Creating a positive customer experience is a common goal shared by businesses across industries, in every stage of growth. Commonly, businesses develop customer journey maps to better understand, and more intentionally build customer experiences—and for good reason. Maintaining high customer satisfaction is key and customer journey maps can help guide you to keeping your buyers happy by proactively anticipating and solving their needs.

What’s a Customer Journey Map?

A customer journey map is a visual tool that provides insight into the mindset of your target audience. They often take the form of elaborate diagrams or infographics, illustrating every touchpoint of a customer’s experience as they progress through the marketing funnel from awareness to customer.

Why We Map

Building a customer journey map can feel like a tedious process, but the rewards are definitely worthwhile. This exercise provides valuable insight into buyer behavior that allows you to empathize with your prospects, understand their needs at each stage and develop inbound marketing campaigns that will generate higher ROI.

The customer journey map also provides a better understanding of common entry points into the sales funnel. These maps can also uncover what kind of content motivates your buyers to move further down the sales pipeline such as case studies, video stories, white papers, webinar-based education, KOL testimonials, etc. With this information, you can develop effective lead generation programs that anticipate the needs of prospective buyers, move them through the pipeline on your timeline, and transforms them into long-term customers.

Customer maps also makes it easier to determine what criteria identify a marketing qualified lead (MQL) versus a sales qualified lead (SQL). For example, an MQL for your company may be a prospect who has downloaded a case study from your website or engaged with another piece of high-level educational content that indicates they’re beginning their information collecting process about your product or service.  A SQL, has moved onto reviewing testimonials, submitting inbound information/ demonstration requests, and is actively researching product specifications to decide whether your company provides the solution to their problem. 

Getting Started

The path your customer journey map takes will depend on several factors including: your target audience, industry and the type of product or service that you provide. The most important consideration when building your map is ensuring that you highlight how you can use each touchpoint to improve customer experience by providing timely and relevant information that will help customers move to the next stage in the pipeline. Here’s a few tips to help you get started:

1.     Do Your Research

A great place to start is right in your own database! You can develop buyer personas by analyzing 4-5 existing customers and mapping out the real-world journey they took to become a customer. Make sure you consider questions they had at each stage that lead them to the content they chose to consume, what feelings they experienced in each step of the journey, and similarities that you notice between them.

2.     Set Clear Goals

While some buyers will follow the anticipated path—others won’t. It’s common for buyers to begin interacting with your company at different stages of the map, some people will skip the awareness phase and go right into product comparisons. Setting clear goals for every step of the customer journey, and automating your processes based on customer behavior, will ensure that you are always ready to the most relevant content, regardless of the prospect’s entry point.

3.     Map It Out

Now that you’ve clearly defined who your buyer is and what they want, it’s time to map out their journey! The easiest way to do this is to begin with a list of the touchpoints that a customer will engage with on their way from prospect to buyer. You may want to start by creating a long list of all of the sales content you have an identify the strongest pieces of content that you want to include in your map. Also make sure you’re leveraging evergreen content so it’s always relevant to your audience.

This is also a great opportunity to hold a “journey mapping workshop” with your sales and marketing teams to make sure both sides are aligned in their efforts! Sales should have a seat at the table for this discussion to make sure they understand the journey and support it with their efforts in the field.

4.     Determine Your Resources

This is the stage where you discuss what resources you and your team will use to accomplish the goals that you have set. Marketing automation, for instance, is an exceptional tool for easily and quickly distributing relevant material to potential customers. These platforms are ideal because they allow you to work create plug-and-play communications that are consistent in both message, and delivery cadence.

5.     Don’t Forget Your Current Customers

Don’t let all your hard work go to waste! Take what you’ve learned and develop a customer retention strategy that will allow you to get more value from your existing clients.

Next Steps

If you’re not sure whether you are crafting your customer journey map correctly, or need help developing and deploying tailored content designed to convert, we can help! Discover how we help our clients. 

References

1.     Weir, Mike.“What Is A Customer Journey Map And Why Are They Important?” LinkedIn Marketing Blog, 5 Dec. 2018, business.linkedin.com/marketing-solutions/blog/sales-and-marketing/2018/customer-journey-map-definition-benefits-examples.

2.     Hoffmeyer, Amanda. “10 Tips for Mapping Your Customer Journey.” Veterinary Marketing Brief, 18 Nov. 2020, blog.briefmedia.com/10-tips-for-mapping-your-customer-journey/.

3.     Agius, Aaron. “How to Create an Effective Customer Journey Map [Examples + Template].” HubSpot Blog, 9 Feb. 2021, blog.hubspot.com/service/customer-journey-map/.