How to Create a Customer Journey Map for Your Marketing Strategy
Whether you’re running a small business or you’re the CEO of a big company, you need to understand the power of a great marketing strategy. Without a strategic plan on how to reach and retain your target audience, you won’t be able to get very far with your business.
Successful marketing means being able to predict and then influence customer behaviour at each point in their journey from awareness to purchase. This means developing an accurate mapping of your specific customer’s journey and then crafting the content that will reach him at each touchpoint. This is exactly what customer journey mapping is all about. And, if you’re not sure how to use it in your marketing strategy, we’ve got you covered.
Just keep reading to find out more.
#1. Develop a Customer Journey Map
Starting from scratch, you need to understand what’s the process behind developing a customer journey map. There are several steps you need to take and we’ll break them down together.
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Define the Buyer Persona
To be able to create a customer journey map that is successful and effective, you need to know who your buyer persona is. In other words, you have to define your target audience.
That means that you need to cross-examine your current and past demographics in terms of:
- age
- sex
- location
- social status
- education
You also have to use the data that tells you more about the online behaviour of your target audience, such as:
- hours per day they spend online
- time of day they’re online the most
- what they like and dislike
Get to know your buyer persona more and be prepared to use that data at any point.
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Know The Stages
The next thing you need to understand is the process your customers go through from the first moment they learn for your brand to the moment they become a customer.
That means that you need to learn about and define all the stages in the customer journey, including:
- awareness
- evaluation & information search
- consideration
- decision
- purchase
- post-purchase behaviour
Defining these stages will help you drive the right content to each stage and influence the potential customers to smoothly transition from one stage to the other.
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Create Content for the Touchpoints
Now it’s time to look into the different touchpoints, pain points, and issues a customer may face during their journey. Knowing what each touchpoint is will help you:
- create the right content for it
- ensure it’s effective
This means that you have to predict what the customer might feel or think and have the right content type ready to step in.
Check out this review of writing services if you need help with content creation or the editing process while working on the journey map.
Think like a potential customer and go through the entire process from their perspective.
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Establish a Timeline
For each of the stages and touchpoints, your customer will need a certain amount of time. They’ll need to think, reconsider their decision, or look into your responses better.
Still, you need to establish a timeline and determine how long it takes the customers to go from one stage to the other.
To establish this, use:
- previous data
- history of customer behaviour
Use this timeline to understand when to give a customer that extra push and when to back up and wait.
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Appeal to Emotions
When you’re thinking about customer journey mapping, you always have to consider appealing to their emotions.
Evoking the emotional side of your potential customers can be powerful if you do it right. This is why, at certain points in the journey, you need to use the emotions to:
- assist with the movement down the funnel
- speed the process up if there’s delaying
#2. Learn Through Examples
Now let’s take a look at an example, and learn what a customer journey map for an interior design service might look like. Here’s how the process goes down:
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Awareness
The customer types “interior design service” into Google search box. One of the top results is Havenly. This is thanks to Havenly’s blog and SEO efforts.
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Evaluation & information search
The customer visits the website and social media to learn more.
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Consideration
The customer learns more about the prices, the offer, and specific services. They might schedule a call with Havenly. Meanwhile, Havenly sponsored ads start popping up to the customer. Havenly offers the customer to sign up for the newsletter. They start sending emails to assist the customer with decision making.
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Decision
The customer makes a decision. They contact the service and initiate the process.
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Purchase
Havenly makes sure every step of the process is wisely conducted and the customer doesn’t change their mind.
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Post-purchase behaviour
Havenly sends follow-up emails and keeps this customer notified about their offer and services for the future. They work on building loyalty.
Final Thoughts
As you can see, you need to use your customer journey mapping to boost the effectiveness of your marketing strategy. For each stage of the process, there needs to be the right content.
Make sure you use data and the right measurements to learn about your customer journey process. Then, use that data to make your marketing strategy more powerful and successful.
- How to Create a Customer Journey Map for Your Marketing Strategy - June 23, 2020
