more interested in you and your brand. This is why it is essential to have high-quality long-form content for your audience.

3. Subscribed: this is the first real ask of your audience and is extremely important as it is your chance to add them to your email list. Often they will exchange their email address for a freebie or to attend a webinar. You can also use a tiny offer here! Once they’re on your email list, it is essential you regularly nurture the relationship with valuable email content.

4. Engaged: By now they have had multiple interactions with your brand and hopefully have commented on a post, slide into your DMs or hit reply on an email… but even if they haven’t, at this phase of the game they are waiting for your next piece of content and excited to consume pretty much everything you offer. At this point, many people will be ready to buy from you!!

5. Invested: these are your loyal, raving fans. They are the ones you tell their friends about you and buy every single thing you offer. They are invested in you and your brand both emotionally and financially.

With a better understanding of the customer journey, two really important questions to ask yourself are...
- How are you getting more people aware of your brand?
- How are you nurturing people through the customer journey?

In the next few episodes, we talk more about both these questions as FB ads can be a powerful tool in growing and nurturing your audience, so be on the lookout for more helpful strategies!

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Episode Transcript:

Hey there, I'm Jenzaia and this is Market, Scale, Grow. A podcast created for ambitious teacherpreneurs looking to have a bigger impact on the world, achieve freedom, flexibility, and ultimately make more money with weekly strategy sessions and inspiring stories from fellow teachers just like you, my goal here is to help you create a customized marketing strategy so you can grow your teacher business beyond your wildest dreams. Okay, so before we jump into the episode, I am super excited to share a brand new freebie with you. It's my targeting ideas for Facebook ads. If you've dabbled in Facebook ads or you've done them and you've tried them, and you're just looking for some fresh inspiration for your audiences, this freebie is for you. I share my top Facebook ad targeting groups for you so that you can have inspiration and find those people that are perfect for what you have to offer. From warm audiences to cool lookalike audiences, to cold interest based audiences. I cover all three in this freebie. Head to marketscalegrow.com/audiences to grab your copy today.

Hello, and welcome back to Market Scale Grow. As you know, I'm Jenzaia, and I'm so excited that you are here today. I actually already recorded today's episode and then realized that a huge foundational part of what I was talking about, I hadn't done an episode on it. So I scratched that episode and hit record again to bring you this episode. Today we're talking about the customer journey.

The customer journey is how people go from never having heard of you to being your raving, loyal, committed fans. It's very similar to a sales funnel, especially if you are focused on your one thing. As I talked about in episode 23, it is important for your business, for your focus, for the growth and development, that as soon as possible, you figure out your one thing and you put all of your time and energy into it. It can be a signature course, an amazing membership, or a signature service that you're offering just depending on your business model. Then everything that you're doing is driving people to that signature offering. Whether it's webinars, challenges, tiny offers, freebies long form content, everything, your intention behind it is to get people into your signature offer. That just makes your journey seamless and clear so that people know and can feel what the next steps are.

So today I'm going to break the customer journey into five different phases to take, again, your audience from never having heard of you to loyal raving fans. Those five phases are aware, interested, subscribed, engaged, invested. So let's start at the beginning.

Aware. When somebody first either sees an Instagram post or stumbles upon a guest podcast episode that you did or finds you in any other way, they become aware of you. It probably takes a couple interactions with you and your brand before they would recognize you, but once they're aware of you, that's the hardest part is getting somebody into your orbit. If you're running ads, then as soon as someone has interacted with you in any way, there should be a way for you to start retargeting them to additional content or offers. This is what we're going to talk about in next week's episode, is how to run ads to these people. But for today, we're just going to talk about the journey.

So once people are aware of you, your job is to keep them interested. So after they've interacted with you, a couple of times, they would move through the journey to interested. Now, they're kind of curious about what other content does this person have? They're probably creeping you on social media. Maybe they're going to hit follow. They're looking to see if you have your own blog or your own podcast because like I said before, they might've heard you on a guest. Or maybe they saw a presentation did at a conference. All of these are great ways for them to become aware of you and now it's your job to keep them interested. So what's super, super, super important at this phase of your journey is that you have long form content, whether it's written, audio or video content. Doesn't really matter, just something that helps you stand out as the expert and gives people something that they can learn from you.

Once you have people interested and they've interacted with you another handful of times, so 3 to 5 times, now our goal is to get them subscribed onto your email list. There's a couple of different ways. The main ones that I would say are getting them on your email list with a freebie or lead magnet, getting them on your email list with a launch event, so something like a webinar, a video series, or a challenge. Then the third one is a tiny offer. So you see these floating around they're like 17 or $27 bundles or mini courses workshops. Those are a way to get people onto your email list. They are paying customers onto your email list. So those are great. That is the third phase, is getting them subscribed. Now you can start your email marketing. You can continue to nurture them with your long form content. I recommend weekly emails. You can also do biweekly or monthly, totally your call. So that stage three or phase three.

Phase four is engaged. These people are engaging with your brand. Maybe they've joined your Facebook group, hit reply on an email, sending you DMs on Instagram, or they're just loyal followers who read every single blog post that you put out and read every single caption of your Instagram, but they never necessarily show you their face. They just are kind of silent followers, but they're still engaged because they're excited to hear about what you have to say, and they want to learn more from you. Potentially, if they ever have a question, you're the first one they go to. So that's phase four.

The final phase is invested. These are your raving, loyal, amazing fans. The ones that buy everything you have to offer, the ones that talk about you to all of their friends, and the ones that come back again and again, and support you. That's the amazing, awesome thing that you've created. Obviously not everyone's going to get there. Some people will buy from you and kind of stay in that engaged phase. Whereas others will definitely move into that invested stage.

As I share, you can understand this is why we call it the sales funnel. There's so many people that are aware of you, and then a little bit less that are interested in you, and then a little bit less that are subscribed to you, and then a little bit less that are engaging with you, and then a little bit less that are invested in you. So what your job is to, a couple of things. Number one, get more people aware of you because that means more people are going through your funnel. Then your second job is once people are aware of you, is to do an amazing, fantastic, wonderful job of nurturing them so that they stay interested, they stay invested, and that they actually move through your sales funnel, which comes from getting rid of any leaky holes, working on your messaging and providing people with what they need or what they think they need. Often, and you may have experienced this already, people think they need one thing, but they actually need another thing. We, as the provider, have to kind of smoosh things around in a way that makes them feel like they're getting what they think they need, when we're actually giving them what we know they need. I hope that made sense.

So those are the five phases of the customer journey and how you can take someone from never having heard of you to completely invested in you. Seeing it that way really helps you to understand like what pieces you need at each phase. It also, at least to me, just screams how important long form content is in the grand scheme of things, because at every phase, your long form content is going to help keep nurturing people, helping them move through your journey.

An interesting statistic that I heard recently is that it takes 7 to 14 touch points with your brand, for someone to go from never having heard of you to brand recognition and interested in buying. So a brand touch point is all the things I've been talking about- interacting with you in any way on social media, just seeing a post, all the way to sending you a DM, reading or consuming your long form content is another touchpoint, emails that they open are another touch point. All of these are touch points and it takes 7 to 14 for somebody to again, recognize your brand and be interested in buying. That's on average.

There's also a growing number of people who are taking 6 to 12 months being part of that engaged community before they buy from someone because the online space is getting more and more saturated. There's more courses, there's more memberships, there's more services. So sometimes it can be overwhelming to make a decision of which coach or which course to take. So we sit on people's email lists, we consume their podcasts, we really think and consider where we're going to spend our money. So it is not abnormal, especially if you have a higher ticket offering, for people to be in your orbit for a really long time before they jump in. So just be aware of that and know that just because you're doing all this hard work doesn't mean it won't pay off. It is a snowball effect.

These little tiny things that you're doing now- sending an email every single week, putting out a blog post every single week, engaging with people on social media- it feels like a lot of work with no payoff right now, but as people move through your customer journey, it's going to pay off big time.

If you have any questions about this, send me a DM. I'm @heyitsjenzaia on Instagram, and I would love to chat with you about your customer journey. Then come back next week, because we're going to be talking about top of funnel Facebook ads that you can be running to help with the first two phases, the awareness phase and the interested phase, what Facebook ads you can run to help grow your brand visibility and awareness and your audience at those two phases. Then after that, we're going to talk about the middle of funnel ads. So that would be the subscribe phase and what kind of ads you're running when you're trying to get people to subscribe to you. Then the following week, we're going to talk about bottom of the funnel ads. That is the really amazing ones that you hear everything about, to get people to actually buy from you. So that would be people that are in the engaged and invested phase. So I really look forward to this kind of mini series that I'm running. I hope you are too. Again, I'll be back in your ear next Saturday. Thanks so much for hanging out.

Thank you for listening to today's episode. Today was brought to you by Dubsado, my absolute favourite customer management tool. If you're looking to streamline and systematize your service-based business, I highly recommend Dubsado. For 20% off of your first month. Head to marketscalegrow.com/dubsado that's D U B S A D O and use the code Jenzaia at checkout. And don't forget to head to our community at marketscalegrow.com/community where you'll find inspiring, ambitious teacherpreneurs who are looking to grow and scale their businesses just like you... See you soon.