Workflows, client journeys, and your brand
When it comes to your internal workflows, it may seem a little strange to think your brand has an effect on it. But it does!
When it comes to your internal workflows, it may seem a little strange to think your brand has an effect on it. The thing is, as I’ve mentioned multiple times before, your brand affects every single part of your business, in one way or another.
In this article, I am going to define a few different terms that can help you relate your workflow to your brand. Starting with, what are workflows, how you come up with one, and how your brand has a say in it.
WHAT ARE WORKFLOWS?
According to Oxford languages, a workflow is the sequence of industrial, administrative, or other processes through which a piece of work passes from initiation to completion. Putting it plainly, it is a template on how you complete your work, starting with inception going through the work process, passing through completion, and continuing onto the next steps. For example, a simple workflow for blog article creation could be…
Come up with an idea for your content and research it
Write out the outline of your article then the full article
Create any graphics required to get your point across
Edit and re-write as required
Add to your website to publish or schedule
Usually, most people would think this is where a workflow ends, on the completion of the individual piece. The thing is, your brand connects all parts of your business, so there are always additional steps upon completion. This can include…
Share your article on your social media
Respond to any questions or comments from your audience
Repurpose the content for other platforms
Come back to it a few weeks later and promote it again
And there are a lot more steps you can add on.
The best thing about a workflow is that it is like a checklist you can go over and review every time you create anything within your business. In the example above, we’re talking about blog articles, but one thing I want you to keep in mind is that you can use the exact same workflow for multiple parts. What this means is that you don’t have to come up with an individual workflow for every single piece of your business.
The exact same example above can also be used for social media posts by only changing the wording of some steps and bam, you can create your Instagram captions, Facebook posts, LinkedIn group interactions, etc.
The purpose of a workflow is to speed up your internal process of creating something. When I say internal, I mean only you see it and your audience doesn’t know all the details about it. You can talk about it to let others know, but your audience does not interact with this process. Workflows can be used for content creation, course organization, onboarding clients, and a lot of other aspects.
They are useful for pretty much any part of your business that you do on a regular basis. Having said that, I literally have a workflow set up for when I submit my taxes. I use it to make sure I have all of the information required for submission, that I don’t miss anything (taxes, seriously), and to make the process faster for myself.
Having said that, your audience still influences the workflow and the main connection comes from your client journey.
WHAT IS A CLIENT JOURNEY?
A client journey is also commonly referred to as a customer journey or customer experience, and consists of objectives, goals, feelings, touchpoints, and more. Your client journey is closely related to your brand awareness goals because the main point of it is to transform a person from your audience and into a brand ambassador.
Note. A brand ambassador is what you want to aim each of your audience to become. These are the people that talk about your brand, services, and products to others and encourage them to buy.
Client journeys are often split into different categories but the main idea behind them is…
Make yourself Discoverable with the point to get traffic and attract strangers to your brand.
Outline your audience’s problems and provide them with general help so they learn what you’re about.
Research more about your individual audience and nurture your relationships with them.
Converts your audience into purchasing clients by Creating something that is unique to them.
And the final is what I like to call the Next steps is to turn your clients into brand ambassadors.
If you look at any information online for client journeys you’re going to notice that the stages are often called differently (there are some really cool acronyms) and some of the details inside each may be different. But the one thing every single client journey has in common is that it is a cycle. Because once your client becomes a brand ambassador, they will help make you more discoverable and help you get new clients.
WHAT DOES YOUR CLIENT JOURNEY HAVE TO DO WITH YOUR WORKFLOWS?
Your entire client journey is one single workflow for your business and, in addition, at every single stage of your client journey, you should have at least one more workflow. That means that you are creating an internal map to help guide your audience through the client journey and additional internal workflows to help them during each stage of their journey.
Using the earlier example of creating blog articles, that would be a workflow that can help with the first two stages of your client journey because you are sharing your content to make yourself easier to discover, plus you’re providing helpful and general content to your audience so they learn more about you. Technically, this example workflow can even spill into the third stage because you are responding to individual comments and questions regarding the article, which means you’re building individual relationships with your audience.
One way I like to create workflows is by expanding my client journey based on touchpoints between my audience and my brand. What this means is that if the first touchpoint they will ever have with my brand is on a LinkedIn Group, I want to have a workflow as to what I will post on that group. Having said that, one important thing I want you to keep in mind with both your workflows and client journeys… don’t let them end!
They are both cycles that continue to repeat over and over until they don’t work anymore, in which case, you change and adapt them so they can start working for you again. Continuing with the example, that means you don’t share your blog article on social media without linking back to your site (so your audience can learn more about you) or turning off the comments (so your audience can interact with you one-on-one).
WHAT DOES THIS ALL HAVE TO DO WITH YOUR BRAND?
Workflows, check. Client journey, check. Connecting the two, check. Connecting it all to your brand? Easy! Every single part of your brand strategy will have a say in both your workflows and your client journeys, but let’s only talk about a few that can be connected to the example of writing a blog article.
One of the parts of your brand strategy that you want to focus on is called your brand’s essence. This includes your brand’s personality, voice and tone, and language style. Blog articles are written language, so you want to make sure that all three of those mentioned can translate into your blog article. You want your personality to show through in the way you write your article (are you excited when you write it?).
You want your voice to remain the same for all articles you’re writing, but to throw in some different tones depending on the topics you’re covering. You also want to use the same language throughout for the entire article and for all of your articles. This also continues on into how you promote your blog article on social media and how you respond to comments regarding it. Literally, the best way ever to test your resolve for your brand is how you respond to trolls online.
And that’s only one section of your brand strategy. Here’s another quick and smaller example. As part of your brand’s positioning, you are working on creating your brand awareness goals. I mentioned those earlier, right? There’s your connection there. You want to make sure you know where you’re sharing your article and that it can help with increasing your overall brand awareness.
The exact same way you can use this blog article to help you along with your brand’s current mission and aim for your vision, research the topic based on what your audience is interested in and what your competitors are talking about, and infuse your purpose and values into every single part of your workflow and client journey, so your audience can get a feel for them as early on as possible.