Evolving Beyond a Customer Journey into a Content Galaxy
I’ve discussed overthinking in my limited audio series, and here’s a big one of mine: I have obsessed over having a perfect customer journey: a mix of tech, automation, positioning, and showcasing the right offer at the right time. In my mind, that was how I could finally have the sustainable, life-first business that I imagined.
The reality is a lot more complicated. Most service providers can tell you that marketing has radically shifted even in the last three years. The big names in the industry have given up on selling their version of success and how to get there.
Data shows that the experience our future clients go through has gotten more complex and multi-layered. People jump seamlessly from phone to desktop to tablet, to their inbox to social.
They listen to summits and podcasts as they do dishes. We want more analog, in-person, hands-on experiences. We return to our physical media. We sign up for Patreons that give us mail with stickers and zines.
There are so many ways for us to engage with our community, our future clients, and those who continue to work with us and refer us. I’ve even heard from fellow marketers and service providers that direct mailers are making a comeback.
The amount of options is liberating: there’s no one way to approach this. It’s also confusing and even overwhelming, especially if you’re someone like me who struggles with fluctuating capacity.
I’m choosing to reimagine what marketing looks like. Maybe it’s been like this all along, and it’s me who has to change how I think about it. But if you’re looking to expand how your content can work for you, I want to encourage you to keep reading.
Some Ground Rules Before We Begin
This is not about having the perfect lead magnet or digital product, or tweaking your welcome sequence until it’s the perfect balance between approachable and promotional. Galaxies are constantly expanding and moving through space. They interact with each other, even collide.
Your content can be intentional without being perfect. You don’t need to know where it all will lead before you begin, either. I will release a future article on choosing a creative theme to focus your content, but right now, keeping it as simple as possible is what will keep you going. The individual touchpoints don’t matter as much as we think they do. It’s about offering folks different options for how they can engage with us.
paved pathway lit with red light in wilderness under stars with view of the Milky Way
Your Content Marketing as a Choose Your Own Adventure
Not everyone appreciates science fiction as much as I do, but we can all probably picture the Milky Way galaxy in our minds. It’s a spiral with a luminous center. What I like about this visualization is that there’s a macro view, but you can also think of it in smaller terms, like our solar system. Both have a center that everything else orbits around.
In this metaphor, you could consider the center as your approach to the work you do: it blends your story, expertise, and framework. This is the foundation of both your paid offers and the content that you create that delivers transformative results to your clients.
Everything ripples out from that. It does not assume that every single person who enters your orbit will automatically become a client. People may stay on the fringes for a long time, and that’s also okay.
How Do You Introduce Your Perspective to People?
We don’t always have folks’ undivided attention. In fact, that’s rare nowadays. Even right now, I’m writing this while I watch a movie and chat with community members in my Discord server. Continuing the metaphor from earlier, they’re not here to visit you; they’re cruising by with you in their peripheral vision.
Introductions to your work should serve two types of people: those who may be passively scrolling and may stop on your content (discovery), or people who are more actively looking for a specific solution or content around what they’re struggling with (search). Networking events are a mix of both; people are actively having conversations with you, but chances are, they’re not actively looking for something you’re able to help them with.
One mistake I saw when I would facilitate my “Polish Your Elevator Pitch” workshop was how often folks plunged into a long explanation of their technology or modalities without asking or giving context to the listener. Those things are important to you, but they’re not at the top of mind to a future customer or collaborator.
Remember when social media was all about finding the right hook to keep people watching your reels? I don’t follow that corner of the internet as closely anymore, but the reality is, there has to be something going on in our introductory content that gives folks a reason to pay your content a visit.
Introductory content should include one of these things:
Give them a new angle on the problem they’re struggling with that they may not have considered before (could use data or a story)
Target a false belief about the industry or what they think will solve their problem
Show them a reasonable future with room to dream
Provide quick and necessary context that helps folks know that they’re in the right place
Discuss the barriers (both systemic and personal) that may have stopped them before
I said this in my audio series, but not every piece of content can serve every single purpose. It just helps to know which touchpoints are most likely to be seen by folks who don’t know much about you yet. Places like your social media bio, your homepage, your elevator pitch, Pinterest pins, SEO meta descriptions, or posting discovery content like reels.
These should give a sense of your luminous center (your voice) in a way that frames why this should matter to them.
How Can People Choose to Go Deeper and Explore Your Content Galaxy?
Some people will stay on the periphery, but others will want to know more about you and choose to go deeper in the work because your introductory work resonated with them. This is where you give them that opportunity to learn more about your approach and insight into their own beliefs and behaviors.
Some folks don’t care for small talk; they want to go deep right away. Others find you at the exact right time that they’re ready to make a change. When we hide this type of content deep in the archives of our website or only when asked, we are doing these folks a disservice. It’s not bothering folks to give them an option to start making progress right away.
But this spot is often where we have difficulty. The gap between those who are casually viewing and those who are booking calls or making inquiries can feel insurmountable. And deeper work has a lot more moving parts:
Deciding on a worthwhile topic
Choosing and learning tech platforms
Email follow-up
Resource-intensive content formats
I plan to go more into depth on how to conserve spoons through this creation process, and I have an article on flagship content that can inspire you. Let your paid work be the guide to what would make the most sense for this type of deeper content. Can your intro or kickoff session format lend itself to a workshop? Does your onboarding questionnaire include exercises that could work as a standalone template or resource?
Keeping it simple will help you in the long run. You can always layer in complexity later, or refine and optimize it for traffic later. When you see content on the latter, it can feel like you have to have it all figured out. But that’s not true. Make it messy, clean up later. And if you’re still struggling, I offer an accessible Flagship Topic Test Drive to help you land on the perfect content experience to bring in clients.
What Do People Need to Know Before Working With You?
Think about how you make your own purchase decisions, especially for larger investments such as cars, computers, phones, or service providers. You don’t make decisions in the same way as all of your potential clients, but it serves as a good basis.
Do you do a lot of research beforehand?
Do you see your purchases as a way to live your values?
Do you ask around to your friends or network before deciding?
I’m not an expert on sales; I struggle with this myself. But your content can also play a role in your sales process, and I see this happening with varying levels of success. Live launches, case studies, capabilities deck, public proposals, or webinars all have their place depending on your strategy, industry, and the people you’re trying to reach.
Knowing the call to action can help narrow down your options to what sales-focused content makes the most sense, considering the type of offer and the action that helps them feel confident in making their decision. Think through your own capacity and what is a good mix between your strengths and what your best-fit clients need to know.
These might be more logistical questions, such as duration of the container and the level of access they have. We often are comfortable sharing those (and if not, my friend Tracy Stanger has a great resource on this called Simple Human Selling), but not the narrative or explaining the why. This makes sense because it starts to feel overly promotional or like we’re bothering people.
If you’re feeling stumped on what to include in your sales content, here are some considerations:
Who’s a good fit for your offer? Why should they choose one over the other?
What are the common themes that come up in testimonials about what clients got out of working together?
How would someone know that they’re ready to take the next step?
What are the questions you get most often (either in DMs, discovery calls, or comments)?
Be loud and proud about your identities and values: folks are much more likely to work with people who have similar lived experiences and who they align with. Hate and bigotry have become so normalized that marginalized people need to know that they are SAFE and RESPECTED to work with you.
Conclusion
Galaxies are most commonly shaped as spirals, and it’s a part of the business design methodology from one of the teachers I’ve learned from, Lindsay Mack of Tarot for the Wild Soul. This resonates because our own understandings of our perspective, clients, and creative strengths deepen.
image of spiral, appears to be architectural but also unclear where it leads
Our content will become multi-layered and give folks more agency on how they choose to engage in our creative work. Even if they never become clients, they’re still valuable community members who shape the content and refer it to others who could benefit. You don’t have to be everywhere at once, or even market in ways that feel icky and gross for you.
There are as many possibilities to promote your work as there are stars in the Milky Way. Once you find the right combination that feels uniquely YOU, you take the pressure off of yourself, and the experience can be a joyful exploration of what you’re here to say and how to say it.
Thanks for reading until the end. Like all of us in the hellscape, I’m trying to sustain myself through my creative work. If you’re called to support me, here are some ways you can do that:
