By Janice Hostager
About fifteen years ago, after moving from a big city to a college town in Wisconsin, I decided to open a little design agency. Since it was just me, at first, I got new business by word-of-mouth. (Pro tip: if you live in a smaller community, a local Chamber of Commerce can be a lifeline for networking and getting referrals!)
But when I decided to expand my business, with not a lot of time or money earmarked for marketing, I resorted to what I call “shot-in-the-dark marketing”. That is trying a bunch of stuff to see what sticks.
Note: this could also could be named the ineffective-marketing-money-drain method.
My results were tepid, at best. And this was particularly humbling for me, because by that time I had almost a decade of experience working in corporate marketing departments and advertising agencies. But this taught me an important lesson: knowing WHAT to do is not the same as having a system in place for DOING IT.
Part of the problem was that there were so many new marketing and social media platforms popping up, along with email marketing , SEO, PPC, and more, it put my ADHD brain into paralysis. So I needed to create a framework that would help me.
Why I created the Trail to the Sale™
One thing that stuck with me from my corporate and agency years is this: strategy builds success.
I knew I needed a marketing strategy–something I could build all my marketing actions on. (The traditional 5 P’s of marketing were absolutely not a strategy.) And it had to be created with something that didn’t change with each new platform or technology: human behavior.
So I started studying my audience at every point, from when they first learned about my business, to when they bought and referred. Though several iterations of creating something that would work for me, I created the Trail to the Sale™
The Trail to the Sale is the process most buyers take to get to the point they try, buy, and refer you to other people. It’s built based on the path your ideal customer takes. So understanding your customer is the vitally important first step in your marketing, because if you don’t understand who they are and where they look for solutions, they will not move forward. Notice I said “customer” without an “s”. That’s because if you’re focused on your best customer–the one that is most likely to buy again and again, pay their bills on time, and is great to work with–then you can be sure your marketing efforts are on target and you won’t be trying to talk to an audience that’s too broad.
The Steps of the Trail
There are several steps on the Trail to the Sale. Here is what they are:
- Awareness: This is the place where your customer learns all about your business and what you offer. The awareness stage can be through anything from social media to a giant magnet you have on your car door. They may be aware of the problem they have, or just the symptom they have of that problem.
You should also consider what triggers them to move forward on the trail. People may be aware of your business, but not need it or feel compelled to move to the next stage. So knowing what motivates your ideal customer to take action is key. - Consider: Once your customer has heard of your company and what you offer, if they want to learn more, they’ll move on to the next phase: consideration. They may look at your website or go deeper into your social media content. But this is also where I like to offer a free download that addresses the biggest problem they have and how to solve it. In exchange, they will only need to share their name and email address. Once they are on your email list, you can set up an email nurture sequence that will further build on that know-like-trust factor that people need to buy from you.
- Compare: Once your potential customer is interested in your offer, they may look around to see what your competitors are doing. That’s where having reviews on places like Google Reviews, testimonials and third party review sites will help you. It also helps if you can set your product or service apart from your competition so they can see how you’re unique. In other words, don’t offer the same things as your competitors, so visitors can’t compare apples to apples, and you won’t become a commodity.
- Evaluate: Sometimes customers will make a first purchase just to try your offer out. So it’s important to make sure they have a great experience even with a small purchase or a trial version. After buying the first time, your customer has a 27% chance of purchasing again. Those percentages go up to 49% and 62% after a second or third purchase. So making sure that first experience with you is excellent becomes very important. Don’t just save your best customer service for your best customers. Make sure their first purchase is outstanding.
- Sell: There’s more involved in a sale than first appears. People buy for a variety of reasons. At this stage of the Trail, focus on the emotions that prompt people to buy, but don’t neglect the facts. Since people buy on emotion but justify their purchase with logic, your offer needs to check boxes in both of those columns.
And pricing is an important thing to look at too. There’s much more to pricing than a cost plus markup formula. - Supersize: An upsell is something that, if neglected, leaves money on the table for you. Simply suggesting a go-along product, an extended warranty, another appointment, or an accessory can mean a big increase in the sale for no additional marketing. Although it’s not always appropriate, an additional sale or upsell can make a difference in your bottom line.
- Serve: Once they buy from you, you need to make sure they feel good about their experience! That might mean sending a thank you note, an email, adding them to a special group or category of buyer, or giving them a bonus. That could also include training on using the product to make sure they are fully satisfied. Treating a customer as someone special can make a lifetime customer out of a one-time purchaser. This also means that you need to make sure your product or service performs up to expectations, especially if you offer a warranty.
- Send: Referrals are one of the most powerful tools in your marketing arsenal. Just sending an email or text to ask for a review can make this happen and be completely automated. You might also consider sweetening the pot with an incentive or gift as a way to say “thank you for referring me!”.
The Difference Between the Trail and a Marketing Funnel
You might be asking…isn’t the The Trail to the Sale the same as a sales funnel?
Not exactly. The Trail maps the entire experience a customer has with your brand, from initial awareness through the purchase process and post-purchase interactions. It includes the touch-points, emotions, motivations, and actions needed at each stage of their journey. Through the Trail, you will be able to address everything your customers pay attention to at each stage.
A marketing or sales funnel, on the other hand, represents the stages a customer goes through before making a purchase. It typically includes three stages: awareness, interest, and purchase, or top of funnel, mid funnel, and bottom of funnel. The funnel is focused only on guiding potential customers through these stages with the aim to convert them into paying customers. It’s helpful to understand marketing in broad terms using a funnel. And I do use funnels for individual promotions. But the funnel concept has some severe limitations.
Here are the problems I have with the funnel:
- It appears that people fall into the funnel and just keep going until they buy. They don’t. With all the noise in the marketing world, there are too many distractions to expect people to go from awareness to buyer. Prospective customers need to be led along by our marketing efforts and that takes intention.
- People sometimes leave the Trail altogether and come back later at restart or start where they left off. With the trail, they can hop back on whenever they’re ready to resume.
- The funnel has only 3 parts. The trail..and the customer journey map–has more steps because you as a business owner need to address each step along the way, rather than just broad sections. The more customized their Trail map is, the more likely they’ll buy.
In essence, the Trail provides a more detailed and nuanced understanding of the customer’s experience, while a funnel is a more focused tool for guiding customers towards a purchase decision. But my experience is that the people who make the customer their priority win at the end.
The Trail to the Sale in Action
What I love about the Trail to the Sale framework is that it can be used in many different parts of your business. When I started using it in my own business, everything became so much more clear and doable. And I realized I didn’t need to do everything at once!
Various tactics can be used at each stage of the Trail too. Take Social media. You might want to do something fun to get attention of your ideal customer in the Awareness phase, invite them to download a freebie in the consideration stage, point out how you’re different from your competitors in the Compare phase, then share a $7 offer in the evaluate stage, and so on.
And many people visit your website while they’re in different parts of their journey, so it needs to have information to meet the needs of customers in whichever part of the trail they’re in. They may have clicked a link in the awareness phase, visited a landing page to download a freebie in the consideration phase, bought something from a sale pages in the evaluation and sell stages.
So the Trail to the Sale is a powerful tool. To learn how you can use it with your own business, get this free download!
