While helping your prospects along the customer journey, it is important to plan out their path with a Marketing Calendar. Your marketing calendar can be divided into 3 parts:
Customer Acquisition, Monetization, and Engagement
- Acquisition (Awareness, engagement, subscription, conversion)
- Getting more leads
- Monetization (excitement, core purchase)
- Converting previous leads
- Engagement (advocate, promoters)
- Keeping past customers excited and willing to keep buying anything you’ll sell.
If you are just starting out in business, you should be focused on an acquisition campaign.
During any other time of your business’s lifespan, it is important to do all 3 parts of the customer journey planning simultaneously. While some parts of the year you may focus heavily on monetization (20% Discount on Core offer THIS WEEK ONLY!!) or engagement (customer appreciate events) you should never forget about the prospects that are still stuck in the other parts of the customer journey.
Look at your year-long calendar and create promotions that can fit into one of the 3 categories (Acquisition, monetization, or engagement) Create a start date and an end date for each part of the promotion.
A simple example could be Acquisition campaign- Run an ad in the local newspaper to generate brand awareness. The ad should have a call to action for website engagement. Incentivize website interest by promising a 20% off coupon. While on the website push for an email subscription to receive the coupon. Convert the website users once they use the coupon for that discounted offer.
Always remember: A prospect, lead, or customer may spend anywhere from a few minutes to a few years at any one of the stages of the customer journey.
You cannot rush the customer journey, although you can incentivize the customer to take the next logical step.