What if you could step into your customer’s shoes for a moment and see your business from their perspective? Read on to discover how customer journey mapping helps you visualize this and why it’s a great tool for campaign strategizing.
Rather listen than read? In this episode of Test. Learn. Grow., we’re back with Level Agency’s creative manager and nurturing and automation subject matter expert, Dale Riether. He’s talking customer journey mapping and how it can align with your marketing campaign strategy.
What is a customer journey map?
A customer journey map is a diagram that illustrates the steps a customer takes when interacting with your business. Knowing this journey can help you identify what’s working, as well as customer pain points for you to act on. From the top-of-funnel awareness phase to purchase of your product or service, customer journey maps can help guide your messaging framework.
How do I start?
Look at your buyer phases. Each business might experience this a bit differently, but in most cases, customers will fall into similar categories.
- People that are completely unaware of your brand.
- People that may have heard of your business but don’t know much about you. They might not realize they have a problem that you can solve.
- People that have interacted with your business a bit—they’re in an evaluation phase.
- People that have moved into the bottom funnel of your marketing, and they’re really starting to consider whether they want to be a customer.
- People that have made a purchase, and the goal is now to retain this customer.
After you’ve decided what these different phases of the customer journey are, you can start to identify the different tactics and levers to pull to interact with people at each step.
The purpose of this exercise is to give you a logical way to think through and organize your thoughts. With all the marketing tactics at your disposal—paid and organic social media, email, display ads, SEM, webinars, sales outreach, to name a few—having the customer journey map as a reference point to determine which tactic works best for each buyer phase can help inform your campaign strategy.
A word of advice…
Dale had some non-sugar-coated words of advice for those of you new to the customer journey mapping game: this takes a long time in the upfront. You want to make sure that you’re mapping out all the different journeys that someone is going to take, from seeing an ad to being nurtured to ultimately becoming a customer. And you want to make sure that you’re hitting them with the right message for what they need, and that takes time to deeply understand. If possible, try to take a step back and remove the want for immediacy from your brain. It’s easy (and common!) to want to direct all your marketing energy towards the high-value action you need your customer to take, but going after that end goal too soon can be detrimental. Creating this framework that starts at the awareness phase and being patient with prospective customers helps build vital relationships.
And another word of caution: don’t set it and forget it. As we said, this is a framework, or guide. It’s entirely possible that you’ll come up against ideas and messaging that just didn’t work. Being able to adapt and pivot when you need to helps the customer journey mapping process be that much more successful.
We’ve only skimmed the surface of customer journey mapping. For a deeper dive, we recommend listening to the full podcast episode! Think you’re ready to get started but could use some guidance? Let’s talk!
Looking for some more tips on nurturing client relationships and understanding the path to purchase? Check out Dale Riether’s first episode of Test. Learn. Grow., “Nurturing and Automation Best Practices.”
What did we miss? Give us your thoughts in a comment!
