Invite your target audience to “step in” this spring while on their customer journey

Greeting spring

It’s almost spring! According to the Old Farmer’s Almanac, the Northern Hemisphere’s vernal equinox is coming up on Monday, March 20th. How will you greet the season? In my home, we celebrate the start of spring with St. Paddy’s Day. This is our first “open house” of the year and we invite family, friends and neighbors to “step in” and join us in celebrating with music and food. 

Teaching the customer journey

The St. Paddy’s Day holiday lines up nicely this year with my spring break at Endicott College. This semester I’m teaching Marketing and Marketing Analytics. In these 200-level courses, I have a nice mix of freshmen, sophomores, juniors and seniors. Each week my students complete group activities. These projects allow my students the opportunity to put themselves in a marketer’s shoes and test out what we’re learning in class. At the same time, the activities allow students to build teamwork skills.

In both classes, the teams have been working on the customer journey for the past few weeks. There are many interpretations, but I like Hubspot’s brief journey with just three stages – awareness, consideration and decision. I do add a fourth, post-purchase stage – advocacy. As a marketer and an educator, I get to develop strategies to meet target audiences along their journey and then model this same journey for students.

Launching the customer journey blog series

As we complete the first quarter of the year and look ahead, now is a perfect time to think through how you, as a marketer, will greet your prospects and clients along their journeys. Are you providing them with invitations to “step in”, get to know your organization and understand how you can help them achieve their goals for 2023? In the coming weeks, I will share a customer journey blog series, with one post for each stage. I hope this series will be a resource for you as you make your plans.

In each post, I’ll walk you through some of the most important lessons I have learned in my career and I hope that you will share your own experience in the comments here and on LinkedIn. To subscribe to the blog, please add your email to the field below. To learn more about how Marketing Strategy Leader supports organizations, please visit my Client Case Studies page.

Be well!
Hester

Hester Tinti-Kane is the founder and CEO of Marketing Strategy Leader. She’s an award-winning, strategic marketing leader with deep experience in digital communications strategy.