When Setting Your Sales Goals, First Ask: What Is the Customer Journey? Then Improve It.

Fourth in a series

When you’re a business manager or owner, once you choose your goals, it’s time to strategize. The relationship with your customer is crucial to those plans.

Every marketing professional will tell you that if your target customer is “everyone,” your message will appeal to no one. In 2023, this is truer than ever. Personalization is a huge trend and it’s never been more important to know your customers and build strong relationships with them. 

Our ongoing experiment in digital marketing is all about knowing and relating to our customers so we can achieve our vision of being partners in their success for years to come.

Last time, we discussed some long-term targets and the short-term goals needed to reach them. One point that kept coming up is that Sprocket is primarily a service provider. We do sell products such as domain names and SSL certificates, but those are not our focus, and for good reasons. 

When someone is looking to buy website hosting, for instance, they go online and usually search by price first and quality second. To be profitable, a company needs to sell a whole lot of this relatively inexpensive product, over and over again to new customers – which means you also need a whole lot of advertising. Do you remember how many years GoDaddy bought Super Bowl ad time? We are not interested in competing with that. 

What we do sell is customized website services that take time to create and which are built by skilled professionals. This kind of website is an investment and organizations are cautious when deciding on who to trust with their project. The customer journey includes a lot of research and asking for quotes from multiple companies. Often, different levels of management need to be convinced before approval. Face-to-face conversation is key. For a big-ticket item like this, the sales cycle can be long. 

During our discussions, we pulled our client data and manipulated it six ways to Sunday. As we suspected, our best clients are also service providers with big-ticket items and their ideal customer is not going to click a “Buy Now” button either. 

If you are one of those who offer a big-ticket service you know the problem. It’s so much easier to sell your service if you are face-to-face with the right person. Once they get to know you, they like you, and then they trust you to help them. But there’s a limit to how many of these face-to-face sales relationships you can cultivate. So how do we use digital marketing to start customers on that journey to know, like, and trust us?

Try-Before-You-Buy is a proven sales strategy and the Sprocket team has decided to explore what service to offer for kick-starting our customer’s journey. We are deep in discussion about what our ideal customer would be interested in trying out and what we could provide as a loss-leader. Like you, we know that folks will see the value in what we can do for them if we can just get in front of them. 

You’ll be the first to know what try-it service we choose and how we’ll market it! But don’t forget that our Search Engine Optimization and other services are available to you now. Just give us a call to learn how we can help. 

Photo by Kun Fotografi

Kate GingoldKate Gingold

I have been writing a blog with web marketing tips and techniques every other week since 2003. In addition to blogging and client content writing, I write books and a blog on local history.

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Full biography

I have been writing a blog with web marketing tips and techniques every other week since 2003. In addition to blogging and client content writing, I write books and a blog on local history.

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