This month we celebrate the June solstice. And according to The Old Farmer’s Almanac, it’s summer now! As a person who loves sunshine and warm weather, this is my favorite season. I live in a small town north of Boston. Here, summer brings the chance to be outdoors and active like no other time in the year. I love to kayak, bike, eat, drink, and play with family and friends outdoors in the summertime. It’s a time of action – a time to do things you can’t during the colder months of the year. And in this series of posts on the customer journey, it’s time to talk about decision campaigns.
To me, it’s always more fun to adventure with others. I’ve learned that if I want company, I need to understand where my people are. I often do that – check in with my people and invite them to adventure with me. I’ve learned that, similarly, understanding where people are in their customer journey is key when designing decision campaigns in marketing. Keeping the customer journey in mind when inviting your audience to move forward and act is crucial to your success as a marketer.
Designing decision campaigns
As an educator of future marketers, I teach a simplified customer journey inspired by Hubspot’s. It includes these stages – Awareness, Consideration, Decision and Advocacy. In awareness, with a welcoming tone, we’re telling our target audience who we are and how we can help them. For a deep dive into awareness campaigns, have a look at my post from April. In the next stage of the customer journey, consideration, marketers invite target audience members to engage more closely with their organizations. Audience members can do this by sharing contact information for future communication. When our target audience members reach the decision stage, we invite them to act. For B2C organizations, this may be an invitation to purchase or make a donation. For B2B organizations, this could be signing an agreement with a salesperson or signing up for a sponsorship.
If you’re going to invite people to buy from or work with you, the timing has to be right. People need to be ready for decision campaigns, ready to take action. They may reach the decision stage through a thoughtfully designed customer journey they are following. They may also reach it through their own research into a solution for a highly-pressing need they have. Either way, marketers have to meet their target audiences where they are in order to be successful and gain commitment from their prospects.
Teaching with award-winning campaigns
This sensing of where prospects are in their journey is not necessarily intuitive for all marketers. This is why I teach it in my classes. This summer, alongside my adventuring and consulting work, I’m preparing to teach an intro-level communications class. This experience is designed for second semester freshmen in college. In this course, I plan to use a CLIO Award-winning campaign that was developed by a company called Back Market and their agency, Marcel.
On Earth Day 2022, Back Market, which sells refurbished mobile phones (including iPhones), launched a stealth campaign inside Apple Stores. In a funny twist, they used Apple’s own Airdrop technology for the campaign. They sent campaign messages to in store display devices! The messaging lured consumers who were ready to buy towards Back Market’s more environmentally friendly purchasing option. Deployed in London, Paris and Berlin, the campaign reached 5,200 people in Apple stores. It reached 100M people through all outreach strategies, and increased their “intent to purchase” metric by 27%. Now that’s an inspiring decision campaign! It meets consumers where they are in the customer journey. It bravely enters a competitors’ physical space. And it lures prospects to their alternative solution with a message that resonates on a global holiday. Nice win, Back Market!
Bringing in the wins with decision campaigns
When your prospects (or existing clients) enter the decision stage, there’s always a chance for a win. I love a win – who doesn’t? Let me share a decision campaign I’ve run for Marketing Strategy Leader. This campaign has been based on social and email with direct outreach to and meetings with previous clients and top organizations I’d like to partner with. This outreach has given me direct communication with people and, in turn, great information on where they are at. And this month, I’ve achieved two wins.
One win was signing a new agreement with a previous client. Another was successfully connecting with the leader of a local, non-profit organization that I may work with in the future. These are two organizations who have reached the decision stage in their customer journey. They are ready to take action. They have a need, have budget, and have selected Marketing Strategy Leader as the right solution to overcome their challenge. When everything lines up, we see growth with decision campaigns. Hooray!
Coming next
Stay tuned for the next, and final, installment of this customer journey blog series. It’s a fun one – Advocacy! To subscribe to my blog and receive updates with each new post, 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.
Adventure on this summer!
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.