12/28/2017
There are 8 steps to starting a successful journey with any affiliate marketing strategy.
Step 1: Awareness
This step is almost self-explanatory:
It’s when and where the person becomes aware of you.
After all, nobody is born knowing who IBM or Google are.
They have to become aware of these companies if they are to become a customer.
Step 2: Engagement
Engagement is where you start conversing with your prospects.
You engage them through some form of content that provides entertainment, information, or both.
Your prospect is now aware of you.
They know who you are but you're still in the early stages of a relationship with them.
They don’t yet know you, like you, or trust you.
Step 3: Subscribe
Here, the person gives you their contact information, by doing so, grants you permission to contact them again in the future.
At this point, the prospect knows who you are and has engaged with you in some way or another.
If you failed to get that person’s contact information, odds are high you’ll never hear from them again.
People today are inundated with marketing and content, creating a scarcity of attention.
Just because someone reads your blog posts today does NOT mean they'll remember to revisit your site in the future.
For that reason, you need their email to remind them to return and to offer them your services again.
Most often, this transaction is an exchange,often referred to as an "ethical bribe."
You promote a valuable offer, but instead of asking for money, you ask for the prospect's contact information.
When they give it to you, not only do you give them access to the content, product, or service you promised, you also add them to your subscriber list.
Step 4: Convert
The Convert stage of the Customer Value Journey is about acquiring buyers or upping the commitment level of the leads you already have.
It is NOT about profitability.
That's right: in this stage of the Journey, you might lose money on the prospects you acquire as buyers.
The most valuable businesses in the world understand that the costliest marketing activity their business undertakes is customer acquisition.
So should you.
The goal is to acquire a new customer.
Profits come later.
The goal here is not to make a huge profit.
It’s to turn subscribers into customers.
As you’ll see, once someone is a customer, it's much more likely that person will purchase higher-ticket, more complex products, and services and do it more frequently.
Remember, one of the costliest marketing activities your business will undertake is the acquisition of customers.
The good news is that once you've acquired them, you don't need to pay to acquire them again.
I will post the next four steps tomorrow in the comments below.
Post a comment now about your thoughts on this post.
By doing so you will be notified when the second half is posted tomorrow.
