Have you ever played the old parlour game of ‘Whispers’ where one person whispers a phrase to you and you pass it on, by whisper, to the next person. After 6 or 7 rounds ‘I have a square’ becomes  ‘a star’. It’s a demonstration of how the intent behind a message can be lost in transition if there is not someone standing between the individual whisperers correcting them.

Early in my marketing career it struck me that the same distortion of message happens when we are trying to take our customers from one end of the purchase process to the other – from a vague interest or need  for our product to purchase. At each stage the customer makes decisions about your brand and product that determine whether you make it to the next stage. Trusting to luck and leaving  your message to find its own way through the purchase process is fraught with danger.

The savvy marketer knows you need to manage every aspect – the brand message and voice, the value proposition and communication content – at every stage to ensure you get the best bang for your marketing buck. You need to look at each stage, at every touchpoint and identify which aspects of your message need dialing up and which down, in order that you can remain in the process.

As a next step you then need to design communications that best deliver the appropriate message at each stage, perhaps a phone follow-up to sales enquiry, an e-mail campaign to people who have asked for a quote, a blog explaining jargon at the point they are exploring products…the fun is in identifying the communication gaps and finding ways to fill them.

Reviewing your purchase process might seem arduous but you could be missing a simple fix that could really impact your bottom line sales – imagine if your conversion rate went from 1 to 2%.

As a marketer I have found this approach incredibly powerful . Simply put, this is how I view the communications process.