What is a Customer Journey? How to Get More Clients By Optimizing Yours
If you’re a mindfulness teacher, you want to get more new clients so you can help them lead better lives. You know that working with you is going to help them reduce stress and improve mental wellness.
But before you can help them, you must first help these “strangers” realize why they should become your student or clients. If no matter how much marketing you do, you can’t seem to get as many sign-ups as you’d like, you're in the right place.
Read on to learn how you can get more clients by leveraging a mindful version of the customer journey in your marketing.
First let’s talk about what a customer journey is in the first place...
How the customer journey helps you market your services
The customer journey is the route someone takes from first learning about your services to becoming a client. A lot of psychological factors come into play before someone commits to sacrificing their time or resources to sign up for anything – even if it will ultimately help them be happier, healthier, or more efficient.
The customer journey takes these into consideration as your potential clients make the decision of whether to buy from you or not. When you're aware of the steps in the customer journey, you can use them to make the most of your marketing efforts to get more clients.
As much as we’d all like people to sign up for our services the first time they hear about us, that’s not how the statistics line up. For every 100 people that encounter your brand for the first time, usually only 3-5 will actually end up becoming clients.
See the numbers below in a helpful graphic by Sticky Branding:
How marketing funnels fit into the customer journey
The marketing funnel is a tool that goes hand in hand with the customer journey. It helps you set systems in place along every point of the customer journey to maximize the effectiveness of everything you’re doing to promote your services. If the phrase “marketing funnel” doesn’t appeal to you, feel free to call it “one-step-closer-to-helping-them” funnel.
Marketing is a numbers game. This may sound impersonal at first…so here’s how you take it a step further to make your marketing more mindful: keep in mind is that everyone on the other side of that screen is a beautiful soul just like you.
It is through marketing your services to them that you get the opportunity to touch their lives on a deeper level.
Think about your own customer journey when it comes to buying a higher-priced item or service online. You probably rarely come across a program and sign up the very first time you hear about it. You want to learn more and make sure you trust the person or business providing it. Your future clients are no different.
The customer journey helps them know you care
Even if you’re a mindfulness teacher with a dozen certifications, people may hesitate to sign up until they know that 1) you can help them a solve a problem and 2) that you care and are trustworthy.
The customer journey is all about helping your future clients resolve these two mental blocks so they finally click that “sign up” or “book a call” button on your website.
So without further ado, let's get into the customer journey so you can apply it to your mindfulness business!
Here are 5 stages of the customer journey customized specifically for mindfulness teachers and businesses. Each includes a key strategy, marketing funnel tools, and questions you can use to maximize each step of the journey so more people become clients.
5 Steps of the Mindful Customer Journey
1) AWARENESS
Key strategy: Educate your audience about mindfulness
Best marketing funnel tools: Create and share helpful mindfulness content through a range of online platforms, Free ebooks (lead magnets)
Are your ideal clients aware of mindfulness as a potential solution to their current perceived problems?
Whether they’re currently dealing with stress and anxiety, not feeling fulfilled in life, wanting to be more resilient or something else, you have to let them know that mindfulness can help them solve the challenges they’re struggling with.
Depending on your target niche, if your prospects don’t know what mindfulness is and how it can help them, start there. Make sure you provide plenty of helpful content on your website or social media to help them understand mindfulness as it relates to the specific challenge they want to overcome. If you don't yet have a specific niche within mindfulness, here are some ideas to help you select one so you can impact more people.
Questions to ask yourself to make sure you’re building awareness:
How are you making your services known?
Are you meeting your potential clients where they’re at as it relates to their knowledge of mindfulness?
Are you talking in their lingo through your website copy and social media posts?
Are you promoting yourself as an expert in your niche by hosting free webinars, appearing on podcasts or conferences, or publishing guest post articles in places where your target audience hangs out?
2) RESEARCH
Key strategy: Make your services easy to find
Best marketing funnel tools: Search Engine Optimization (SEO), SEO optimized website copy and content
Once they’re aware that mindfulness can help them solve a problem and lead happier lives, do they know how your services in particular can help them? Are they aware that you have a mindfulness-based solution to their problem?
This is where you think about what your target audience would likely be searching for to find the answers to their pressing questions. When you understand your audience and their needs, you’ll be more aware of what particularly they want to know about mindfulness and what kind of help are they seeking.
Questions to ask yourself to make sure they find YOU when doing they research:
Are you using the right SEO keywords throughout your website content and blogs/articles? (If you're not sure what SEO is or how to use it - it's not just you. Learn more about the basics of SEO here)
Are you promoting your services on the right platforms where your audience will actually pay attention to them?
Are you marketing to the right people who will resonate with you rather than just trying to target everyone?
If you’re a location-based business, do you have your Google My Business profile set up? Are you using specific location keywords throughout your website copy to increase the odds of people in your area finding you?
3) REPUTATION
Key strategy: Cultivate relationships and establish trust
Best marketing funnel tools: Free ebooks (lead magnets), Email marketing and newsletters
Once your potential clients are aware that mindfulness could help them solve a problem AND that you provide a way for them to integrate mindfulness into their life, do they feel comfortable buying from you?
It takes time before people are willing to trade their time and money for a service from someone they don’t know. The marketing stats say it takes an average of 7 touches before someone is ready to buy.
Your ideal clients will likely need to interact with your brand at least a half dozen times before they feel comfortable making a purchase.
Building trust and establishing rapport takes time – not just in person but also online.
That’s why you have to have a plan in your marketing funnel to do that! If you don’t, most people who land on your website might be intrigued but are unlikely to come back again.
Questions to ask yourself to make sure you’re building trust with your audience:
Do you have a way to stay in touch with your potential clients through email?
Do you have a freebie or a lead magnet that will incentivize them to give you their email address in the first place?
Do you have a nurture or welcome email sequence set up so that every new subscriber is greeted warmly and provided valuable info over the first few weeks of getting on your email list?
Are you staying engaged with your audience through regular newsletters that provide value?
4) CONVERSION
Key strategy: Call them to action
Best marketing funnel tools: Captivating website copy written to maximize conversions
Once they trust you, are you making it easy for them to buy from you?
Even if you have great relationships with potential clients, you have to actually extend the invitation to work with you in order to convert more of them to clients. As a mindfulness copywriter, I see too many mindfulness teachers make this mistake in their marketing: they don’t ask for the order!
If you don’t call people to action and challenge them to get out of their comfort zone, they’ll keep doing what they’ve always done. And why have them struggle with their old habits when you know that working with you could help them?
Questions to ask yourself to make sure you’re building trust with your audience:
Are you using clear calls to action (CTAs) in your content? Do you have separate CTAs for different target audiences (if you have more than one)?
Are you providing enough information about what the process of working with you will be like?
Are you making it easy for them to actually sign up for your class, program, workshop from a technological standpoint by providing a clear schedule or link?
5) ADVOCACY
Key strategy: Cultivate loyalty with ongoing value
Best marketing funnel tools: Provide ongoing mindfulness content to subscribers and followers in the form of blogs, articles, freebies, helpful social media posts
Once your prospects become clients, give yourself a huge pat on the back – nice work! Now you want them to be so thrilled about working with you that they can’t wait to tell their friends. You want your clients to become your advocates so they help you touch even more lives.
Questions to ask yourself to get more referrals from existing clients:
Are you providing valuable content consistently so that your clients always have something great to read and share with their friends?
Are you asking for feedback and testimonials on an ongoing basis?
Do you have a referral incentive or referral system in place?
After reading through these steps, give yourself credit for doing a great job at those steps of the customer journey where you're consistently showing up. And if you've struggled to convert followers or website visitors into clients, now you can see which steps you may need to pay more attention to. By making small changes in your marketing strategy over time, you can optimize your marketing to maximize the impact of your business today.
Ready to increase brand awareness and establish trust with your audience without having to spend more time on marketing? Have me create science-based mindfulness content for you!
Want to do it yourself instead? Learn how to effectively market your services to get more clients by signing up for the upcoming enrollment of my Online Marketing for Mindfulness Teachers course here.