Can Video Help You Create Loyal Customers? (A look at Customer Journey) - Teacher: Juma Bannister

Hello, and welcome to the useful content podcast. And today we're going to be talking about what the customer journey is and how you can use videos to take your customer from not knowing who you are. all the way to being a loyal buyer and advocate for your products and services. Here we go.

I am Juma Bannister. I am your host. And today I am your teacher in the useful content. Classroom. Now, if you run a business, you know that everyone who buys something from you at some point did not know your product or service existed.

So they may have a need, but they are ignorant that you could help. With that need. Now when they finally decide to buy from you, if the product or service that you are offering meets their needs at the price that they are willing to pay and is given with great service obviously, or in other words they get value from that product or service, then two things happen.

first thing that happens is that when they need that particular product or service, again, they will continue to buy from you because you've provided them with great service. You've given them value for their money and you've continued to show them that you are someone who they can trust in order to get what they need to solve the problems that they have.

And so they become a loyal customer based on that experience that they have had with you. The second thing that happens is that they most likely will not keep that good experience to themselves. If they have friends or family who need a similar type of service, or even sometimes the general public who need a similar service, they will be happy to share their experience because it has been a good one and recommend you so that they will become an advocate on your behalf.

They will share the experience that they've had with your business and they will advocate for your services because they have had such a great experience. So if they are friends and family, they'll talk to them directly. And that is something that you as a business owner, you don't get to see, but it is quite possible. That they may also leave a public review, which you will get to see, they may rate you five stars. And then they may share the reason why they love the service, or they may even create something we call. user generated content, which is basically when a customer likes your service so much that they create their own content, whether that is text or video, a lot of time it comes across as video on how great your product or your service was or how they had a positive experience with your product or service. now having a loyal customer who privately advocates on your behalf, who recommends your service to others and who publicly endorses you and may even make content about how great your services is the ultimate customer. To have

these are the types of customers we should be aiming to create as business. owners. But here's the thing. A customer does not just end up there. A customer does not just end up as someone who is a repeat buyer and who shares their good experiences they have had with you. There is a process in between them not knowing that your service or your product exists, moving all the way down to being a loyal customer and advocate for your business.

And that something is called the customer. Journey. And that's what we want to talk about today because the content you create impacts the customer journey.

So let me explain further and let's think about it. Another way, your ideal customer, the person who you would love to buy from you has hundreds, thousands, and sometimes even millions of options that they may not know about. What works in your benefit is that most of these options, the majority of these options are positioned badly in the market, which means that they don't know who they are.

So they come across as. Generic and they look and sound the same as everyone else. Hopefully that's not referring to your business. Hopefully you're different than you stand out. And so if your business is generic, the ideal customer is not likely to find or choose you because you get lost in a sea of vanilla.

Right. And some of these businesses. Who may have a product or service that a customer wants. They may have bad branding or bad marketing, uh, which it could be that their messaging is not clear or appropriate for the person that they want to buy from them. So they are fighting their own uphill battle in terms of being seen and visible by their ideal customers.

And then there may be cases where some of them are not marketing at all, or they're not doing very good marketing. At all, little to none. And so those are the ones that are easy to overcome because if you're marketing and they are not, then you don't really have to fight or battle with them too much.

You already ahead of the game.

Now, if you do your job well, as a business owner, as a marketer for your business. What you will be fighting with are a small group of people, a small group of people who are well positioned in the market.

They can clearly communicate who they are. They know their ideal customers and they have a clear message and they communicate. That message consistently, these people are your actual competition. And the reason for that is that these people create a demand for their service. These people who have good marketing, good messaging, good positioning. create a demand for their service. And this is a space that you want to compete in when you put out your content. You want to put out your content and be in the market in such a way that you create a demand for your service.

So when you put your content out there, what you're doing effectively is asking your ideal customer. to actively reject all of those other options in the market and choose you. So you're causing a separation between yourself and other people in the market.

But let me go on to explain this a little bit further from the customer's perspective so that we can understand it a little better. And let's talk a bit about how the customer journey works. So if we were to visualize a simplified version of the customer journey, and I'm saying simplified because the customer journey is really not a straight line, but we're going to imagine it as a straight line and we're going to simplify it just for illustrative purposes, right?

So here's how I want you to visualize it. Think about a flat, straight line, and there is a point on the left side of the line that the customer is standing up on. And at that point on the line, the customer is standing up and the customer is saying, I don't know you exist. I don't know who exists in the market that can help me with my problem. I have a problem, but I don't know who exists or who is in the market that can help me solve my problem. And then if we move to the far right of the line, all the way to the extreme right.

The line, there's a customer standing up on that side and they are seeing that I found someone that person is incredible. The product or service that they give is a five star product or service. I'm going to tell everyone who has a similar problem to mine, to buy from this person and to use their services, So on one end, we have somebody who's totally ignorant that you exist, that any business exists, I could solve their problem. On the other end, we have somebody who is satisfied, who is loyal, who is becoming a repeat customer and who would advocate on behalf of the business.

So we have the extremes so you're moving the customer from this end of the journey to the other end of the journey, from not knowing who you are, not knowing who you to being a loyal customer and for advocating on your. Okay. We got that right. So that's pretty clear. so the big question is how do you move someone from not knowing you exist? to being someone who is a repeat buyer and advocate for you? That's the big question. And of course, I have an answer for that question. The way you do that is by getting them to know who you are, to like who you are and what you offer, and then to trust you.

And that process of getting them from knowing to trusting is a process of relationship building. It's a relationship building process. And one of the key ways you can build that relationship is by using content. Now, there are other ways to build that relationship or what we like to call other types of touch points.

And touch points simply mean places that the client can interface with you and you can do things like you can give them samples, you can invite them to events. And there are other things that you can do to interface with the client. And those are various touch points.

But today we're talking about content but creating content and videos in particular is one of the most high return cost effective ways to build that relationship and carry a customer from not knowing who you are all the way to being a loyal customer and advocating on your behalf.

And if you do it well enough, it builds long term relationships.

Now, even though I've described the customer journey as a line in my example, the customer journey is really not linear, which means there are many twists and turns and different ways that a customer. Could interact with your product or services and content before you buy it. They can interact with you in many, many different ways.

So it's not really a straight line. There was a thought before in marketing where the customer journey was more of a linear journey, but we now know that not to be true because customers will find you in one place and know of you but ignore you there and let's just suppose they find you online in an ad.

They will look at that. They may not click on it but they become aware that you exist. And then they may see one of your social posts, and then they may ignore that. They may encounter one of your employees, the CEO of the company may be posting as well.

They may engage with some of his personal posts or some things that's not directly related to the product or service that they sell. And then they get to know you more that way. And so the customer journey is quite meandering and all that time, the customer may not have a direct need for your product or service just yet, but they know who you are and they're learning about you so that when that need does arise, they can remember, Oh, these people do this in this way, and they can solve this problem in this way.

And so they're able to recall that because you are top of mind, and then they come and approach you when they want to decide to buy.

And when we're talking about a customer journey, we're talking about getting a certain percentage of buyers to buy from you over and over again.

And of course, that every single person who buys from you will be a loyal repeat customer and will advocate on your behalf. Some people may just buy. Once some people may buy twice. Some people may buy multiple times. but you don't really have everyone who buys from you repeat by, but the thing is, is that there is a certain percentage of people who will be repeat buyers.

and in a book called Eat Your Greens by Wiemer Snijders, his research confirms that at any given time, about 60 percent of your business revenue comes from about 20%. of your customers. And also that these 20 percent of customers who give you 60 percent of your revenue is generally constant and they are fixed for a long period of time.

So those are the people who are the repeat buyers and those are the people who you are building this long term relationship with. so your goal in creating content is to move people from not knowing who you are into the section or into the percentage where they are heavy. buyers, because once people become repeat buyers, they tend to stay there. They tend to stay loyal for a longer period of time. And so that's where you get this 20 percent making you 60 percent of your revenue.

And that is why you have to build a relationship. And that is why I believe the purpose of content is to build relationship. Once someone is in the market for what you sell you want to be able to move them skillfully and efficiently along the customer journey to be in that 20 percent of loyal buyers.

You don't just want one time buyers. You want repeat buyers or people who would advocate on your behalf. So you want to create all of these content touch points so that you can build these relationships so you have greater potential for long term and consistent revenue generation.

Of course, in terms of touchpoints, the traditional way that you used to do that is by meeting someone, you sell to them, you give them great service, and they remember who you are and refer to you. others to you. So you have to invest a lot of time in building these personal relationships.

And that's probably still the best way to go and still very effective for certain types of businesses and for certain size of businesses. However, If you want to grow your business rapidly and with less effort, you want to be able to build those relationships at scale. And what scale means scale simply means that you take something that applies to one person and you apply it to many people all at the same time.

So you amplify this good thing that only applies to one person and you apply it to many all at the same time. And that is where video. Comes in in the company I run, Relate Studios, it's a strategic marketing and production company, which means we not only help our clients plan and structure and find the best way to use content, but we also help them produce that content and specifically. Video content. So when we create content strategies, we always recommend that clients build out their strategies with video at the core, and there are two major reasons why we recommend doing it this way. And these are the reasons. The reason number one is the proliferation and the preference for video by every single major social media platform, every single social media platform now. Is using or carries video and to prove this, let me just share with you how these platforms are using videos. And you will see that there's actually an emphasis on video.

So you'll be losing out if you don't use video. So let me first start with YouTube. So YouTube is the platform for long form video, as we all know, you can do an almost unlimited length of video on YouTube. And of course they have short form in the form of shorts and also you can go live on YouTube.

Facebook uses four different types of videos, including stories, reels, and lives. And you can go up to 240 minutes of video on Facebook. Instagram has at least three different types of videos, including video reels, lives, and stories. And you can go up to 60 minutes of recording on Instagram. I mean, Unlocked Threads was launched as a part of the Meta family. So it goes along with Facebook and with Instagram

and of video. And of course there's Twitter that allows up to two hours if you have the paid version of Twitter. Oh, I shouldn't just say Twitter. Twitter or X has been rebranded by Elon you get up to two hours with Twitter or X blue. That's a professional version. And if you don't have that, you have up to 220 seconds of video on Twitter or X on LinkedIn, you get videos up to 15 minutes and you have to upload that from desktop and you get live videos. I believe.

Up to four hours. In recent time I uploaded a 14 minute and 57 second video almost maxing out LinkedIn's video limit. So I know it's possible to upload a long video on LinkedIn and have it do well as well. And on Pinterest you can upload videos up to 15 minutes and on TikTok you can upload videos up to 10 minutes long.

So the second reason we tell our clients to center their content strategy around video is because you can make every single type of content.

out of a long form video. So long form video comes in the form of, you can do a live video or a live show, or you can do a video podcast. And out of that, you can have shorter videos, which can be used on YouTube. Of course, if you are doing your video live, it can stream to multiple platforms, including YouTube.

And you can have a shorter version of those videos edited down Let's just say your 45 minutes. You can make a shorter video inside of that, that is five to 10 minutes. If you have segments inside of your live show and then out of the long form video, you can also create shorter form video clips from that live show or that video podcast, which could be one to five minutes in addition to that, you can take the transcript from the long form podcast and create a blog post. That text can be then repurposed as text posts for places like LinkedIn and Facebook. And then you can use the shorter version of the text for places like threads and places like X. And then you can take those things and create graphics out of them.

Take the points you made inside of the long form video and turn them into carousels. There is a plethora of ways that you can repurpose your long form video into other types of content. So if you start in long form video, you give yourself opportunities to take that long form content and create multiple pieces of image, of text, of video content that you can use to amplify and 10x and 20x the reach of your content. over a period of time. And it's one of the best ways to continue to add into your content library fast and to build it up so that you have something that you can continually use in order to market your company and your business on social media.

All right, so now let's connect those two dots. Let's connect the customer journey and how you can use video in the customer So along the customer journey, there are different stages of awareness along the customer journey. There are different stages of the customer getting to know you.

So let's just categorize it in three categories. There's a point where the customer is becoming aware of you, they don't know. and they're becoming aware of you. There's another point where they're aware of you, but now they know what problem you solve, and they're considering buying from you. They're in this consideration stage. And of course, there is a time when they understand what you sell, they've considered, and they actually want to buy from you, but they're just waiting for some kind of cue or some kind of way to do that.

So we have awareness content, we have consideration content, and we have content that is for selling. And so if we take those three parts and we put them together, we can see that we have to create. content, video content for all stages of the customer journey.

And usually the structure is referred to as a funnel. Now we're not going to talk about the funnel today, but there are many ways you can look at it. One of the ways I also like to look at it is the difference between features, benefits, and transformation. And then of people look, look at it as no, like trust.

I mean, there's many ways you can look at this customer journey and put it inside of what we would call a funnel. And It's called a funnel because you have many people at the top and only a few people at the bottom, because not everyone is going to buy from you, but you really only need a certain amount of people to buy from you over and over again, to sustain.

Your business. so Now let's talk about what video content you need for each stage of the customer journey. So in the awareness section of the journey, I recommend that people create what we do content. So it talks about the service or the thing that you offer.

So you give tips about that. You show tricks how to make people's life easier by doing these things really quickly. You do how tos. You can do lists. These are the 10 things about this. And so you really want to give people quick wins, show them who you are I showed them what you have to offer at the beginning of the customer journey, when you're building awareness.

So it basically is referring to brand is referring to people getting to know you is giving people quick wins in that part of the customer journey. That's the beginning when people don't know who you are and they're getting to know who you are. Now, when you move people to the middle of the customer journey, which is the consideration, you want to create video content that highlights how you help.

How you help. So these are the behind the scenes content, which shows you helping other customers and how that goes, how you create the thing that you offer your product or service. And then you want to create process videos, which goes step by step into how you help people. It may not be behind the scenes, but it may be actually a step by step process of how I create this thing for my customers.

You want to do that. As well. So you want to show people how you help you want to show behind the scenes. And you want to show process videos and this will help people get a deeper understanding of what you do and put them in a in a state of deeper consideration for hiring you to do the thing that you said when they became aware of you.

and the last kind of video content you want to create for the selling part of the customer journey is what we've done type of content. So these things are going to consist of client testimonials, people you've actually served, getting on video, creating content.

In order to show people, yes, these people have served me, this is what they've done, And those are highly effective types of content because when customers see other customers, real people, talking about how you've helped them, they then can put themselves in the shoes of those customers and trust even faster.

And so you might want to do things like have case studies, videos in case studies as well, showing step by step. How you have helped this customer and the statistics that go along with that. You move them from this amount of revenue to this amount of revenue. They had this problem. You're able to solve it.

So inside of those case studies, you'd want to use a lot of numbers. You want to reference what is the transformation that you brought with the thing that you helped with. You'll want to say, well, the person had this problem. This was a state before, and this is the state that they're in now. So you essentially are showing befores.

And after and inside of those types of contents, you want to have strong selling call to actions like buy now, contact us now, fill out this form here or something that somebody can click on immediately in order to go on by to sign up, to book a meeting, all of those different things. So you want to be in a mode where you're selling when you create this type of end of the customer journey content, that focuses on what you've done to help people.

all right, so we talked about the customer journey and we talked about how video can help with the customer journey. Let's now do a complete review and go over what we've learned today in the useful content classroom. Number one, at the beginning of the journey, most people don't know. who you are.

Number two, you want to move those people along the customer journey from not knowing who you are to being a loyal customer and being an advocate.

Number three, at any given time, around 20 percent of your customers are responsible for 60 percent of your revenue. So you want to add more people into that repeat buyer category so you can sustain your business for the long term.

Number four, you do that. by using content to build relationship with them over a period of time.

Number five, starting in video content is one of the most efficient and effective ways to create multiple forms of content that can build. That relationship.

And that is why when you're thinking about your content strategy, you should give deep consideration, and probably deep preference to building out that content strategy. With video at the core.

So I hope this lesson on the customer journey and using video was useful, and I'll talk to you soon.

Useful content classroom, dismissed. And of course we're clear, oh my, oh my, no AC, I'm quite, quite sweaty right now. I've made it through. Good stuff.