When you think about how your marketing and sales efforts can work together, you’d definitely think about sales funnel. As a straightforward definition, a sales funnel is something that illustrates the journey that your potential customers go through on their way to make a successful purchase with your website. We knew ‘reach’ and ‘frequency’ to be the critical factors for driving growth in any market. But today’s customer journeys are different. According to Google, no two customer journeys in the past six months were exactly alike, and they don’t even resemble a funnel. The usage of smart devices have made people expect immediate answers whenever they want to know a piece of information, go somewhere, do or buy something, making it the fact that customer intent is redefining the marketing funnel in today’s market.
So to be successful, brands must start predicting the intent and needs of their customers throughout their journey. Today’s customer journeys are like they search for dozens of times before finalizing their buying decisions. There may be days or even weeks of timeframe between their first search and purchase. Business brands should make it a point to look at the time lag from the so-called first impression to sale because a considerable percentage of sales come days/weeks after the first impression.
You’re making the biggest mistake by guessing your customer’s digital journeys. Instead, use Google ads and analytics data for that. Customer journeys are rich with intent and are defined by customer signals and activity; marketers should use these signals to deliver real-time experiences that help customers in making their next step. These signals do help marketers in predicting behavior and delivering what customers really want before they even express it.
By redirecting customers to the right landing page that provides the information they’re looking for, you’re giving yourself a chance to connect more personally with your potential clients. Anticipating customer intent is actually simple with a little effort. A user who is searching for sports shoes is most likely to buy one, and that too from a retailer near his location. Likewise, a job person looking for information about business management is more likely to enroll himself in a related course. So by understanding how people will act when they visit your business site, what content they read, the pages they most visit, etc., you can develop customer journey paths that engage your users in a better way and lead them towards the purchase decision.