The Customer Journey: Creating Awareness for Your Brand

Welcome to our Customer Journey series, where we’ll discuss each stage of the customer decision path in depth. In this first story, we’ll start with the awareness stage.

Perhaps you’re a new brand looking to become a household name. Or you’re an established brand looking to connect with new audiences, or deepen your existing customer relationship. Either way, Chat Marketing is the best way to create awareness around your brand, generate leads, and move those leads down the sales funnel.

Traditionally, brands have generated awareness using a combination of organic and paid channels, including ads, word of mouth, social media, paid and organic search, and news sources. Brands will throw out their message to as many people as they can reach, and hope some fraction of those people might be interested.

But the disparate channels make it difficult for marketers to manage, track, and convert on their messaging. Furthermore, brands are talking at people instead of talking with them — meaning they don’t know what prospective customers want, or when they might want it. Add in glaringly low conversion rates and the increasing noise of the global marketplace, and you have yourself a critical marketing predicament.

Take ads. Most online ads end up in the great digital ether, the black hole reserved for overlooked, neglected Internet pages. Even if people do see an ad, or even click on it, holding those people’s attention requires cookies, retargeting, and other low-conversion — not to mention tough-to-measure — tactics. And all this work won’t even necessarily pay off: according to the advertising “Law of Seven,” people need to see an ad seven times for it to make any sort of impression at all.

Conversational Marketing, on the other hand, resonates with people immediately, because they’re actively interacting with the chatbot. Thus, the impact is much deeper than if they were to passively notice an ad. Chat is the forever ad: you can continually re-engage customers and increase awareness throughout their purchasing journey, at a fraction of the cost of traditional advertising or retargeting.

And it’s not just ads. Social media, for all it was touted as the savior of organic marketing, is just as disparate, oversaturated, and hard to measure. Likes and comments are maddeningly useless without turning passive clicks into a deeper, persistent connection between brand and customer — especially now that brands are being kicked to the bottom of people’s Newsfeeds. And email, when it’s not headed straight for junk, is one-way, static, and gives little insight into customer data.

In other words, it’s tough to to capture people’s attention, even tougher to keep their attention, and nearly impossible to track how that attention leads to interest, sign-ups, or sales.

Not so with Chat Marketing. When people click on an ad, a QR code, a link, or any other avenue into a chatbot, they’re automatically guided into a direct, two-way conversation with your brand. Given that chat boasts 80%+ open rates, it’s likely that people will opt into a conversation with you — which opens them up to being messaged anytime.

That means there’s no need to trail people around the Internet in the hopes of luring them to a website. Chat Marketing makes converting people into leads more efficient and less time consuming. It’ll also save you money, because you won’t need follow-up ads. Instead, you can send significant, personalized, and well-timed content that will resonate at key points in the customer journey.

And this isn’t limited to ads. There are multiple organic tactics to guide someone into a Messenger chat — QR codes, links, widgets, Facebook comments, a “message us” button, among others — all of which lead to a direct, continuous conversation between brand and customer. Once you’ve initiated the conversation, the possibilities for messaging people are limitless.

Conversation-powered marketing gives you access to a massive potential audience: there are 1.2 billion users on Messenger, and over 1 billion messages exchanged with businesses and brands each month. With a well-deployed Chat Marketing strategy, those 1+ billion users become your customers. But in order to convert those users, you need to be continually messaging people at every stage of the customer journey.

Learn more about how Chat Marketing can help your brand at Chatkit.com.

Stay tuned for the next part in our Customer Journey series — consideration!