If you aren’t using a customer journey map as part of your marketing strategy, you are essentially implementing marketing tactics, crossing your fingers, and hoping for the best!

 

For ALL forms of marketing, both digital and traditional, a customer journey map is an essential tool that will help you understand your customers on an individual level, therefore giving you the ability to maximize the impact of ALL of your marketing initiatives. 

 

So in this blog post, we will give you an overview of the components of a customer journey map, how it can make your marketing tactics more effective, and tips on creating one for your own business.

 

 

What is a Customer Journey Map?

First of all, a customer journey map is a tool used to neatly organize and visually represent the steps your customers take to purchase your products or services. This includes everything from beginning to end, and even the unboxing or customer service experience your customers have after they receive their product or service. In addition, after dissecting and analyzing your customer journey map, it can also reveal weaknesses in your marketing, new opportunities to take advantage of, and customer insights that can help you optimize your existing marketing.

 

As for its components, you may see variations online, but a customer journey map should consist of 2 things, a table and a timeline. The table should describe the general steps your customer would take leading up to their purchase, while the timeline should describe specific touchpoints, both positive and negative, that your customer would experience along the way.

 

Typically, the table would define each step of the purchasing process. So the headers included may look like the following or similar: 

 

 

Awareness

• This step refers to when your customer discovers they have a problem that requires a product or service to solve.

 

 

Exploration & Research

• This step refers to when your customer begins to research the different solutions available to them.

 

 

Comparing Competition

• This step refers to when your customer compares all of their options, comparing price, effectiveness, convenience, customer service, etc.

 

 

Purchasing

• This step refers to when your customer decides to purchase in-store or online.

 

 

Experience & Advocacy

• This step refers to the experience your customer has waiting for their purchase, unboxing it, using it, and their review of everything.

 

 

As for the timeline, it should include the specific interactions and experiences that your customer has with your business as they move along the steps to purchase. For example, if your business provides massage therapy, the bullet points along your timeline can look similar to this:

 

• The customer discovers massage therapy is most likely the best solution for their back pain after coming across one of your blog posts.
• Although the customer enjoyed the blog, they found your website a bit outdated so they checked out your Google reviews.

 

When creating your customer journey map, you need to include both of these components to get a complete overview of how your customers discover, research, and evaluate their options, and how your business falls into this equation.

 

At the end of this blog post, we will also include tips on creating a customer journey map for your small business!

 

 

 

 

How Will it Make My Marketing More Effective?

After gathering all of this data, you may be wondering how these components contribute to your marketing… To put it simply, it provides an in-depth understanding of your customers! This will give you the ability to customize your marketing in order to better connect with the core values, wants, and needs of your individual target segments.

 

Continuing with the previous example, if you ran a massage clinic, you could have a distinct audience of educated millennials looking to optimize their health, and an audience of older individuals unaware of massage therapy looking to take care of a specific injury.

 

In this scenario, not only are the wants and needs of each target audience significantly different, but they also have a significant difference in massage therapy-related education. Without a customer journey map guiding your marketing, you could have easily launched marketing tactics that contain medical jargon that only one of your target segments can understand. On the other hand, while a general marketing strategy can avoid this issue, a tailored and targeted marketing strategy will always outperform it!

 

By creating and utilizing a customer journey map, you can launch more effective marketing initiatives that captivate and convert each segment of your target audience into leads.

 

 

 

 

Tips on Creating Your Own Customer Journey

Now, we’ll cover some tips that will make your customer journey map more useful for your strategy development.

 

Take your time. Since your customers are already on your mind, it may feel redundant to organize the information you “already know” into an infographic, but, we guarantee that crafting a customer journey map will uncover weaknesses and opportunities that you wouldn’t have come across otherwise. Moreover, while defining your market segments or buyer personas, taking your time to be as detailed as possible will reveal nuances that will allow you to further optimize your marketing.

 

Ask your colleagues or other departments in your organization for their input. You may have an in-depth understanding of your customers, but this understanding is still solely from your perspective. Your sales department may notice different weaknesses you weren’t aware of, while your customer service department may notice new opportunities you can take advantage of!

 

Consider your competition. Along every touchpoint that you have, your competition is most likely right there with you. So if you want to garner even more opportunities for you to optimize your marketing, take a look at the pros and cons of your competitor touchpoints, or even their lack of them.

 

With these tips, along with an understanding of the components and purpose of a customer journey map, you should be able to craft and use one of your own to better connect with your customers, and most importantly grow your business.

 

 

 

 

In conclusion, a customer journey map is an essential tool that can take your marketing campaigns from an educated guess, to an organized plan of action. And, while it may take some time to create, by prioritizing an in-depth understanding of your customers, you can make every marketing tactic you implement better connect with your customers. 

 

Do you need help determining the journey your customers take, and how you can capitalize on opportunities? Contact us for a consultation!