Marketers encourage people to buy products and services that are expected to satisfy their needs. To successfully promote their products, marketers need to know exactly who their customers are and clearly understand their desires, pain points, frustrations, etc. Otherwise, your customers and potential customers will choose your competitors.
If you want to fully understand your customers to improve your marketing strategy, customer experience, increase sales, and facilitate business growth, you need to pay attention to customer journey mapping. Let’s find out what it is and how it can help you get ahead.
Describe customer journey mapping in simple words
Mapping the buyer’s journey is a visualization of the stages a customer goes through while using your products or services. Creating a customer journey map will allow you to understand how to meet the expectations of your customers, discover the problems they face at different stages, and see what emotions they experience when interacting with your brand. Simply put, you have the opportunity to walk a mile in your customers’ shoes.
Let’s see the steps of a young woman who wants to buy a pink luggage bag:
- You search for a luggage bag online and find a Facebook post describing their products.
- She likes your bags, but pink is not available. However, she likes the design and decides to read the characteristics of the bag and reviews on specialized sites.
- Your bags are so cool that she is willing to buy one of them.
- You try to add the bag to the cart, but cannot due to an unknown error.
- He contacts the manager to resolve this issue and place an order.
- The manager helps her order and offers her a discount on her next purchase.
- A woman describes her experience on Instagram. She complains about the lack of pink, but she credits the quality and the design.
A customer journey map will help you see all those stages, interactions, channels, and touch points. In addition, you will have at hand the actions that your customers take, the problems they face, as well as other useful information that you can use to improve the customer, product or service experience. For example, you can consider making luggage bags pink.
Another example: a travel map for a sneaker store, Persona is an influencer. Source: UX Press.
How can customer journey mapping benefit your marketing strategy?
Creating customer journey maps will provide a great opportunity to strengthen your customers’ relationship with your brand. Let’s see how.
Understanding your actual experience
As a retailer, you certainly have insight into customer experiences with your brand. But when he creates a user journey map, he will have the opportunity to compare his actual experience with the one he imagined. He will be able to understand how they feel, what they are doing and what they expect at each stage of their journey. The map will help you better understand them and see if he is delivering on his brand promise.
Designing a better experience
User journey maps allow you to not only understand the current user experience, but also think about ways to improve it. Your customers need a product or service that fully meets their expectations. That’s why it’s important to look at your brand through the customer’s eyes and think about how to change their experience for the better.
Choose the right communication channels
You can interact with your customers through different channels such as search engines, ads, social media, friends, websites, apps, and others. But sometimes it’s hard to deliver the right content to the right person at the right time through the right channel, right? How to find the ideal channel for interaction with customers? Customer Journey Maps are here to help. They allow you to clearly understand what resources your customers need at each stage of their journey, what communication channels they use, and provide those resources to them through those channels.
Let’s imagine that a young man named Andy wants to buy a camera. He finds the desired model in your online store and asks for a video review. Unfortunately, there are no official reviews on the store of him, and Andy has to find and watch an incomprehensible and incomplete video made by a blogger. Looking for a simple and detailed official review, Andy finds a similar camera at a rival store and buys it there. Having a buyer’s journey map handy will allow you to see roadblocks and quickly remove them (for example, by adding official product reviews to their online store).
Expand the set of marketing opportunities.
Your marketing team is already using various tools like Google Analytics, HotJar, etc. You can leverage the data they provide to create a customer journey map. For example, you may see that a stage is taking too long and come up with an idea of what to do to improve the situation. Or you will be able to determine what marketing activities and at what stage of the user journey you want to carry them out. These marketing activities may include the following:
- blog posts that answer questions the customer has at different stages of the journey;
- banners on third-party websites that describe customer pain points and offer them solutions with the help of your product;
- modify landing pages according to the insights you have gained based on the user journey map;
- etc
Improve communication with other departments.
It is not enough to make a map and use it only within a department. It is vitally important to share it with other departments so that they too understand the customers and see their journey. This will allow your business to break down silos and create amazing products and services together.
When your colleagues have a good understanding of your customers’ needs, issues, and expectations, they have a coherent idea of how to help you build close customer relationships, enhance the customer experience, and foster customer loyalty.
Here are some tips on how to create an effective customer journey map.
#1 Define people for your map
First of all, you need to think about the people you will include in your map. What to do if you have several User Personas? Which to choose? Do you need to create maps for all of them? Since it takes time to create a map, choose the people who are most important and valuable to your business. Don’t waste effort and resources on a limited or less relevant number of customers.
Collect as much information as possible about your customers through surveys, questionnaires, research, observations, etc. This data should include customers’ interests, goals, preferences, and other useful information. It will allow you to create a persona based on real data and representing a real customer segment.
#2 Define the required information
If you don’t know how to create journey maps from scratch, you can use the customer journey map templates as a starting point or for inspiration.
If you decide to create a map from scratch, consider the following details:
- Select the extent of the map. You can create an end-to-end journey or go for a more limited scope if you feel it’s more important right now.
- Add channels and touchpoints. There are instruments through which the customer interacts with your brand (ads, website, mobile app, forums, blogs, online store, etc.)
- Write down pain points, obstacles and problems. Some things prevent your clients from achieving their goals.
- Visualize the emotional experience. There may be excitement associated with a discount or disappointment that the seller was unable to confirm the order.
- Do not forget about the goals and expectations of customers. What does the customer want to receive at each stage of their journey?
- Think of ideas and opportunities. How can you improve the user experience?
#3 Assemble the team
If you want your buyer’s journey map to be trustworthy, it should be created with the participation of different experts who are involved in different stages of the buyer’s journey. Your team should include marketers, sales managers, customer service specialists, product managers, and others who may share important customer data. No detail is too small!
#4 Update your customer journey map regularly
Job done, have fun. Oh no, this adage doesn’t apply here. Once the customer journey map is created, that doesn’t mean you can forget about it. Review and modify your map regularly to enrich it with new data when necessary. Have you launched a new communication channel or updated your product? It’s time to update your map!
To end
Marketers use various instruments to track customer preferences and demands and keep them loyal to a product or brand. Customer journey maps are now becoming another more effective tool to help marketers put themselves in the shoes of their customers and offer more customer-centric products and services.
Categories: How to
Source: HIS Education