A Complete Guide to Effectively Incorporating Customer Journey Mapping Into Your Marketing Strategy
When it comes to developing a solid marketing strategy, most beginners have nothing except the expert advice they find online in digital marketing blogs to start with. No doubt, this will last you a long way, but at the end of the day, you are borrowing experiences from somebody else’s business instead of building your own. This is the reason why big firms spend so much on analytics and data.
Because with someone else’s analytics, you can only go this far, but at some point, you need to start collecting and interpreting data yourself. Without doing this, you cannot expect to understand your vast customer base. In this blog, we will be discussing how to create a customer journey map and all the information and tools that you will need for that.
How to Create Your Customer Journey Map?
A customer journey map (CJM) shows the path of a customer from making their decision to purchase or take any other action to actually doing it successfully.
You can easily create a CJM for most processes that involve customer decisions and then use it for multiple purposes. Like a comprehensive map of going from the initial funnel stage to making a purchase can be utilized to improve conversions.
Well, for now, we will focus on making a simple CJM that covers a customer’s journey from showing interest in your product to purchasing it. This will help you in enhancing your overall marketing strategy.
Let’s dive into the details.
- Defining user personas
Before you track the customer’s path, you need to know who is making that journey, and for this, you must know at least these four sets of data about your consumers:
- Demographics (age, gender, location, etc.)
- What solutions does your product provide them?
- What do your customers value from the product?
- Where do they get information from?
These points will help you know your customers and their journey better. Here are the tools that will help you in acquiring this information.
- Google Analytics
- Sign-up forms
- Facebook Analytics
- Email surveys
- Pop-up surveys
You can easily get users to give you their basic demographic information via sign-up forms. You can ask them to provide a bit more than just their email address while they are registering on your site or grabbing a freebie. With this, you will already have a decent customer database. If you deal on a B2B platform, then gathering employment information can be extremely valuable for you.
Similarly, you can utilize the other tools mentioned above to gain information about your customers. Although these are just some basic tools, you can always switch to a more advanced analytical tool if you want.
- Identifying touchpoints
Once you know who your customers are, it’s time to start tracking their path towards making a purchase. You will have to trace the touchpoints the customers have with your company as they move through every stage of the sales funnel.
Asking your leads how they ended up on your site might not be an excellent idea as, before the purchase, many touchpoints will be forgotten.
You can do it more efficiently by using these tools:
- Google Analytics
- Sign-up forms
- Lead scoring software
Let’s begin by looking at the off-website touchpoints. Typically, social media, blog posts in Google SERPs, ads, and other online portals drive a customer to your site. You can use Google Analytics to find out where the traffic is coming from.
The other trick is to learn to use Google Analytics’ ”Reverse Goal Path,” which lets you choose a goal from your campaign and see the actions a customer performed on the website before converting. This will show you most of the on-website customer journey.
- Drawing the map
By now, you know who your customers are and what actions they perform on your website before making a purchase. So now, all you need to do is draw the customer journey map.
You can create it in whichever way you like, just ensure that it will always be useful for future use. You can choose your own tool, whether it is a piece of paper or Photoshop or any other tool you are comfortable in using.
Begin by specifying the user persona for which you are drawing the map. Since different user personas can have different journeys, you might need to draw multiple maps.
How to Improve Your Marketing Strategy With Customer Journey Map?
Once you finish drawing your customer journey map, it’s time to understand how you can utilize it to improve your marketing strategy.
- Search for insights
Your CJM is not complete without the insights or potential opportunities for development. Get your team in place and brainstorm opportunities for improvement that you can interpret from the customer journey map.
There is no particular way to do it. It all depends on what your map shows. For example, if you observe that a specific touchpoint has a poor conversion rate in comparison to the rest, you must work on it. Conduct more research and find out why it isn’t performing well and how you can improve it.
- Improve messaging
A customer’s motivating factor in making a purchase plays a huge role in deciding which company they are going to stick with. So if you discover what your audience is looking for is not what you are advertising, it is a crystal clear sign that you need to improve it.
- Focus on tangential interests
If you are performing content marketing, then your findings from the ”Affinity Categories” can be useful for you. Some people can find out your products while reading a blog related to it. Lookup the data on affinity categories, and you will be able to add several new topics to your content marketing stockpile.
- Focus on high-converting channels
Customer journey mapping lets you figure out which marketing channels work best for you. See which channels are the most widespread in the first half of the customer journey and find the reason behind it. Now you can either try to fix the channels that are not bringing enough customers, or you can double down on the ones that are already bringing you the best ROI.
- Boost on-website conversion
You will get some great analytics on the on-website actions of your customers through CJM. This will help you see what your leads do on your website before converting, which allows you to improve the entire process.
This is not just about improving the touchpoints you have; you can also modify your on-site conversion strategy and put in new touchpoints.
Creating a customer journey map helps you know so much about your consumers and their journey on your website. It opens many doors to improve the user experience, which will ultimately boost your conversions. Let us know how this works out for your website in the comments below.