A customer journey is a prevalent method of marketing communication in the business world. It is used by companies to show a timeline of events that every one of their customers goes through. It provides an organization a timeline of a typical experience for the companies product and services. A customer journey allows for a company to build the overall brand and understand the touchpoints to make a more effective and efficient customer journey.
Here are three must-have’s for a customer journey:
Define your Customer Base
How well do you know your customer base? You want to be able to define your business personas. Defining the personas will help with a competitive advantage, knowing who your customer base is and how to reach them.
You want to start with your demographics, income, geography, needs, and anything that is for your type of business. You also want to check your analytics to get a better idea of who is buying from you, which plan (depending on if you have different levels of cost) by-product or service. See if you are interacting with your customers via your social media platforms. You also want to keep an eye on what your competition is doing. Who is your competition appealing to with their products and services? Knowing these things will help in creating a better customer journey.
Identify Touchpoints
You want to be able to determine how your customer base is going to find your product or service. There are specific stages in which your customer can interact with your company:
Awareness: How are your customers finding you? When is the first interaction with your brand?
Consideration: Are your customers interacting with your product or service but decides whether to proceed with the buy.
Purchase/Service: Does the customer procced to purchase your product or service? If they do not, do they reach out to your customer care department to question any of your products or services?
Post-Purchase: Don’t assume the journey ends after the purchase has been made. You want to follow-up with your customers with surveys, bonuses, discount codes, referral programs, etc. Your goal is to convert your customer base to loyal, long-term followers.
Here you can use AIDA (attention, interest, desire, action) to help you build your customer journey map. See where you can reach out to your customer base, such as:
Social Media Platforms
Website
Creating landing pages
Emails
Newsletters
You always want to ensure you have a call to action for each of these touchpoints. You still want the customer coming back to your website for an easy and secure purchase.
Take the Journey Yourself
If you take anything from creating a customer journey, you have to take it yourself. This journey needs to be taken at all levels in the organization from the CEO to the lower level employees handling the product or service. This allows for different departments to understand the process as well as provide insight and fresh ideas on fixing any issues that may arise.
As a company, you try out the journey and keep track of the data that you are getting from the testing if that is positive or negative. You also want to incorporate analytics into the process. We live in a day and age that technology has the power to give you the analytics for you right away. You can use software to keep track of your services and products. A perfect example of software you can use is Customer Relationship Management (CRM) such as Salesforce or Hubspot CRM. You can also use Google Analytics to see website traffic, and there are all in one social media platform software to track your post, comments, and likes, such as Hootsuite.
Pull your Customer Journey and see if you are doing these 3 top items are a part of your current customer journey.