Is Your Lead Tracking Stuck On A Bus Bench?

When tracking leads, many small to mid-sized businesses will ask their customers, “How did you learn about us?” This is an age-old technique drilled into our brains as a critical practice by old-school marketers who picked up this technique when newspaper ads and bus stop bench ads still ruled. I preached this practice myself as a former magazine publisher. “Make sure the phone number is BIG,” I would tell my graphic design staff. “Remind our advertisers to ask their customer where they got the number,” I would drill into sales reps. Back in the day, the customer journey was a simple path for marketers to follow. They saw the ad, they called.

We’ve come a long way from bus benches, baby, but most businesses still rely on this same tracking technique. In 2021, 9 times out of 10 or more, when asked, “how did you hear about us” the customer will answer, “your website.” Digital tracking will often return the same response as it is the last touchpoint on a complex journey. Truth be told, there is a ZERO PERCENT CHANCE that this is actually how they heard of you. Think about the logic of it for a moment—there is ZERO likelihood that your brand and URL address just ‘POOF’ magically appeared in your customer’s brain. There is a 100% chance that another “ENTRY POINT” began your customer’s journey to ultimately end up at your website. When you add another ‘check’ to the website column of your leads tracking spreadsheet, you’re ignoring the steps they took to end up on your website. To understand and optimize these business-critical steps, you need to have a solid grasp of the customer journey.

Before we delve into the modern customer journey, let’s start with the analogy of a journey we’ve all been longing for during this pandemic — a VACATION! As I write this on a balmy 13° morning here in New England, I’m longing to get back on track with the trip to Florida we put on hold last spring. So let’s talk about that journey. For this trip, we’ll have several transportation touchpoints, but we’ll first need an ENTRY POINT for our journey. Our entry point might be that we call a car service, book an uber, drive to Logan, drive to the train station, or ask a friend for a lift. For this example, let’s say we pile the family into the car (touchpoint 1) and head to the nearby bus station. The bus(2) will take us to Logan Airport where we’ll hop on an escalator(3) to our gate, before heading south via plane(4), our MAIN MODE OF TRANSPORTATION. We’ll have a layover in Atlanta where we’ll need to hop on a shuttle(5) to our terminal. The next plane(6) will then arrive in sunny Miami, where we’ll grab a rental car(7), our FINAL MODE OF TRANSPORTATION, and head to our resort.

Back to the customer journey (this will come together, I promise). The modern customer journey is incredibly complex, there are many twists and turns it can take, and it rarely follows a straight line, but we know through research and statistical data, that a modern customer journey has a minimum of seven touchpoints. This journey, as in our vacation analogy, always has an ENTRY POINT. Common entry points for the modern customer journey are social media, online search, Google ads, email marketing, or offline branding such as signage. The entry point of our journey is the top of the funnel. From here, endless possible routes can be taken, but, again, we know that there will be at least 6 more touchpoints. These typically include online reviews, your blog, a webinar, podcast, additional social media research, etc., etc. Almost always, your “airplane” aka the MAIN MODE OF TRANSPORTATION during this discovery stage, will be your website. Eventually, if your marketing ducks are in a row, qualified prospects will gather the knowledge they need, and drop through the funnel to become leads. Today, this most often comes in the form of a contact form, which will be the FINAL MODE OF TRANSPORTATION along this leg of the journey.

Still with me? I know, this blog took a bit of a journey itself, but here’s where it comes together!

Once we arrive at the resort, the receptionist says, “Wow, all the way from New Hampshire! How did you travel?” A typical answer would be the MAIN MODE OF TRANSPORTATION, plane, or MOST RECENT MODE OF TRANSPORTATION, a rental car from Miami. It would be seriously weird if we responded by saying, “We took our car to the bus station,” or, “We took a shuttle from one terminal to the next in Atlanta.” For those still relying on our old-school lead tracking technique of asking the prospect how they knew about your company, it would be just as odd for the prospect to answer, “Facebook,” or, “A Google ad.” They’ve been on a long journey, a minimum of seven touchpoints ‘transported” them to this point. They're going to respond by communicating their MAIN MODE OF TRANSPORTATION or their MOST RECENT MODE OF TRANSPORTATION, “your website.” Logically, however, as we mentioned earlier, it would be impossible for them to magically arrive directly at this destination. To get to your website, they started at an entry point and then propelled their journey through multiple modes of transportation along the way.

In 2021, it’s critical that when tracking marketing ROI, we must understand that the final destination is a small part of the customer journey and it will only be reached if multiple modes of transportation along the journey are functional and performing. In other words, if you want more leads, sure, your plane needs to be fueled up, but it really won’t matter if your bus breaks down.