Hi everyone, Laurel Mintz here with Elevate My Brand. Today’s conversation is all around a post COVID era customer journey. Now historically it’s been a pretty simple arc or funnel and you’ve heard us talk about that time and time again. But as we approach this post COVID era I believe, and so does our team, that there is going to be a seismic shift in this next year. What do we mean by that? Well in terms of how that is important for you as a brand, you need to start rethinking how customers are going to be engaging with your product or service, both in an on and off line capacity.
Now we know IRL hasn’t started up again but we’re getting a lot of RFP’s and we’re anticipating they will come back at the end of Q3 top of Q4, of course pending any new COVID issues. But really you need to think about breaking it out into stages. So you start with awareness, consideration, decision and devotion and you know I love talking about the devotion section because that’s when you’ve got a customer or a client that is so excited about the product or service that you offer that they’re just like screaming your name from the rooftops and that’s when you get really great referral and of course great testimonials and that’s always where a brand wants to be.
But it’s important that you decide which touch points belong in which stage of that journey. So again it’s not a simple arc or a simple funnel as it once was, it’s really about planning ahead and making sure that you’re also aware that there’s going to be a lot more potential customer apprehension, of course a lot of emotion (I talked about the emotional tie in and how critical that human element is your marketing processes more so now than ever before especially as it relates to this customer journey.) So that proactive empathy, that message of forgiveness and kindness and humanity is going to be absolutely critical as you start to develop those new customer journeys. So that’s how we start to think about how to map that customer journey and I hope that you’ll take time to think through that for your brand as well.