DigitalLevers
46 West Main Street
Clinton, NJ--
The Customer Decision Journey
THE Digital Journey Checklist
The customer decision journey has changed. Connections with
consumers begin or are validated typically from your mobile device,
initiating relationships to your products and services.
Today, it will come as no surprise that customers are increasingly
using digital resources to find, research, and decide more about your
business. The majority of consumers now start their search online
before making a purchase offline, but the fact remains that most
brands have yet to optimize digital marketing.
Below is the checklist to help define your Customer Journey Map, we
will examine the intersection of consumer preference and customer
expectations.
Marketing Tactics Checklist
Your Website
Press - do you have something to say?
Events - everyone wants to attend events.
Email Sign Up - do you ask for their email?
Thought Leader Docs - share your thoughts.
YouTube Video - use the YouTube player.
Organic Search - remember the keywords.
Text Bots - text customers when they are on your site.
Social connections - link to your social sites, by using sharing icons.
Email
Feature your content in your email newsletter. How are you developing a list?
Blog
Consider telling a story that highlights your latest piece of content. Give your readers the ability to
follow your blog by receiving emails on new material or via RSS. Make sure your post optimized for
the right search keywords.
Employee Email Signatures
Take advantage of employees’ daily correspondence by having them a link to your blog or another
content channel in their email signature.
Internal Communications
Create an email which highlights crucial concepts or quotes (if applicable) in the content and
sends it to internal teams (sales, customer service, etc.).
Employee Business Cards
Have a line below employee name and company on your business cards that reference the URL of a
content channel, like your company’s blog, Twitter or even YouTube channel.
In-store Handouts
If applicable, distribute handouts at events or in-store that promote or include relevant content.
Signs and Display
Design and put up signs in strategic locations (stores, high-traffic spaces) that includes an easy-toremember URL for your content (for example, a contest promotion), or a way for the viewer to
quickly get additional information on their phone.
Reports and Whitepapers
Annual or quarterly reports can showcase specific content campaigns, how they aligned with
business objectives, and their outcomes. Use yearly reports to position yourself or your brand as a
thought-leader in the field.
Bylines
Add bylines and bios to authored content to promote trust and build a brand.
Events
Showcase your content by highlighting it at an event or conference your brand is running,
participating in or sponsoring. Present it as part of a panel or discuss it at a roundtable.
Webinars
Consider doing a webinar or live stream to engage your target audience over a piece of content
directly. Partner with appropriate brands and cross-promote.
Facebook
Beyond creating posts and images at different times that link to your content, also split test things
like post length, time of day, vision, and targeting criteria to get a better sense of how these
attributes impact distribution success.
Twitter
Add appropriate hashtags and mentions to tweets. Use the first tweet to introduce the content with
positioning. Have follow up tweets pull out key facts or bullets. Add those visuals! Consider hosting
a Twitter chat to discuss a more significant piece of content.
LinkedIn
Promote your content on LinkedIn. Post content in relevant LinkedIn groups, and use LinkedIn
authorship to syndicate relevant essays and blog posts.
Meetup
Meetup helps people do more of what they love by finding and create communities based on the ideas and
activities that matter to them. Meetups are formed around a common interest, goal, or cause, and they are
made up of regular, face-to-face gatherings.
Local Events
Community organizations are looking to schedule local services for events. Reach out to your
local library, and community services senior center, housing, transportation, etc., to plan the
promotion of your products or services.
YouTube
Post video content on YouTube organically and consider distributing shorter commercial videos as
TrueView placements.
Google+
Share your content on Google+ into a relevant Google+ community feed. Consider hosting a public
hangout to discuss the content.
Instagram
If your content can be captured or encapsulated in an image or short-form video, consider
Instagram to reach mobile visual content consumers.
Pinterest
Make sure your posts have at least one pinnable image and don’t forget to add a URL to the
image.
Tumblr, Snapchat, etc.
Social is all about the correct target market.
Slideshare
Share presentations, video, and eBooks. Especially useful for B2B content.
Social Sharing
Get more impressions by including sharing buttons on content like blog posts.
Media
Use paid advertising to scale your successful content distribution tests and tactics. For example,
with Facebook advertising, create different variations in your content and run some separate,
small “dark post” experiments (meaning the content is unpublished to your timeline but appears in
users timelines as sponsored pieces of content) to determine the best packaging for your content.
Then, promote the winner.
Mobile
Mobile is everything, anticipate a large percentage of your audiences the first
experience is with their phone.
Amazon
If you have written a long-form piece of content, consider turning it into an eBook and making it
available on Amazon.
Podcast
Use iTunes podcasts to reach a larger audience and humanize your brand.
Guest Blog Posts
Build a relationship with influencers and bloggers with their networks. Go beyond duplicating your
content by reimagining it for this specific audience, or adding a refreshing it with updating content.
Third Party Editorial
If you have formed relationships with other companies, ask them to showcase your content.
Consider authoring a piece of content on digital publishing platforms like LinkedIn, Medium, Yelp,
Angie's List, or Svbtle.
The Ad Tech Networks
The ad tech industry is highly disruptive, and it would not be a stretch to say that Google has
competitors who give them a good run for their money. It may take a lot of hit and trial to figure
out which ad network, or even combination of ad networks, generate the highest revenue for you,
but when you finally do figure it out—it would’ve been well worth the effort.
Content Communities
Communities like Reddit, Quora, Hacker News and Product Hunt can be channels to reach a
targeted, relevant audience for your content.
Podcast Associations and Trade Groups
Try to find a relevant interest group or organization with a vested interest in promoting your
content to its following.
Influencers
Influencers like well-known bloggers in your industry have large, pre-existing audiences that can
significantly amplify the reach of your content. Build relationships with them to tap into their audiences
Favicons
Favicons are one of those little things that we usually don’t pay too much attention to, but the truth is that far
from being insignificant, they are a significant part of the web, both from a user interface perspective and a
branding point-of-view.
Your Digital Marketing Machine
This checklist is only the beginning of your Digital Marketing.
Together we will drive customers online, energize engagement, improve
loyalty and increase monetization of your products and services.
All of these topics in the checklist may not fit your customer, company
or needs. These materials were developed to assist the Digital
Marketing process in identifying the significant areas to Map in your
Customer Decision Journey.
Lets’ get started!
Thank you,
Tom Levers