Elevating Your Business: Unlocking the Customer Journey and Growth Strategies

Unlock the secrets to business growth as I guide you on an exploration of the customer journey's hidden potential. Whether you're flying solo or leading a small business, you'll find that the insights from my live presentations are game-changers; they're transformative revelations waiting to springboard your venture to new heights. We're also spicing things up with a 14-day challenge featuring a lineup of guest experts, each day promising practical, implementable strategies. Tailored for the entrepreneur on the go, this challenge will pinpoint the growth aspects of your business that are begging for your attention.

For those of you seeking a deeper connection with your audience, we're dissecting demand generation and pull marketing secrets. I'll share how to craft content that not only raises eyebrows but also builds awareness and gets people talking. From leveraging your unique selling proposition to mastering the art of personalized engagement, you'll learn to escort potential clients through the consideration stage straight to purchase without missing a beat. And for the women entrepreneurs ready to propel your business skyward, I'm rolling out the red carpet to my exclusive weekly training group, where your ambition meets my expertise, all to drive your customer attraction, lead increase, and profit maximization efforts into overdrive.

Transcript

Caroline Balinska: 0:00

Each episode will unravel the strategies, tactics and insider secrets to elevate your marketing to new heights From lead generation to automation, to positioning yourself as the expert to client retention. I've spent years in the trenches learning the ins and outs of the marketing world. Now I'm here to share my knowledge and invite other experts to help you create a thriving and fulfilling business that you're passionate about. This is the More Clients, less Hustle podcast. We'll be turning your business dreams into reality. Are you ready? I'm Caroline Balinska, your host. Let's dive in and transform your coaching business together. Welcome back to the podcast.

Caroline Balinska: 0:41

Well, I have just been recording for 10 minutes and found out that my mic wasn't actually turned on, so I wanted to get into the episode quite quickly today and share with you about the customer journey and the importance of it. Now, I have done this presentation so many times live on stage and every single time I've done this live on stage, people are blown away with this information. The first time I presented this, I didn't even think much of it. I just thought, okay, I'm going to present it and just make it part of my overall information, and the feedback I got was so mind blowing for me even that I realized the importance of it and how much people don't realize what is at play when it comes to the customer journey. The customer journey a lot of people think of as something that big companies need, something that is not for them. When you're, you know, a solopreneur, if you have just got a couple of people working for you, you've just got a small business, you might have a couple of consulting clients and you think that what difference does it make for you? However, I can guarantee it makes some different. It makes a difference to every type of business, so I really want to get into that. Today I've had people coming up to me after I've presented on stage and like grabbing me, going oh my God, you have just made me think a completely different way about my business. So I recommend you listen to today's episode and really take it in.

Caroline Balinska: 2:08

If you are not watching this and you're just listening, I will try to explain everything through. Otherwise, there's all in underneath with the screenshots of what I'm talking about. I also just want to touch on the fact that in a couple of weeks, I'm running a 14 day challenge, and that 14 day challenge I've mentioned it before on this podcast the 14 day challenge is really about how to sort of take on board everything you can. I've covered off the 14 most important things when it comes to running a business and I'm going to have guests coming in and explaining certain aspects. Now it sounds a little bit overwhelming, but what I'm doing is I'm going to because one thing I found doesn't matter if it's about business, doesn't matter if it's about I've got my life on purpose over 40 podcast, doesn't matter if it's about fitness, doesn't matter if it's about mental health, it doesn't matter relationships. If you don't take action and you just listen, you're not going to get the results. So you really need to take action.

Caroline Balinska: 3:10

So what I'm doing with this 14 day challenge is that you're going to, at the end of every episode, we're going to have one to three different action points you have to take action on immediately. I want to make them short, I want to make them easy, because I want you to be in a situation where you take some sort of action on each of the 14 areas and by the end of those 14 days, I want you to be in a position where you say okay, I know that LinkedIn is actually. I can see already there's a little bit of a change, that I'm going to go deeper on that. Or you say, oh, I did that LinkedIn stuff and you know what doesn't feel right to me. I don't think I want to be on LinkedIn and then you can leave it. But by doing these 14 main core areas of your business, you're going to see results straight away. You're going to by the end of the 14 days you will be getting results and then you'll know what you want to do more of and what areas you should be doing more of.

Caroline Balinska: 3:56

The other thing that I really wanted to just touch on before I get into this episode is I think I say a lot of things to myself and a lot of things that I know to be true and I don't say them out loud enough. And it's not until I actually sometimes I accidentally say things that I realize the importance of it. And today I was being interviewed and during that interview I was talking about how I'm so passionate about helping especially moms with their businesses. And since becoming I was a stepmom for many years, but since having my own daughter and having a child full time, it's made a really big difference. Like being a stepmom is one thing. I had the kids half the week. When you are either a stepmom or a parent where you share custody half the week, it's a different situation. You kids half the week. When you are either a step-mom or a parent where you share custody half the week, it's a different situation. You have half the week to yourself. Once you've got a child in your care full time, you've gone to this extra level of hang on a second. It's really about that child more than it is about me and what I find and I speak to a lot of moms that have this situation. They find it very hard to separate their mom time from their business time and they can become really overwhelmed and they start to feel like they're failing and they're not good enough. And I can tell you right now it's not about that. It's just about setting really strict boundaries.

Caroline Balinska: 5:19

Men have got this amazing ability and I'm one of those people that's like. I'm glad I'm a woman, but in this particular case, for this reason, I wish I was a man. Men, when they focus on something, they're focused and you cannot switch them off. They don't hear anything else going on around them. They can have kids screaming around them, but for a woman, we have got so many things going on in our heads all the time. Oh, do I have stuff for dinner? Do I need to get something washed for school tomorrow for the kids? What day is that excursion? What do I have to do about that? Is there a party? What about, you know, the Uncle Fred's party? Do I have to get a present for that? Like, we're going through all of these different things all the time, and yet here we are trying to run a business and it makes it really hard to focus. And yet here we are trying to run a business and it makes it really hard to focus. And because of that, I know that if we can just set ourselves up for success in that area, other things can be done as well, and then we can concentrate more on the things that are important, such as understanding how to use new tools and technologies to make our lives even simpler. So I'm really passionate about that, and having that interview today made me realize that it's an area that a lot of people don't think about, but it's really important. So we're all really busy.

Caroline Balinska: 6:35

I don't want these episodes to just drag out for the sake of dragging them out, to have just more content out there. I want to try to keep everything as short and sharp as possible for you. If you are just listening to this and you're not watching this, I will leave notes underneath links to the actual screenshots, but please try to watch this. If you've got any comments, leave them underneath the video. If you're listening to this, head over to my Instagram at boutique automations and leave any comments on my Instagram or send me a DM and I'm happy to answer them.

Caroline Balinska: 7:06

So in this episode I want to talk about the customer journey. When it comes to customer journey, a lot of people if you see on the screen think that this is it Awareness, consideration, purchase. They think, oh yeah, run some ads, do some social media, some people consider working with me and then they get on my email list and then they buy from me. That's what most people think is a customer journey. It's so far from the truth. I'm going to show you what an actual customer journey is and I'm going to touch on some really key areas for you. There are five stages to a customer journey. There's awareness, consideration, purchase, post-sale and loyalty. Now we can also look at it another way, through a funnel where we say people come through the top of the funnel and they go through to the bottom. More people are coming through the top and then, by the time we get to the end, there's far fewer people, because along the way we've lost them. So this is the same sort of thing. What you need to understand is that each stage of the funnel or the customer journey, whatever you want to call it people need to know different pieces of information. So I'm just going to run through what an actual customer journey looks like.

Caroline Balinska: 8:15

People come in either on ads, word of mouth, social media, pay-per-click, or from your competitors or from influencers. That's awareness. That's where they're getting the awareness stage of hey, that's Caroline Polinska. Who is she? What's her company? Boutique Automations, what is it? That is awareness. Then we get to the consideration stage and that's where people come in on. They read reviews, they watch videos about you, they go to your website. That's all at the consideration level At that stage, and also social media is in there. They're considering if they want to work with you. Then it goes on to the purchase stage. This is when they're on your email list, they see you more on social media and they start actually communicating with you. They get your retargeting ads. They're going to chat to you and they're going to visit your actual products that you're selling, your sales pages, your landing pages, your store. And then we go into the postale, which is about the email, social media, leaving reviews for you and different promotions that you can do with them, and then into the loyalty of them, referring you to their friends and their family and their business colleagues. And this is where it's word of mouth, this is the circle on it, and this is where they start creating content for you, you GC, and they become a raving fan.

Caroline Balinska: 9:39

I don't want to talk about that end of it at the moment. I'll just say that, as a post-sale, you need to give them what you say you're going to give them. If you're not giving them the same level as what you promised, then you're going to have a big problem and you'll never have a raving fan. So I'm not going to touch on those three, those two areas, at the moment. I really want to touch on awareness, consideration and purchase. You need to understand these areas very, very clearly, because by understanding them you start to know what sort of content you need to make.

Caroline Balinska: 10:09

A lot of people say to me oh, my problem is I don't have enough customers, and that might be the result of your problem that you don't have enough customers. Therefore you're not making enough money. But your problem is actually at the beginning. Your problem is the fact that you're not getting enough awareness out there about you and at the awareness level that is really where you can make such a big difference. It's a numbers game at the end of the day. If you get 100 people to become aware of you, the better that you do the middle part, the more people that will end up at the end of the funnel. So maybe the first hundred people that you tell about you, maybe none of them are going to buy from you because the middle part is not organized yet and you haven't built up all of the reviews, you haven't created a great website, you don't have enough videos, you don't have um an email funnel set up properly, so then no one comes through. Then, three months later, another hundred people find out about you and one of those people buy. And then another few months later, three of those people buy, then six and then 10. And then suddenly you start building up and more and more people come out the other end.

Caroline Balinska: 11:16

It is a numbers game at the end of the day, and how those numbers work depends on what work you put in along the way. So if you have got enough people at the top of funnel at the awareness stage already and you do not have a problem there, but you're still not getting people out the other end, then there's something broken in between, and I've got a client like that at the moment. She's getting so many people coming in at the top of funnel they're not coming out the other end, and that's because she's got a broken link in between that we've been working to fix. That's very rare, though. Not many people have that problem. Not many people can say I have too many people coming in to my funnel, too many people like me, and they've got awareness and now they're actually at the consideration stage. That is a lot fewer people, but if that's your problem, we've got ways to fix that too. I'm going to work with the scenario that you don't even have that going on at that end, at the awareness stage. What you need to understand is that someone doesn't have any idea who you are If you're already trying to sell them.

Caroline Balinska: 12:22

I'm going to talk about demand generation as well in another episode. Compared to lead generation, demand generation is really where you're creating a demand for you, demand for your brand, and that is where you're doing the pool marketing. Come on, come to me this is me. Come and see what I've got compared to push marketing, which is buy my product, buy my product, buy my product $5, $5, $3, $1. That's really push marketing.

Caroline Balinska: 12:52

You want to be doing the demand generation. You want to be doing the pull marketing, pulling people into you, and at that stage, what you need to do is you need to build that awareness, and that awareness is built on people understanding that you are good at what you do. You want to have some point of difference, because just having a sales page that says, um, buy my course, it's a 12 week course and it is a hundred dollars, with no other information around it, you're not going to get sales there. That's just not going to happen. And this is where a lot of marketers push this fake narrative that that's how you're going to get sales and you're not. You need to build up the information before that.

Caroline Balinska: 13:33

Now, how do you do that? You do that with things like a podcast. You could have your own podcast. You could do that with just getting more content out there, and this is a big area I talk about. I've got a course coming out about it where I help people build more content in a very, very large scale amount. In a very simple way, because the more content you put out there, the more chances people will see you and the more chances people have to consider you. And you might be doing ads. I still love ads. I think ads are fantastic and you could get some influencers to work with you.

Caroline Balinska: 14:09

But what's the sort of things that you want to be putting into that awareness stage? At the awareness stage, what you really want to be doing is things like a before and after, the results that you got for people. Hey, this person was a hundred kilos. They're down to 80 kilos. I got that result for them and you want to be talking about. You know, whether you won some awards, or if people are talking about you, about something wow.

Caroline Balinska: 14:31

This is where PR comes in at this level, where PR is quite sometimes not even talking about the actual business that someone has, but something completely different. So that's the awareness stage where you want to be talking more on this sort of broad scale of how wow you are and the results you can get. That's where you capture people, that's where you capture attention. So you capture that attention. But if that's all you are, then you're not going to get to the next level. And some people are missing this. And those are the people who have no experience in a certain field and they decide they're going to start a business in that field. And because they go, oh, I can just put out this PR, you know, press release, or I can do this like crazy before and after, but then they can't. Actually they don't have the substance at the next level. If you don't have the substance at the next level, you're not going to succeed. And if you're someone that has the substance and you're seeing a lot of people doing that first thing of wow, look at me, look at me, and you're worried about those people. Don't worry about those people, because the ones that are not really good at what they do, they're going to drop off anyway. So if you have the substance and you have got the expertise, then at this level you can start to show people exactly how that result will work for them. So an example if your first level is I'm a fitness instructor, my client here's her before photo, here's her after photo.

Caroline Balinska: 16:00

Someone at consideration level will turn around and say, okay, that person lost 20 kilos, but how does this work for me? This is where you might turn around and you do a discovery call. This is where you might turn around and you do a discovery call. This might be where you turn around and do a um, weekly online training, uh, group training, where it's a free sign up and it's like like a live webinar sort of thing. Um, this is where you might do extra reviews where you say, okay, you want to lose 20 kilos. These are all my reviews about losing 20 kilos and what they went through case studies. Or, oh, you want to lose only five kilos. These are the reviews you want to read over here. So, breaking it up so people understand this is exactly the sort of thing they can get. So the consideration stage is about someone considering okay, I've seen your, wow, I've seen all the great things that you can do, but how does that work for me, for my business, working with you? Your website has to have information, your videos need to have information, and then people go into the purchasing part. This is where they're actually making the choices of working with you.

Caroline Balinska: 17:04

This is where a lot of people actually fall off at this stage because they forget about you, because you're not sending them emails. All the time They've been thinking about this particular problem that you can solve. You've told them that you can solve the problem. Now it's in their head that they have this problem because you've told them about it and now this problem's always in their head like, okay, I have this problem, I have this problem, I need to solve this problem. And then suddenly someone else snaps them away and goes, oh, I'll give you that result because I can help you. And then suddenly you've lost that person and you've done all this work for someone else to gain the benefit at the end. So making sure that you capture the person at this stage as well is really, really important. So if listening to this has made you realize that this is really important to your business and you are not actually looking after this yourself in your own business, I do have a free weekly live call that I do, and on that free live weekly call I actually go over questions like this.

Caroline Balinska: 18:00

So just pop your question up each week and I will go over the questions that are most needed to be answered for that week, and I always mix it up. We always make sure that we go through different training and let's talk about the customer journey in our free weekly live calls and that way you can learn more about what works for you. I like to do this personally with people, one-on-one, because what I find is that for every single person it's completely different at the top end, especially when it's the awareness level, because what you have got as your special point of difference is different from the next person. So we need to tweak it. We need to think about what works for your business knowing what you're selling, knowing who your target audience is Then we work out what will work for you. So just click the link in the description and come through.

Caroline Balinska: 18:48

Join my free weekly training, completely free, sign up. It's a small group of women who want more help with their business, want more help with getting more customers, wants more help with getting more leads and making more profits. I'm all about cutting out 80% of your tasks and 10Xing your sales. So until next week, take care. See you soon.