Know Your Customer! Step Two: Pick Your Channels
Once you know who your target audience is, the next step is figuring out where to find them. What Websites do they read? Where do they go for news about the latest games?
When you’re unknown, bringing customers to you can be a difficult challenge, which is why—especially when you’re young and just getting started—it’s important to figure out where they are, and go to them.
In this second article in our three-part series called Know Your Customer, we’ll look at how your customer persona informs where you concentrate your marketing efforts.
Understand Their Journey
We’ve already posted an article focused specifically on the customer journey, and we started talking about it in the last article in this series—it’s really important. Not only does it help you understand the customer even better, it allows you to start identifying their behavior so you can better anticipate their needs, and meet them where they are.
There are five main stages in the customer journey:
- Awareness— Potential customers find out about your app
- Discovery— Interested customers seek more information about your app
- Consideration— If your product description, ratings, and imagery look good, customers will download your app
- Conversion— Customers go through the setup or login process and begin using the app
- Retention— Customers continue to use the app regularly
To create really targeted marketing, you’ll need to determine your customer’s wants and actions at each stage of the journey. It can be helpful to create a visual of your customer’s journey. For a starting point, download the worksheet below.
What Do They Want?
The customer embarks on the journey because they want something. Begin fleshing out your customer journey by putting yourself in the customer’s shoes and thinking about the questions they would have at each stage of the journey. Do they need information, reassurance, a preview of the gameplay? The answer will be different depending on where they are in the customer journey.
Think back to the persona we created in Part 1, the 28-year old fish owner named John. During the discovery phase, he might want to know how well the app works, and during the conversion phase, he might want to know whether its features fit with his lifestyle. For instance, he might want to know if he can log in with his Facebook account or easily integrate his existing calendar.
What Do They Do?
Once you've considered what the customer wants at each stage of the journey, think about their behavior. What action will they take? When John our fish owner wants to know how well the app works, does he rely on ratings, customer reviews, or expert reviews? Where does he go to learn about specific features? Think about the persona you created, and walk through the journey with them.
How You Can Meet Them
Once you understand what your customer wants along the journey, and what actions they'll take—you can identify the right channels and meet them there. In the above example, if John wants to know how well the app works, and he's going to look for expert reviews, then you need to find an expert who will write a review. If you're developing a trivia game and your customer spends time on Reddit to learn about new games, then you need to have a presence in that community. We’ll talk more about this—and how you can get creative about getting on those channels—in Part 3 of this series.
Unless you have really deep pockets, you’ll want to research and understand all the potential channels, and then choose the few you think will be most effective with this target audience.
Here are some places to consider:
- YouTube
- Google search for top new games or apps
- Social media
- Reddit communities
- Blogs or magazines
- Gaming portals
- Tech blogs and magazines
- Industry blogs and magazines
- Tech or gaming events
- App stores
- Your own website
Look for Trusted Spaces
Keep in mind that the more authentic the channel, the more well-received. We’ll talk more about this as it relates to customer acquisition in the next article, but a good rule of thumb is to find a balance between paid placements and personal testimonials. Social content, blogs, and other types of original content all tend to have a high believability factor. Things like search engine marketing—while effective—are understood as more straight-forward advertising, and therefore less trusted. That doesn’t mean you don’t want to use those channels, just be smart about finding a balance.
What’s something you’ve purchased recently—an app or something else? What was your customer journey? Tell us about it in the comments!