Digging Deeper into the Customer Journey
Does your content provide smooth, consistent transitions through the customer journey, to the sale and beyond? What really happens when potential customers start to engage with your content?
These are just some of the questions Michael Barber, SVP and Chief Creative Officer at B2B agency Godfrey came on The Content Experience Show to talk about. As a champion for the importance of experience, Anna Hrach and I were thrilled to have him join us as a guest.
During the episode, Michael explained how his first boss out of college was Jay Baer, who, 11 years ago, put him on a stage and told him to speak. “You’ve got something to say, so speak,” Jay told him.
Since then, speaking has become a passion of his, and his focus has been on presenting different topics in different perspectives that he hasn’t yet seen in the conference circuit. In other words, creating valuable experiences for conference goers.
My co-host, Anna Hrach, was right to note that Michael embodies experience in all aspects of his life — from speaking, to the work he does on a day-to-day basis, to his personal life on social media. But what I’m most interested in digging into is how he uses this mentality when creating content for the customer journey.
Michael proposed that the next step to improving the overall experience for your customers is to focus on the steps in between.
“There are so many nuances between the initial awareness of a piece of content and actually experiencing that content.” — Michael Barber
Michael went on to explain that this “in-between experience” is where businesses are often losing the audiences that they’re going after. They’re not focusing on the end-to-end content experience.
At Uberflip, we actually looked at a framework for this a while back, and saw that a lot of companies were doing just that. As people thought about creation, the next pillar that they talked about was distribution, and then analytics. So they had three. It was create, put it out there, and then see what’s working.
My team said exactly what Michael said on the podcast, there’s a missing pillar between creation and distribution. Where are you pulling people back to? What is that experience at the end of the day?
Next, Michael dropped the idea of who would own that experience, and suggested that some organizations are creating customer experience teams.
Michael explained that for him, a customer experience team would need to answer two key things:
- What is the actual way that customers are experiencing the organization? How do customers and prospects get to know us as an organization? What do they experience as they build that awareness around our organization?
- What helps customers make those buying decisions? What makes prospective customers fill in a form, or buy a particular product, or call an account rep, or make that first step? What’s the experience from that particular prospect, as they get to know organization?
Essentially, what Michael was saying was this:
“You have got to build a group of customers that you can have honest and brutal conversations with.”
Understanding experiences from the customer perspective is immensely valuable. Being able to establish that open feedback loop, both internally and externally, is what helps us lead positive change within our teams.
There were so many more great insights that Michael shared with Anna and I on this episode, but I don’t want to spoil them for you. If you’re interested in listening to the full episode, check out the link below.
Feel free to let me know what you think in the comments. I’d love to learn about how your marketing team creates great experiences throughout the customer journey.
