In the previous session, you saw that your business must be customer-focused as your product will only sell

if the customer sees value in it. You also saw that you can use market research and wisdom to draw
consumer insights for all kinds of marketing exercises — product positioning, product development, and
much more. One key area in which you should use your consumer insights is sales. Sales is nothing but the
art of converting a potential customer into your actual customer. Let’s find out how you can do this: how
you can influence consumers along their customer journey.

CONSUMER JOURNEY

So we have been talking about market research. Say, you wanted to do some market research to
understand your customers, you might go into Google and do a Google search on how to conduct market
research, it is possible that Google will recommend you try something like SurveyGizmo so you go to
SurveyGizmo and on the SurveyGizmo website, you see a form asking for your details such as your name,
your e-mail and other contact information.

© 2018. UpGrad Education Pvt. Ltd. All Rights Reserved.

Once you provided this information you will receive an e-mail from SurveyGizmo containing marketing
advice or offers, if you like the advice or offers you may choose SurveyGizmo as the platform to conduct
your market research. Once you start using it and it becomes your go to platform for market research, you
may start forming opinions about the tool, if you think that SurveyGizmo serves your purpose really well.
You may talk about it to people in your community and you might even promote it to others. This is an
example of a typical customer journey that most consumers follow in the digital environment.

People typically when they are looking for a product or a service to satisfy a need perform some sort of
search just like you searched on Google and then they evaluate the alternatives presented to them. Just
like you might have evaluated alternatives then they pick a particular product just like you picked
SurveyGizmo and at that stage you try the product and you form opinions about the product and once you
have tried the product and you have become its customer, you may even promote it to your peers if you
like it a lot.

© 2018. UpGrad Education Pvt. Ltd. All Rights Reserved.

 So, in this journey you first started out as a stranger for SurveyGizmo then you turned into a
lead when you gave it some information and SurveyGizmo came back to you with some personalized
promotions, you would turn into a customer once you accepted those promotions and decided to use it as
a product for your research and once you are happy with SurveyGizmo’s services you became a promoter.

This is the typical customer journey and we will use this as we go forward and think about customer focus,
customer insights and larger marketing plans.

This brings us to the consumer persuasion framework or the marketing funnel, which is the flipside as I said
of the customer journey because it represents the view of the customer journey from the point of view of
the firm, it is of utmost importance for any marketer or business leader to understand this consumer
persuasion framework because it represents the steps that a marketer or a firm must follow to influence
its consumers as they make their way in the customer journey from need recognition to search to
evaluation of alternatives to acting and purchasing a product to their post purchase experience. Here is
how the consumer persuasion framework looks like…

In the following segment we look at the various steps of the marketing funnel or the consumer persuasion
framework in detail.

MARKETING FUNNEL: ATTRACT STAGE

© 2018. UpGrad Education Pvt. Ltd. All Rights Reserved.

When you searched for ‘how to conduct market research’ on Google, SurveyGizmo was one of the top
results that appeared. The reason why it appeared among the top results was because the marketers of
SurveyGizmo have optimised its website really well for search queries on Google. Let’s find out more about
the role of a marketer at the attract stage of the persuasion framework or the marketing funnel.

So, the first stage of the marketing funnel is the attraction stage, ​So​, the first stage of the marketing funnel
aims to convert a stranger to a visitor in the customer journey here are different ways to attract potential
customers, we will study these techniques in more detail in modules four and five of this course, but to
understand them a little bit let's look at the following example.

So, let us look at an example of how a firm uses the top level or the first stage of the consumer persuasion
framework. This is the part of the framework where we are trying to create awareness about the product
or service. We know that in today's day and age people work really long hours and they do not get that
much time for their family. So, they are looking for opportunities to create quality time with their family.

© 2018. UpGrad Education Pvt. Ltd. All Rights Reserved.

Club Mahindra holidays is a subsidiary of the Mahindra Group, which is an Indian conglomerate. It offers
travelling memberships of twenty-five years. What Club Mahindra does is it tries to create awareness of its
product for people who have a need for a product like this, who are looking for a break from work to
maximize the quality of their time with their family through a vacation.

So, most of club Mahindra's ads add that focus on creating awareness for its product and service take the
form of providing information and details for people, who would typically be unaware of the benefits of
enrolling in Club Mahindra.

Another example of using the awareness stage of the consumer persuasion framework is the blog post
Zendesk. Zendesk is an online customer service platform operating in the B2B domain.
© 2018. UpGrad Education Pvt. Ltd. All Rights Reserved.
In the blog post the company says nothing about its product rather it talks about why it likes to be on the
front lines of employee support, a topic its potential customers will definitely be interested in. So, this post
by Zendesk aims to attract people looking for advice and customer support and through that it moves
them to the next stage of the customer journey.

MARKETING FUNNEL: CONVERT STAGE

So you saw the example of Club Mahindra which attracts people looking to take a break from work and
spend time with family through its advertisement. But the job isn’t even half done yet. Club Mahindra now
needs to engage these potential customers so that they clearly see how the company is different from
others in the travel and holidays space. Let’s see how it does this.

So, to continue with the same example, let us think about the next stage of the funnel and see what Club
Mahindra does to keep its customers moving along the funnel. Once customers have some awareness
about what Club Mahindra is about it uses a different kind of ad to move them along the funnel.

© 2018. UpGrad Education Pvt. Ltd. All Rights Reserved.

The second kind of ad has more information about how customers, who are aware of Club Mahindra and
its products and services can now contact Club Mahindra to find out more about which travel membership
and holiday package might actually suit them better.

This kind of ad serves two purposes in the marketing funnel, it not only aims to attract by creating
awareness, but it also aims to convert the moment customers. After customers have become aware and
been attracted to the product they can then move further down the customer funnel and become leads.

So the convert stage of the marketing funnel helps a marketer to drive a visitor to become a lead.

Let us look at the second example again of Zendesk at the end of a blog post titled say agent experience
guide Zendesk offers an e-book with the same title, however, only after a visitor fills a form can she
download the guide or read it online by filling.

© 2018. UpGrad Education Pvt. Ltd. All Rights Reserved.

 By filling this form the visitor moves to the next stage of the customer journey and becomes
a lead from a stranger or a visitor.

Earlier, you saw many examples where Microsoft helped entities transform digitally, including the
examples of
[1] Metro Bank and Real Madrid.

Now,
[2] cold calling is a method that many companies use to
[3] acquire new leads. But it’s
[4] not a very effective way to do this since it becomes the first time the company contacts the person. So,
let’s look at an instance when

© 2018. UpGrad Education Pvt. Ltd. All Rights Reserved.

[5] Microsoft’s subsidiary, LinkedIn, helped a company to completely get rid of the cold calling that was
used to acquire and follow leads.
[6] BMC, a multinational software provider that helps companies shift to digital, observed that the
decision-making power that its audience possessed was significant in terms of the digital revolution.

To reach out to it using different channels, BMC used LinkedIn’s

[7] Sales Navigator.

[1] Sales Navigator is a tool that makes

[2] social selling easy by leading your business to the
[3] right prospects. In the case of BMC,
[4] Sales Navigator’s ROIs, when compared to traditional methods, were improved
[5] 40 times within the first year itself.

With Sales Navigator,

BMC had access to
[6] social posts,
[7] job updates, and
[8] other news that gave it information about its new prospects’ businesses. This helped it
[9] find out what its potential customers wanted and helped in
[10] lead acquisition. Again, since these were rich leads, customer acquisition was significantly improved.

© 2018. UpGrad Education Pvt. Ltd. All Rights Reserved.

For instance, while establishing its
[1] Latin America market, LinkedIn’s Sales Navigator helped BMC close
[2] 67 new accounts that brought in
[3] 3.4 million dollars of the company’s revenue.

This digital adoption by BMC helped it go a long way towards acquiring leads in a new market, during the
attract and convert stages of its marketing funnel — a move that eventually translated into sales.

MARKETING FUNNEL: CLOSE STAGE

So you saw that through the attract stage, marketers drive strangers into becoming visitors and then
through the convert stage make visitors into leads. At this point potential customers are engaged with Club
Mahindra. They are in touch with someone from Club Mahindra. This could be through email or through
telephone calls. The next stage of the persuasion framework is very important. It is at this stage that a lead
is driven into buying the travel package. This is the third stage of the marketing funnel, namely the close
stage.

© 2018. UpGrad Education Pvt. Ltd. All Rights Reserved.

During interactions and engagements with leads via e-mail or phone calls a strong emphasis is laid on the
fact that Club Mahindra offers a personalised holiday experience through a line of planned activities for the
family such as relaxation therapy, scuba diving, go-karting or other recreational activities.

A promise of such an experience along with discounts and other offers helps the club to sell its
membership to the leads acquired in the previous stage.

So, the closing stage of the marketing funnel helps to influence the leads in becoming customers.
Another example of this is the use of promotional offers.

For instance, Zendesk offers different promotional codes that its leads can use to avail themselves of
discounts on the purchase of a Zendesk plan. So, to give you a third example Grammarly an app that can
check your grammar on the goal, can send you a personalised email offering a 45% discount on its
premium services and that can turn a lead into a customer.
© 2018. UpGrad Education Pvt. Ltd. All Rights Reserved.
MARKETING FUNNEL: DELIGHT STAGE

In the previous segment, you saw that beyond the close stage of the persuasion framework, the leads that
you acquired became your customers. This brings you to the most underrated stage of the persuasion
framework— the delight stage.

So, after Club Mahindra has sold its memberships and acquired new customers, it has to make sure that
they have a good experience. This is because if it keeps its customers happy there is a chance that these
customers will turn into its promoters. So once it has acquired new members Club Mahindra offers
discounts and holiday packages during special events such as festivals and the start of the New Year. These
© 2018. UpGrad Education Pvt. Ltd. All Rights Reserved.
 offers serve to delight its customers, not only offers, but the entire Club Mahindra
experience that was promised during the lead engagement now serves as a way to delight its consumers.

This helps the company in two ways, the members share the great experience they had at Club Mahindra
holidays with their peers and they also keep coming back. So, after a lead becomes a customer, the firm
tries to move the lead and the customer into the next stage, which is the delight stage.

This is where the marketer can ensure the customers actually have an outstanding experience with their
products or services. Marketers may also choose to offer discounts to their customers at this stage so that
they keep coming back for their services. With great experience and incredible offers the customers
acquired in the previous stages become promoters of the product.

Thus by delighting their customers marketers are able to achieve two aims as I just said, one they turn
customers into loyal customers and they also turn their customers into promoters.

© 2018. UpGrad Education Pvt. Ltd. All Rights Reserved.

Let us consider another example in the B2C domain, look at this advertisement for Amazon there is not any
mention of product pricing. It is an ad that talks about guessing the discount. Through this ad Amazon aims
to attract potential customers to its website.

Once the customer visits the website and participates in the contest, she is now a lead for Amazon through
discount offerings on different products. Amazon influences the acquired lead and converts her into a
customer.

Amazon can also do this through a promotional e-mail sent to its registered users, once the leads are
converted into customers Amazon offers various kinds of options for speedy delivery, which further serve
to delight its customers.

Once the delivery is completed Amazon asks about the overall experience for the user. Through these
steps Amazon ensures that its customers keep coming back and moreover that they become its promoters.
These are some examples of how marketers can use an understanding of the persuasion funnel to move
their customers along the customer journey when they start out as strangers and then become visitors and
then finally go through the process of becoming customers and then might even end up as promoters

© 2018. UpGrad Education Pvt. Ltd. All Rights Reserved.

So now you know the persuasion framework that you, as a marketer, must follow to drive strangers to
become promoters.

First, you have to attract strangers and convert them to visitors. Then you must convert these visitors into
leads. After that you must close the acquired leads and convert them into customers. And finally, but very
importantly, you must turn these customers into your promoters.

This persuasion framework or the marketing funnel is crucial to this program. Every time you go through a
digital marketing strategy, this funnel will be referred to. Every stage of this funnel has a conversion rate
associated with it, which quantifies the success of a marketing initiative at that stage. These metrics will be
discussed in depth in the 7th module on digital analytics. Now that you have identified the persuasion
framework that you must follow as a digital marketer, in the next segment you will learn how marketers
actually influence their potential customers along the consumer journey.

© 2018. UpGrad Education Pvt. Ltd. All Rights Reserved.

Earlier, Huawei faced a major challenge as a relatively unknown Chinese firm trying to break into the
international market.

It needed to build its brand, attract potential customers, and convince them to purchase information and
communication technology (ICT) contracts. These are typically worth hundreds of millions and have
long-term implications.

To address this challenge, Huawei worked with a global top-tier analyst firm to create the Global
Connectivity Index (GCI), an annual study in the form of a White Paper that shows how countries progress
in terms of digital transformation, based on several unique indicators that cover five technology enablers:
broadband, data centres, cloud, big data, and the Internet of Things.
© 2018. UpGrad Education Pvt. Ltd. All Rights Reserved.
The study positions Huawei as the global thought leader in digital transformation, which has been a hot
topic concerning global leaders and executives in both the public and private sectors.

The study’s narrative on centralised planning to enable ICT capabilities lay down the foundation for Huawei
to start conversations on leadership, about building ICT infrastructure to support the positive growth of
national economies.

The digital marketing team cuts the hefty GCI White Paper into a series of easily snackable social posts.
These were promoted on social media platforms to the targeted CxO audience segment, driving traffic to
the Huawei website.

The website lists successful case studies that offer potential customers references about how Huawei
helped similar firms. This convinces site visitors to initiate project-scoping discussions. Once the scoping
discussion is complete and the project is executed, Huawei invites customers to take part in the creation of
further successful case studies that also build a positive, supportive ecosystem and help in future
promotions.

DRIVING THE CUSTOMER ALONG THE MARKETING FUNNEL

© 2018. UpGrad Education Pvt. Ltd. All Rights Reserved.

So you saw the journey that consumers follow right from the time they realize the need to actually buy a
product. You also saw the persuasion framework that marketers use to influence potential customers
along their journeys. But how do consumers move from one stage to the next? And what can you, as a
marketer, do about all this?

So, we have talked about the customer journey framework and we have talked about the flipside, which is
the custom of persuasion framework, which is what the company uses to influence a potential customers’
journey from a stranger to a customer and to maybe a promoter and we have talked about this in a fairly
abstract way. So, let us talk about this with more details in mind now. Let us consider the example of a
market research company from a marketers perspective and think about us being a digital marketer at
SurveyGizmo so what is our first step.

Our first step is to attract customers and make them aware of the tool that we provide called SurveyGizmo.

© 2018. UpGrad Education Pvt. Ltd. All Rights Reserved.

We can do this by having our website ranked high on a Google search result this can be achieved through a
process of solid search engine optimisation or SEO, which we will talk about in more detail in module four,
however, you really need to understand that the search is not the only way to get a consumer expose to
SurveyGizmo’s services.

There are other ways we could also use to influence consumers to move from being a stranger to
becoming a visitor and these are things like word of mouth, blogging, website promotions and publishing
on social media websites. Once we have visitors we can actually do something more quantitative, we can
actually track the number of website visits or landing page visits for that matter.

We can track conversions from the first to the second stage. Of course the challenge is always to convert
these visitors into actual leads into actual customers this will require having some information about them
so that we can target them in a specific way based on their needs.

If you think about it, it would be highly ineffective if we flatly ask them to fill out a form and give us
information about themselves, but there are still other ways we can use to influence their journey through
the customer funnel.

© 2018. UpGrad Education Pvt. Ltd. All Rights Reserved.

We can do this by providing calls to action such as asking these leads to watch a demo, start a trial etc.,
once the visitors tap the call to action button. Then we can provide them with a form requesting
information may be specifically their email addresses or other ways to contact them.

So every visitor to the SurveyGizmo website who fills out a form is now a lead whom SurveyGizmo can then
further pursue.

People who have clicked on the calls to action or essentially the ones who moved along the customer
journey

Now there is a way for SurveyGizmo to target them and sell them their service since SurveyGizmo has
information about their e-mails, these ads and communications can be personalised, Once the lead signs
up and is willing to pay for the service then at that stage they are a customer and now we can work on
trying to convert them into becoming promoters and repeat customers and we do this as we said in two
ways, one is we give them the experience that we promised them maybe even more than the experience
we promised them and the second is we can maybe give them additional discounts.

© 2018. UpGrad Education Pvt. Ltd. All Rights Reserved.

So, let us recap the main lessons from this SurveyGizmo example. What companies can do in order to
influence the journey of their customer at the attract stage or the awareness stage is to expose them to
the company through various ways.

One this can be word of mouth, two this can be blogging, three this can be through search engine
optimisation, four it can be through publishing on social media. Five it can be through website promotions.

Further in order to acquire leads we can do the following things. One, we can have calls to action such as
watching demos or downloading e-books. Two, we can have landing page tracking. Three, we can have
information forms. Four, we can have potential leads contact us.

At the next stage where we want to turn our leads into customers, we can guide them further through the
persuasion funnel in the following ways, we can send them emails, we can give them customized
promotions, we can do lead scoring, we can do relationship management.
© 2018. UpGrad Education Pvt. Ltd. All Rights Reserved.
Once they have signed up we can request a track and online review through various ways. One, we can do
customized calls to action. Two, we can use e-mails. Three, we can monitor social media. Four, we can do
customized customer relationship management all these methods of conversion from one stage to the
other will be covered in more detail in different stages of this program.

However, to give you a brief perspective let us consider a few examples. So, say if you want to convert the
customer from one stage of the journey to another, it is important that the customer is targeted not just at
the right stage of the journey, but also at the right place and the right time.

So, here is an example say if you were stuck in a traffic jam and you saw a billboard like this, which says
that if you lived here you would be home by now, it is essentially saying that you can save a lot more time
in your commute by living at this location.

This message may be lost most of the time because consumers are hit by thousands or tens of thousands
of messages a day, but when they are sitting there stuck in traffic they are extremely receptive to a
message like this, this is when this particular need for them to save time in their commute is highly salient
for them. So, this is a message at the right time at the right place for the right consumer.

© 2018. UpGrad Education Pvt. Ltd. All Rights Reserved.

Another example is this ad on the top of a bus. You might think rightly who in the world would advertise on
the top of a bus, it makes no sense, but let us think about this from the customer’s point of view and when
they might be most receptive to a message like this.

So imagine for a moment that you are on the balcony of your high-rise apartment and you have just done
your laundry and you are in the process of hanging the laundry to dry and you look down from the balcony
and you see a bus passing by and when you look at the bus on the top of the bus, on its roof you just see
this ad for the laundry detergent, the fact that you are in the process of doing your laundry puts you in
exactly the right mindset to be receptive to an ad like this.

If you saw this ad at some other place say in a subway on a billboard when you were driving or when you
were surfing online, you may not be as receptive to this because truth be told we are not thinking about
doing laundry all the time, we have got other things to do, but when you are actually in the process of
doing laundry you are quite receptive to a message about laundry that is why in metropolitan cities where
people live in high-rise buildings and might be conceivably on the balcony hanging their laundry to dry, it
makes sense to advertise on tops of buses. Because when they are in the process of drying their laundry,
they might be really receptive to ads about laundry detergents.

Again this is an example of thinking about the consumer funnel and using it to the firm's advantage or
being at the right place at the right time for the right consumer in order to make your message most
receptive.

© 2018. UpGrad Education Pvt. Ltd. All Rights Reserved.

If you think these examples are outlandish, let us think about a product, a service that we are all familiar
with that we all use all the time. Think about Google's business model. What is Google's business model, it
is about search advertising. When a consumer searches for something on Google it is highly likely at that
stage that she is interested in acting on that search.

It is at that stage, she is most receptive to the information about that product or service that she just
searched for that is when this need is the most salient for her. So, again it is that same simple idea based
on when you are the most salient for your consumer in the consumer funnel. Being at the right place at the
right time for the right consumer.

So, you saw how you can target your customers at each stage of the marketing funnel. Not only is it
important to set up marketing campaigns, but it is equally important that companies continuously monitor
performance against key metrics at each stage of the marketing funnel. This helps identify gaps and
corrective actions early and maximises performance.

For example, if you consider the attract stage of the funnel, companies may have thousands of search
keywords in their paid search campaigns. So, it is not possible to manage bids manually. Here, the best
practice is to use analytics and dashboards to identify blockages in the conversion funnel, so these can be
rectified easily.

Digital analytics will be covered in greater detail during a later part of this program. However, to help you
understand it at this point, here is an example of the data-driven approach that helped correct a mistake in
paid search advertising, to improve the conversion volume at the attract stage of the funnel.

© 2018. UpGrad Education Pvt. Ltd. All Rights Reserved.

HPE wanted to promote its 3PAR flash data storage solutions to potential customers who were searching
for 3PAR product information on Google.

By using the sitelink option on Google, the company was able to deep link the paid search traffic to
different product pages. Its digital marketing team monitored the number of clicks and the cost per click
daily, to assess performance by keyword.

It was observed that the 3PAR Flash Hybrid ad was underperforming as the volume of clicks dipped against
its historical benchmark.

© 2018. UpGrad Education Pvt. Ltd. All Rights Reserved.

 The team went into the paid search ads manager and realised that there was a typo in the
ad. Once this was corrected, the volume of conversions from the attract stage to the convert stage of the
funnel was significantly improved.

Again, while monitoring performance at a later stage of the funnel, the team found that there were very
few conversions in terms of website visitors to leads.

Despite the huge amount of traffic attained through paid website promotions, the percentage of traffic
filling the CTA form was very low. This signalled to the team that there may be an issue with the form’s
design. After reducing the number of fields in the CTA form, the conversion rate at the convert stage of the
funnel saw a manifold increase.

So, these examples highlight the importance of tracking and analytics for digital marketing investment.
By monitoring the key metrics, brands can optimise conversions at every stage of the funnel, to improve
the performance of their overall campaigns.

In this session, you identified the journey that consumers go through from the moment they realise a need
to actually buying a product or service.

You also saw the persuasion framework through which you, as a marketer, can drive the customer from
being a stranger to a visitor to a lead to a customer to a promoter. Later, you saw the purpose of each
stage of the persuasion framework.

© 2018. UpGrad Education Pvt. Ltd. All Rights Reserved.

The attract stage is meant to expose a stranger to your product or service. To a visitor, you can serve
different calls to action and convert him or her into a lead.

A lead can be closed through email nurturing and personalised promotions. There are many ways in which
you can track your consumers at every stage of their journeys. These will be covered in detail at a later
stage of this course.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, transmitted, or stored in a retrieval system, in any form
or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise,
without the prior permission of the publisher.

© 2018. UpGrad Education Pvt. Ltd. All Rights Reserved.