What’s Slowing Your Customers Down?

And Amanda Northcutt is our CEO. We are just gonna give people a moment to hop on. And if you're already on with us, thank you for joining us. We are so thankful that you spend a little bit of your time with us in, in your week. Today we are gonna be talking about the customer journey, and we are so glad again to spend a few minutes of our day with you. If you have any questions for us while we are in this livestream, drop them in the chat. We are happy to answer those at any point in time. If you haven't met us yet, there are 2 ways that we help thought leaders like you build rock-solid recurring revenue businesses. First, we have Level Up Creators. This is our done-for-you white glove consulting firm. And second is Level Up Creator School, where we help a global group of thought leaders build businesses through a done-with-you model. Creator School includes all of our access to our consulting team and our methodology in a way that we used to reserve exclusively for our consulting clients. All right. So we're going to jump right in. Okay. So Amanda, in your experience, what's the most common friction point businesses overlook in their customer journey?

Most common checkout-related friction, not unclear communication with regard to like what the offer is, how to get the offer once you pay for it. So that could be pre-purchase or post-purchase in an onboarding sequence. And so basically creating friction for your customers that could be eliminated through better use of verbiage, technology, branding, imagery. So I guess that all comes back to lacking empathy for your customers. And so if you are able to zoom out and go on an, you know, incognito browser where you are not cookied or anything like that, and go through the motions that you're asking your customers to go through, or Ask some friends and family who are going to be honest with you to go through that. Also doing customer interviews, very important to identify those points of friction and reduce them. That's kind of what this is all about, is designing a beautiful customer journey and experience for your customers to follow, and reducing, systematically reducing friction points along the entire journey so that people are more likely to do the behavior that you want them to do.

Yeah. So based on businesses that you've worked with, what's the quickest way to identify and remove roadblocks in the purchase process?

There's a couple of ways to do this. So one, like I just said, go through the motions and see if you can find anything that is glaringly obvious. Hopefully there's not, but from time to time it happens, right? We all make mistakes. Um, another would be, again, those voice of customers interviews. So you're getting qualitative information from your customers. You're understanding the experience that they're having in more of a narrative format, information that we can't necessarily get from multiple-choice information on surveys. But surveys are also very helpful for quantitative data, and you can have those free-form response for that qualitative response as well. But surveys— there's no replacement for voice-of-customer interviews. And if y'all missed our webinar with Catherine McGarvie of Nosy HQ out of New Zealand on Monday, that was fantastic. Let me know if you want the replay, and we'd be happy to send that to you. She walks everyone through exactly, like literally exactly how to perform top-notch customer interviews that she gets paid tens of thousands of dollars to do for companies. So doing that. And then, you know, we're really, really big on metrics tracking at Level Up Creators. And so we teach the Bowtie Funnel. So it's the experience that a customer has from the time that they first learn about you, all the way through LTV maximization, spending as much money as possible with you. Ethically. So the whole entire bowtie. And then we create metrics dashboards that follow that linear path of the bowtie funnel all the way from top of funnel sources like social media, podcasting, paid ads, partner marketing, infinite options through email nurture automations, newsletters, retargeting ads, cart abandonment, first purchase, second purchase, third purchase, recurring revenue metrics, high ticket metrics. So if you're tracking those metrics, in a linear fashion that I'm describing using the template that we provide in Level Up Creator School. We do this for all of our consulting clients as well. You can see trends. You can see glaring, you know, red flags that were like, maybe your business is bleeding out at this one particular conversion point. Like people are really engaging on your sales landing page and they just don't freaking complete their checkout. And so that's a bottom of funnel problem. That your metrics dashboard and a heat map also, like a tool like Microsoft Clarity or Crazy Egg, will be very helpful in helping you identify definitively where the problem is. And then it's your job to dig deeper and understand why that might be happening. Is a button broken? Is your checkout process way too high friction? Are you asking for a full billing address when all you really need is an email address and credit card details? Boom, done. Um, so metrics dashboard, I mean, that is single source of truth information month over month, every step of the way.

Yeah. What advice do you have for creators to ensure their messaging stays consistent across all their platforms and all their touchpoints?

Yeah. So you need, uh, an artifact, a document called a style guide. And so we have brand guides that tell us what our logos are, what fonts are okay to use. Well, iconography and images and colors and gradients and combinations of logos and lockups. Everybody thinks about their brand guide in that way. But when the style guide piece is missing, you're setting yourself up for inconsistent messaging, especially if you're working with a team. And so we're actually going through and updating our style guide, because when you learn new information, you do something different. And so, you know, our company is only about a year and a half old. And we made certain assumptions about who our customers would be. And now we have a much firmer idea of who our customers are. And so we are revamping our style guide document that tells us who our customers are, our ICP, our unique value propositions by product and service, the words that we use to describe our products, words and terms and topics that we don't hit at all. And we're going to have a very significant brand refresh rollout throughout Q1, where you'll see, you know, landing page, LinkedIn banner. I mean, everywhere we are on the internet, all of our top-of-funnel service sources will have updated messaging that will be extremely consistent, super dialed in for our specific and unique ICP. And remembering that we are big on niching down, going narrow and deep, into a niche so that you are the person for the thing that you do. So that's, I mean, a style guide and then finding all the places that you are on the internet and doing like, here's the style guide. Here's my landing page. Do these match? Do they not? Do we need updates? So having a single source of truth document from which all the inspiration comes for all of your copy.

Yeah. And I'm assuming that creators who have built their online business probably did so in like a clunky fashion. Like, you know, they created this and it worked and then they created this and it worked. How often do you think a creator should go back through and rework their messaging?

That's a good point. When something is wrong and once a year during an annual planning cycle, which should begin at the beginning of November. So we're about to do that, which is really fun and exciting for people like me and you who are deeply analytical and linear thinkers. And we love planning and lists and things like that. So yeah, when something is wrong and once a year.

OK, what is your go-to strategy for helping businesses personalize their customer experience without overwhelming their team or themselves?

Yeah, so first we want to create the experience, right? We've got to have an experience from which to personalize or curate for an individual. So mapping out your bowtie funnel, I'm actually teaching an action workshop next month in Creator School where we're going to have like a bowtie funnel template. Everybody's going to get to fill on their own. So everybody will leave out with a pretty dialed-in customer journey. This is what I want people to do at every step toward this specific end and then this next purchase and the next purchase. So you got to have that at the 10,000-foot level and then using technology to offer the right thing at the right time to the right person in the right way over and over and over again. And typically that's going to happen through your email marketing software like ActiveCampaign or ConvertKit because they have robust tagging systems. So you understand what behaviors and actions people have taken that have been tracked and cookied, what purchases they have or have not made. And then you can serve up even in a broadcast email in your newsletter that goes to everybody. You can have a snippet in ConvertKit or a conditional block in ActiveCampaign that serves up a very specific message that prompts some, maybe someone who has just joined your email list. You want them to do a different action than someone who's been circling the drain at the bottom of your funnel forever. You need something to incite action and motivate them to make that first purchase. And so like, it would be foolish to send those people the exact same call to action. So you want to leverage technology to do that. There's another tool called Right Message that facilitates that process as well. But again, it's all about having that 10,000-foot level bowtie funnel figured out. And you're sending everyone on the same journey because we're talking about niching down to a narrow and deep audience, and then serving up the right message to the right person depending on actions that they have or have not taken. Using technology.

Okay. What's the first improvement you recommend businesses and creators make to create a more seamless and enjoyable customer journey?

Hmm. Do it intentionally. So design an experience. Think about like if you've ever been to a high-end restaurant or stayed at the Four Seasons or even test-driven, you know, a luxury car or something like that. Think about the experience that you had. There. And that didn't happen randomly. That was a well-designed experience by a product marketing team and delivered by sales and operations people in hospitality, basically. And so we want to take those in-person experiences that match our brand and the level of clientele that our brand serves, whether it's upmarket, downmarket or midmarket. So super inexpensive stuff, hyperexpensive, like luxury goods, or somewhere in the middle. And then, yeah, just taking that online. How does that, how can you apply those learnings and those experiences that you've had to your specific ICP? And then again, it's just about filling in the bowtie funnel and automating that process through the right technology. So those are kind of the same answer as last time, but like, that is the answer, I promise.

So when you're in this planning phase, like, What is your go-to thing that you do? What's your go-to advice or tip in the way that you approach it?

And doing— how do I think about creating a bowtie funnel for someone's business? Or what do you mean?

Yeah. Or just customer journey. When you're looking through the customer journey and you're like, I want to plan this out a little bit more, what's your go-to method or piece of advice?

Gotcha. So we do have a very specific methodology for how to think about your business and how to address these very specific things. So we start with North Star, a North Star Pyramid. And so that's basically like this cute diagram that we have and where we're filling in a vision, mission, values, goals, strategy, and then the projects and tasks that will support bringing that vision to fruition. What do you want to do for the next 10 years? What activities do you want to do in your business to bring about this 10-year vision? And then We got to think about what would have to be true in order for us to create an experience for customers— again, a specific niche, specific type of customer— that would guide them along this path to value recognition that we have designed. Again, it's not going to happen by chance. So you're, I mean, I would sketch this out on paper. I did this. Let me see if I can show you this real quick. Sure. And let me see, I got to cover up the— okay, I'm covering up the client.

Giving away our secrets here.

I'm covering up the client. But here's— this is a hilarious thing. This is something I actually delivered to, um, I delivered this to a customer and I sat there at a giant table with a bunch of Post-its and put all of their top of funnel, mid funnel, bottom of funnel sources there, all their existing product ladder, reworked everything and organized it into this experience. So if you come in the funnel this way, here's the next step, and the next step, and the next step. So get out a piece of paper and some Post-it notes, map out what's there or what you want to be there, depending on what stage of business you're at. And then I'd probably come talk to us about how to automate that with technology and how to refine it and iterate over time. These things don't happen overnight. You know, business is hard. It's full of, it's fraught with peril and failure. And it's all about how you respond. to those challenges. But that's why we exist, right, to help you get there much, much, much faster. We've been there, done that, got the T-shirt for any number of kinds of businesses. And we're hyper-specialized for knowledge creators, matter experts who are teaching others what they know.

So thank you guys for joining our livestream. I would say if you are in your beginning journey, and you're like, I haven't really started putting content out there, or I have, and it's kind of doing well, but I don't have any offers. We have resources for you. If you grab the Creator to CEO or Creator Business Blueprint, any of those resources out there, those would be a great starting place. If you're a creator and you're already turning revenue, check out our Level Up Creator School because we have so much more tips like this that go into very detailed steps of how you can hit that next level of growth. And so yes, thank you for joining us. And if you haven't already, check out some of those resources. Be sure to follow Amanda on LinkedIn because she's dropping daily tips and advice on how you can level up. But yeah, thanks again for joining us. And we will see you next time. I wanted to get a stick in there, like a resources thing.

Yeah, I'm glad you did.