Step 1: Reach – Build awareness of a brand, its products and services on other sites and
in offline media and build traffic by driving visits to web and social media presences.
Reach involves building awareness of a brand, its products, and services on other websites and in offline media in order to build traffic by driving visits to different web presences like your main site, microsites or social media pages. It involves maximizing reach over time to create multiple interactions using different
paid, owned and earned media touchpoints.
Step 2: Interact – Engage audience with brand on its website or other online presence to
encourage them to act or interact with a company or other customers.
It's a separate stage since encouraging interactions on websites and in social media to generate leads is a big challenge for online marketers. It's about persuading site visitors or prospects take the next step, the next
Action on their journey when they initially reach your site or social network presence. For many types of businesses, especially, Business-to-Business, this means
generating leads, but it may mean finding out more about a company or its products, searching to find a product or reading a blog post. You should define these actions as top-level goals of the funnel in analytics. Google Analytics Goals can include "Viewed product", "Added to Basket", "Registered as a member" or "Signed up for an e-newsletter. Act is also about encouraging participation. This can be sharing of content via social media or customer reviews. The specific goals and dashboards need to be defined for each business.
Step 3: Convert – Achieve conversion to generate leads or sales on web presences and
offline.
This is conversion to sale - occurring either online or offline. It involves getting your audience to take that vital next step which turns them into paying customers whether the payment is taken through online Ecommerce transactions or offline channels.
Step 4: Engage – Build customer relationships through time to achieve retention goals.
This is long-term engagement that is, developing a long-term relationship with first-time buyers to build customer loyalty as repeat purchases using communications on your site, social presence, email and direct interactions to boost customer lifetime value. It can be measured by repeat actions such as repeat sale and sharing content through social media. We also need to measure the percentage of active customers (or email subscribers) and customer satisfaction and recommendation using other systems.
Digital channels always work best when they are integrated with other channels, so where appropriate digital channels should be combined with the traditional offline media and channels. The most important aspects of integration are, first, using traditional media to raise awareness of the value of the online presences at the Reach and Interact stages and, second, at the ‘Convert’ and ‘Engage’ steps where customers may prefer to interact with customer representatives