This stage of the buyer’s journey matters to your marketing, but most of the marketing buyer’s journey guides don’t pay a lot of attention to it.
This is the stage where your hero emerges victorious and returns to their community with their treasure.
That treasure is the success they’ve achieved with your help.
The Hero Emerges Victorious
Back to the Hero’s Journey for a moment.
The final stage of this journey is when the hero has faced the ultimate trial, achieved their victory and returns to their community to celebrate.
Think about the very end of the first Star Wars movie where Luke, Han and Leia are all in the fighter hangar, celebrating the destruction of the Death Star along with everyone on the Rebel base.
Or in Return of the Jedi when the second Death Star has been destroyed and there are a bunch of singing and dancing Ewoks watching fireworks (Not the world’s best movie ending, but still a victory.)
During that sequence, we also see Luke burning Darth Vader’s body as Yoda, Obi Wan Kenobi and Anakin Skywalker all appear to him as entities of the Force. This is Luke’s victory, saving his father from the Dark Side.
Okay, enough waxing geeky.
The same holds true for your customer.
Once they have purchased your product or service, followed your guidance and reached their goals, they too get to emerge victorious and return to their community to brag about their adventures and display their treasure.
In this case, their adventures are their experience with your product or service.
Their treasure is their achievement with said product or service.
Can you see where this is leading?
Using Your Customer’s Buyer’s Journey to Further Your Marketing
Your customer has what they want. They have achieved their wildest dreams and now want to share their successes with their community.
You should still be in regular contact with your customer because you’ve continued as their mentor.
Now, while your customer is excited and bragging to everyone who will listen about their triumph, is the time to get a little extra benefit for your business.
There is nothing unethical about this.
In fact, it’s something companies do regularly and should do more often.
You’ve probably seen it immediately after you’ve called customer service or gone through a sales funnel.
Yes, I’m talking about customer feedback.
While your customer is basking in the glow of their own success, is the perfect time to ask for two very important pieces of information to help with your own marketing efforts:
- A testimonial
- Referrals
Politely Asking for a Testimonial to Add Their Success to Your Success
Let’s face it. When someone looks at your product or service, they want to know that they’ll get results.
Having customer testimonials is an excellent show of proof of results. It shows that others have tread this path before your potential customer has and they have achieved the results you’re promising.
This sets you up as a reliable company (mentor) and demonstrates that your product or service delivers, just as your marketing says it will.
Asking your customer to vouch for what you’ve helped them achieve is an important step in achieving your own goals, more customers and more business growth.
Get proof of success from your customer, and display it on your website, in your marketing materials and in your brick and mortar store to show other potential customers that they too can be the heroes in their own stories.
Your customer is still glowing with their own success. They’re usually happy to give you a testimonial to use in your marketing.
You can do this in a few different ways:
- Send a survey with an open-ended question that lets them expound on their experience and success.
- Ask them to write a testimonial for you, either via email or in person.
- Ask for a testimonial and offer to write something for them to approve.
Whatever you do, be totally upfront about the fact that you will use their words in your marketing to help others on their own buyer’s journeys reach the same success your customer has had.
If you decide to go with the last option, tell that customer’s specific story as you saw it develop. Don’t make it something generic, otherwise all of your testimonials will sound the same. Ask them to add their own thoughts to your version. Once you’ve smoothed everything out, run it by them one last time before adding it to your marketing.
The more testimonials you have, the more proof you can offer to potential customers that they’ll reach their own goals. The more new customers you’ll convert and the faster you’ll grow your business.
Asking for Referrals, So You Can Help Their Friends and Family Too
There are several industries that thrive on referrals. So much so that some of them don’t do much marketing beyond that.
Why?
Because no conventional marketing is more powerful than word of mouth.
We don’t trust Facebook ads or television commercials.
We do trust our Aunt Sally who has just had great success with her own problems and wants us to get similar results to hers.
People are more willing to listen to a recommendation of your business from a friend after visiting your website a couple of times.
Referrals grow your business faster than just about any other form of marketing.
And let’s be honest, the more people you can “mentor” on their buyer’s journey, the more people will help you spread the word about your business. That’s marketing gold right there.
To get referrals you can:
- Send a friendly email or two asking your customer to share their success with friends and family and to send anyone interested your way.
- Create a referral program where anyone who makes a referral get some sort of benefit if the person they referred becomes a customer.
The first option is something most people are willing to do anyway. Aunt Sally will tell everyone who will listen about you and how you helped her. Reminding her to give her friends and family your business’s information is easy.
The second option does more than just get new customers in the door. It maintains your current base of customers as well.
If Aunt Sally is going to get some sort of benefit every time one of her friends becomes a customer, because they mentioned her name or used some sort of coupon code, you bet she’ll remain a loyal customer. You are literally earning her repeat business by getting her to further your marketing efforts.
And you’re using your marketing to help others on their buyers’ journeys so they can find the same success as your current customers have.
Everybody wins.
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I hope you now understand the journey your customers take to get to your product or service, and to achieve success with it. Making the marketing buyer’s journey work takes some effort, but it’s always worth it in the end, for you and for your customers.