Mapping your customer journey
You know your products and services, you know how they work, and you know the main benefits they provide to your customers. But, have you stopped to flip the script and see how your customers see your products and services and what steps they’re actually taking on their customer journey?
A customer journey map can help you better understand the different paths your customers take before they’re customers. It points out gaps in information or content, identifies purchase points that customers commonly get stopped at, and it helps you better understand how your customers see and decide to buy from your brand.
A customer journey map simply helps you put yourself in their shoes and take a walk along the real customer journey, not the one you think they should have.
Creating a customer journey map provides many benefits to marketing and sales:
- Seeing the logical steps customers take along their path to purchase
- Understanding the content needed to make a purchase
- Understanding the gaps in content or seeing the content your competition puts out
- Identifying where customers interact with your brand, like social media, forums, review websites, etc.
- Revealing questions or pain points shared by your customers
How to create a customer journey map
1. Understand why you’re creating it
Okay, I already gave you some reasons above on why you should map out the customer journey, but you have to know the reason behind creating the map and have an understanding of how you’ll use it.
Why are you mapping the journey? Which customer will you follow? What goals are you trying to achieve?
2. Meet your customers
Create buyer personas for each of your customers so you can understand their experiences, what they like, what challenges they’re trying to solve, and their own goals in their life or in business.
Read more about buyer personas here.
3. Map out touchpoints
Next up is detailing all the places customers can interact with your brand, both on your own site or within email campaigns, owned channels like social media, or offsite locations, like third-party review websites. You have to know exactly where people are going to find information about your brand and how you can use those touchpoints to tell your story and how your customer belongs in it.
Google Analytics is a great resource for this information and it’ll even help you understand common paths your customers take, like visiting your website, going to social media, coming back to your website, then opening an email and returning to your site once more, and then making a purchase.
4. Plot the customers’ actions
Now it’s time to actually create your customer journey map by plotting out all the steps your customers take and when they take them. Can you identify spots where customers could fall off the map? Can you see where new content might be needed to eliminate an unnecessary step? Can you identify points where sales could step in sooner to help the customer?
Go through the customer journey map as many times as needed to find opportunities for improvement.
How will you use your customer journey map in your marketing efforts? Share your thoughts in the comments below!
