The Fundamental Objective of Every Business is to Convert a Stranger Into a Brand Advocate
The coming months if not years are going to be challenging for most businesses. As with every recession, it’s the strongest that will survive.
Ensuring your business is one of them, building strong foundations to ensure you are best placed to take advantage of the few opportunities that do come is essential.
Traditional business objectives revenue, profit, and cost, still stand is deliverable outputs but the prime objective in the digital world is to Convert a Stranger into a Brand Advocate and to continually repeat this process, the net result is the 3 outputs above, revenue, profit, and cost.
if we take a keyword from this statement, ‘process’ we know this then lends itself to being comprised of a series of steps that any organization can optimize to deliver this objective.
I call this objective #StrangertoAdvocate
Break The Stranger to Advocate Journey Down
With any objective, problem, or task, it is always easiest to break it down into its constituent parts. The Stranger to Advocate journey can be handled in the same simple way.
It has 6 key steps that a customer needs to go through in order to achieve your goal, they are:
- Stranger
- Content Consumer
- Lead
- Prospect
- Customer or Client
- Advocate
Let’s take a look at these steps in a little detail, with a description, the goal of the step, and how success can be measured.
Strangers
Description: A person you do not know & is likely not familiar with you and your brand.
Goal: Awareness and interest in your content.
Success Measure: Web/Social Traffic
Content Consumers
Description: So you have someone consuming your content? On your website? On your social page?
Goal: Awareness and interest in your brand to establish who they are and how to contact them
Success Measure: Leads created
Leads
Description: So you have a name and contact details & maybe an area of interest in your brand services.
Goal: Establish what they want or need and what value you can provide
Success Measure: Prospects created
Prospects
Description: A qualified and interested person in the value your brand can provide to fulfill their wants or needs.
Goal: To become a spending customer
Success Measure: Revenue
Customer or Client
Description: a person who buys goods or services from you.
Goal: To repeat spending and advocate the brand.
Success Measure: Revenue
Advocates
Description: a person who publicly supports your business and returns to purchase not because they have to but because they want to.
Goal: To continue to iteratively improve their customer experience
Success Measure: Repeat Revenue and Referrals
So What Next?
Map your business to these steps. Start with what you do today at each step to take your customers from one step to the next. Use process mapping to establish your as-is, use customer experience maps to identify customer pain points, and use both of these to identify what your to-be journey will be.