Marketing professionals encourage people to buy products and services that are supposed to meet their needs. To successfully advertise their merchandise, marketers should know exactly who their customers are and clearly understand their wants, pain points, frustrations, etc. Otherwise, buyers and potential customers Your will choose your competitors.
If you want to understand your customers to improve your marketing strategy, customer experience, increase sales, and facilitate business growth, you should pay attention to customer journey mapping. Let’s find out what it is and how it can help you progress.
Describe the customer journey map in simple words
Customer journey mapping is a visualization of the stages in the customer journey that they go through when using your product or service. Building a customer journey map will allow you to understand how to meet customer expectations, reveal the problems they face at different stages, and see how they feel when interacting with your brand. Friend. Simply put, you have the opportunity to go one mile by the customer’s location.
Let’s see the steps of a young woman who wants to buy a pink luggage bag:
- She searched the luggage bag on the Internet and found a Facebook post describing your product.
- She likes your bag, but not pink. However, she liked the design and decided to read bag specifications and reviews on specialized websites.
- Your bags are so cool that she’s willing to buy one of them.
- She tries to add the bag to the cart but cannot do so due to an unknown error.
- She contacted the manager to resolve the issue and placed the order.
- The manager helps her to order and gives a discount on her next purchase.
- The woman describes her experience on Instagram. She complains about the lack of pink but appreciates the quality and design.
A customer journey map will help you see all of these stages, interactions, funnels, and touchpoints. What’s more, you’ll have at hand the actions your customers take, the problems they face, and other useful information that you can use to improve their experience, product, or service. of cutomer. For example, you can think of making a pink luggage bag.
Another example – an itinerary map for a sports shoe store, Persona is an influencer. Source: UXPressia.
How can customer journey maps benefit your marketing strategy?
Creating a customer journey map provides a great opportunity to strengthen your customer’s relationship with your brand. Let’s see how.
Understand their practical experience
As a marketer, you definitely have an idea of the customer’s experience with your brand. But when you build a customer journey map, you’ll have the opportunity to compare their actual experience with the one you imagined. You will be able to understand how they feel, what they do, and what to expect at every stage of their journey. The map will help you better understand them and see if you’re delivering on your brand promise.
Design better experiences
A customer journey map allows you to not only understand your current customer experience, but also think about ways to improve it. Your customers need a product or service that will fully meet their expectations. That’s why it’s essential to see your brand through the eyes of your customers and consider how to change their experience for the better.
Choose the right communication channel
You can interact with your customers through a variety of channels, such as search engines, advertising, social networks, friends, websites, apps, and others. But sometimes it’s hard to give the right people the right content at the right time and through the right channels, isn’t it? How to find the ideal channel of interaction with your customers? The customer journey map is here to help you. They allow you to clearly understand what resources your customers need at every stage of their journey, what communication channels they use, and provide them with these resources through these channels.
Imagine that a young man named Andy wants to buy a camera. He finds a requested sample in your online store and finds a video review. Unfortunately, there are no official reviews in your store and Andy has to find and watch a confusing and incomplete video made by a blogger. Looking for a simple and detailed official review, Andy found a similar camera in a competing store and bought it there. Having a customer journey map in place will allow you to see barriers and remove them quickly (for example, by adding official product reviews in your online store).
Expand the group of marketing opportunities
Your marketing team already uses different tools like Google Analytics, HotJar, etc. You can leverage the data they provide when building customer journey maps. For example, you may find that one or a period of time is taking too long and come up with ideas about what to do to fix the situation. Or you will be able to define what marketing activities and at what stage of the user journey you want to conduct them. These marketing activities may include:
- blog posts that answer questions customers have at different stages of the journey;
- banners on third-party websites that describe your customers’ difficult problems and provide them with solutions with the help of your product;
- tailor your landing page to the insights you receive based on the customer journey map;
- et cetera.
Improve communication with other departments
It’s not enough to build a map and use it only in one department. It is important to share it among other departments so that they also understand the customer and see their journey. This will allow your company to break down barriers and create inspiring products and services together.
When your colleagues deeply understand your customer’s needs, problems, and expectations, they’ll have a coherent idea of how to help you establish strong customer relationships, enhance the experience, and drive loyalty. their loyalty.
Here are some tips on how to create effective customer journey maps.
#1 Define Personas for your Map
First of all, you should think about personas to include in your map. What to do if you have many customers? Choose which one? Should you build maps for all of them? Since mapping takes time, choose the individuals that are most important and valuable to your business. Don’t waste your efforts and resources on a small or limited number of customers.
Collect as much information as possible about your customers through surveys, questionnaires, studies, observations, etc. This data should include customer preferences, goals, preferences and proprietary information. other benefits. It will allow you to create a personality based on real data and represent a real customer segment.
#2 Define required information
If you don’t know how to create a journey map from scratch, you can use customer journey map templates as a starting point or for inspiration.
If you decide to build a map from scratch, keep the following details in mind:
- Select the map extent. You can build a journey from start to finish, or choose a narrower scope if you think that’s more important at this point.
- Add channels and touchpoints. There are tools through which customers interact with your brand (ads, websites, mobile apps, forums, blogs, online stores, etc.)
- Write down pain points, barriers, and problems. Several things prevent your customers from achieving their goals.
- Visualize the emotional experience. There may be excitement associated with the discount or frustration because the salesperson cannot confirm the order.
- Remember your customer’s goals and expectations. What do customers want to get at every stage of their journey?
- Brainstorm ideas and opportunities. How can you improve the customer experience?
#3 Gather a group
If you want your customer journey map to be reliable, it must be created with the participation of multiple professionals involved in different stages of the customer journey. Your team should include marketers, sales managers, customer service professionals, product managers, and others who may share important customer data. No detail is too small!
#4 Update Your Customer Journey Map Regularly
Work done, your fun. Oh, no, this proverb doesn’t work here. Once your customer journey map is created, that doesn’t mean you can forget about it. Review and revise your map regularly to add new data as needed. Have you launched a new communication channel or updated your product? Time to update your map!
end
Marketing professionals use different tools to track customer preferences and needs and keep them loyal to the product or brand. Customer journey maps are now becoming a more effective tool for marketers to put themselves in the shoes of their customers and offer a variety of customer-centric products and services.
Categories: How to
Source: vothisaucamau.edu.vn
