Explore the customer journey in today's complex market

- [Instructor] It's not the strongest species that survive, or the most intelligent ones, but the ones that are most responsive to change. And we see that in companies because the ones that don't adapt are the ones that fail. They fail their customers and they fail their prospects. Their prospects leave forever, and they'll buy from the competition. So we're here to solve both of those problems by creating brand stories that sell so your company can grow revenue and you can spend time doing what you love. So let's take a look at the marketing funnel. This affects you in a big way because what's changed in the past five years is over 70% of B2B buyers are buying without your sales team being involved. And in B2C, in e-commerce, up to a hundred percent of the sale is done without the sales team. And that means the 30% of time that your sales team has to spend before a decision is made has to be perfect. They have to know your brand story. And most of this has to be done while people are looking around online. So the marketing stacks that can take months and thousands or millions of dollars to build can be done today with AI and done much more quickly. And whether you look at a marketing funnel or the marketing flywheel with dozens of on-ramps and off-ramps for customers, either way you look at it, you've got to realize 70% of the purchase is being done online, people are collecting information. So let's speed that process and take a look at a marketing funnel like this. In this course, you're going to learn how to build a marketing funnel and all the assets built for organic campaigns built with AI. So let's go through each stage and talk about what you need in each stage. So your content must tell your story for you. And it's incredibly important in each of these phases of the funnel that your customers are going to move through from not knowing about you through buying from you and becoming an advocate. At the top of funnel, we call that unaware. The customer isn't even aware that they have a problem or that your product or service exists. The content that you put out will let them know that they do have a problem and it is solvable. In the middle of funnel, they're moving to becoming solution aware. They know there's solutions out there, but they're not sure which service or product is best for them. This is where your value must truly stand out against all your competitors. And the bottom of the phase is decision aware. The customer's ready to buy based on the information that you brought to them, making you the leader. Now, breaking down each into what asset types they are, if you look at the funnel, you have videos, webinars, podcast appearances that'll let people know there's a problem out there and a solution exists. Social media content, posts, articles, newsletters, SEO traffic is fantastic to bring traffic to your website in a helpful way that helps people solve problems. And you can also do guest posting and replies to other people's posts and other people's comments to get that top of funnel moving. In the middle of funnel, you can see that landing pages and gated guides are critical so that you can collect the information from the prospect and be able to get back to them with a drip email series with helpful articles with how-tos so that they start to build value in their mind for you, the hopeful solution. Explainer videos do a beautiful job here as they explain not only the visual, but the story itself of why they should buy from you, the bottom of that phase, original and curated content. And that moves you into the bottom of the funnel, where sales enablement, service pages, customer testimonials and case studies are extremely important to help people make their decision. So if you take a look at the customer journey, having these assets set up and working for you when you're doing other things will make a huge difference in your business. Now we can find two symbols that exist in the Japanese language. These characters mean crisis and opportunity, and they're used at the same time. So let's use the Japanese symbol to take this crisis of change and make it into an opportunity for your career.