There are only 3 ways to make more money for your business:

1. Increase the number of paid customers you have (or clients, users, etc.)
2. Increase the number of sales per customer (i.e. sell them stuff more often, or sell them more kinds of stuff).
3. Increase prices (by either raising prices on existing products & services, or adding products & services that have a higher value).

Let’s simplify these three methods to GET, KEEP, and GROW

Of course, in order to get, keep and grow your customers, you’re going to need to understand what their core needs are, and how to speak to your product’s or service’s ability to meet their needs. To make sure you understand your customers’ needs, start out by building a customer persona, and then really boil down how their problems indicate deeper needs.

Everything you do in your business should be in service to meeting customer needs. And yet, companies struggle with meaningful — strategic — goals. Too often the marketing goals are tactical in nature, or they resemble work streams rather than goals that have large outcomes and really move the company forward. When thinking of big strategic marketing goals, you need to look for levers that will move you toward your ultimate outcome of meeting customer needs — that’s your WHY.

By the way, your ultimate outcome is NOT ‘make more money’. It’s to super-serve your customers. Your company vision should be articulated in a way that is customer-oriented. Making more money is the by-product of super-serving your customer needs.

When you deliver more value to customers than your competitors and alternatives, you win the business and make more money. So the real question is, how do you super-serve customers? This is where the combination of knowing your customers’ needs and understanding the marketing funnel comes in. If you know your customers’ needs and are able to apply the marketing funnel strategies to expressing how you meet those needs, you’ve got the magic formula.

The marketing funnel is your ready-made framework for building strategic goals. Simply plug your messaging (that responds to the customers’ needs) into the stages of the funnel. The marketing funnel is designed to mirror the way a customer makes a decision about a product or service, so let’s take a look at the decision journey a customer typically makes.

The customer purchase journey

Customers go through the following purchase or decision journey:

• Awareness — hey, I’ve got a problem!
• Consideration — Hmm, what are the ways I could solve this problem?
• Preference — Ah, could this be the best way of solving my problem?
• Primary Action, Determination or Choice — Hello! This is the answer to my problems. I’m taking action.
• Loyalty — I’m so smart! I had a problem, I solved the problem. I love the way I solved this problem. Yay me.
• Advocacy & Referral — Hey friend, I see you have a problem. I used to have that problem, but I’m smart so I solved my problem in a smart way. If you’re smart, you would solve the problem the way I did.

Sometimes this process happens in a nanosecond, and sometimes it takes much longer. It really depends on the complexity of the decision. For example, when choosing a toothpaste, a relatively easy decision to make, the process can happen really fast. It might look like this:

• I need new toothpaste
• I like whitening toothpastes
• This Colgate whitening toothpaste promises to whiten teeth in 2 weeks
• I’m going to add this to my shopping cart
• (Weeks later) Wow I like this toothpaste, and I think my teeth are getting whiter
• I would recommend this toothpaste

However, when making a more complex decision, like purchasing a car, the journey could weeks to even months. Car purchases often involve research to determine which cars go into the consideration set (ex. based on gas mileage, body style, safety ratings, etc). And preferences aren’t decided until after the shopper has driven several cars, and talked to several sales people. The shopper might also talk to friends and family for recommendations, and need to talk to their bank to see how much they qualify for in financing before they narrow in on their preference. So a big-ticket complex decision like a buying a new car normally takes quite a bit of time to get through both the consideration and the preference stages of the purchase journey.

You can start to see now that how well you do at aligning yourself to respond to the customer’s purchase journey is going to have a huge impact on not only how many customers you acquire, but whether you can turn them into repeat customers, and whether you’re going to be able to sell them add-ons and additional services (like GPS, satellite radio, etc.)

The marketing (sales) funnel

From the business point of view, that sets up the marketing funnel. The marketing funnel is designed to respond to the customer’s purchase journey on their way to meeting their needs.

• Attract — what are the activities you need to perform in order to attract prospects who are looking to solve the problem you can solve, but have no idea that you exist? How will you make them aware of you?
• Engage — what messages, content and tools do you have in place for prospects to put you into the consideration set that solves their problems?
• Differentiate- what do you have in place to help your prospects form a point of view that your product or service is better for them than the alternatives?
• Transact- how easy are you making it for prospects (once they’ve determined to choose you) to follow through on their decision. What are you doing to reduce friction in your sales process, and to de-risk their commitment to a decision?
• Delight- once they’ve completed their transaction, what are you doing to validate their action? How are you re-engaging them and giving them additional value?
• Enable & Empower — once you’ve super-served them, how are you empowering them to advocate, promote and refer your product or service to others?

Do you see how the core activities of the funnel respond to the purchase journey and are the guide to your strategic marketing objectives? The ONLY thing you should be thinking about in terms of establishing your strategic marketing goals is articulating goals that correspond to the activities of the funnel, and that get, keep and grow your customer base. Depending on the maturity of your company, you might want to focus on Attract, Engage and Differentiate if what you really need is more customers. However, if you’ve cracked the code on getting customers but aren’t retaining them long enough, you might want to think about how you Delight them by adding more value. If you are efficiently acquiring customers and are getting repeat purchases, it’s time to Enable and Empower them to to refer you to their friends and family.

Below, see a sampling of marketing funnel stages that serve as strategic marketing goals, and some of the tactics that would ladder up to accomplishing those goals.

Build Awareness:

• Advertising
• PR
• Social
• Search (organic and paid; SEO/SEM)
• Events and Sponsorships

Engage:

• Website
• Landing pages
• Email sequences, newsletters & campaigns
• Social
• White papers & guides
• Quizzes and decision trees
• Infographics

Differentiate:

• On your website, consider comparison tables & tools, decision trees, quizzes, etc. that help prospects quickly narrow down their consideration set.
• Build credibility and authority with endorsements and testimonials
• Build trust with guarantees, ratings
• Produce evidence that proves your product or service delivers value in the form of white papers.

Transact:

• Pay attention to the purchase path and get rid of barriers.
• ID any friction in the process and eliminate it,
• Make it easy for customers to give you their money, and then transact again.
• Add badges that indicate security, safety, good business.
• Introduce guarantees to eliminate the perception of risk.

Delight:

• Re-engage your buyers. Give them new ways to use your product or service, or to extend their use of it with how-to videos, use cases, meetups, training.
• Make sure those buyers know how to utilize or apply the service in a way that affirms the choice they made.

Empower:

• If you did your job well, your customers will talk about you. How can you make it easy (and rewarding) for them to refer you?

The Bottom Line

Don’t overthink (or under-think) your strategic marketing objectives. Think about the things you’re going to have to accomplish to Get, Keep and Grow your customer base. What are you doing and saying along their purchase journey to assure them you can meet their customer needs. Those things will inevitably involve building greater awareness to attract new customers, implementing programs to super-serve your customers in engaging and differentiated ways, and giving them reasons to do more business with you more often. The things you do to to encourage movement through the stages in the funnel (like advertising, social, improving the UI on your website, etc) are tactics. Keep your eye on the big levers of the marketing funnel and you will align your goals to your customers’ needs.