Customer journey, finding and reaching your destination is a whole lot easier when you have a map for guidance.
Incorporating customer journey into your content marketing means you can produce and deliver your content in ways that add context to your marketing.
What is a Customer Journey?
Customer journey maps are a visual way to represent the journey a new customer takes to find your product or service.
From the first moment, they understand their need for a product or service that you offer until they eventually become your new customer.
4 Steps in a Customer Journey Checklist
Awareness: Customer realises they have a problem that needs to be solved.
Consideration: Research solutions. Start comparing offerings, prices and features.
Several factors can affect decisions: the price range fits into the budget, availability of a physical product, special offers, useful features, useability if technical, and online reviews are also central to most decision making these days. All this information will influence decisions.
Research and considering options can be the longest part of the journey.
Decision: Purchasing time, confident they have the knowledge to shortlist potential products, understand what best suits their requirements and who offers the best prices.
Retention: Does it meet their expectations? Excellent customer service and after-sales care can really help the making customer stay loyal to your brand.
Note: The journey does not always include all steps. People may jump straight from awareness to purchase
Who are you Customers?
Who are your customers? Understand who your audience is:
- Needs: Identifying needs
- Wants: What do they want in a product or service?
- Pain points: What does your product or service solve?
- Questions: What are they most likely ask themselves?
- Search Terms: What terms will they be looking for?
- Niche: Appeal to a small focused group
How to map a customer journey?
Walk-in Customer’s Shoes: Base the journey on a typical customer. Create a customer persona and picture their journey.
Basic Initial Mapping: This can be simply done using a pen and piece of paper to understand the journey.
Discover the Steps: What steps do they go through in becoming a customer?
There are a number of potential touchpoints of contact even before direct contact is made. From advertising, social media, recommendation and reviews. These need to be all incorporated into your customer journey.
Activities, Motivations, Question and Barriers:
Actions: what is the customer doing at this stage of the process? What steps are they taking to move onto the next stage?
Motivations: what motivates, encourage (or potentially discourage) the continuing journey? What kinds of emotions are they feeling? Why do they care?
Questions: What questions might the customer have? What might make them uncertain or confused (jargon) to move on? Can they easily find the answers?
Barriers & Obstacles:
What barriers and obstacles do your customers come up against? Example costs, implementation, returns and warranty policy. All these can cause the customer journey to fail and give up and not become a customer.
Repeat Using other Personas: Different customers will have different touchpoints, questions, and barriers to becoming your customer.
Remove Barriers: How can you remove barriers and answer their questions? How you can improve the whole customer journey and experience? Understand Pain Points
How can you reduce or remove barriers, or proactively answer questions?
Consult Customers: Ask customers direct. Customer feedback surveys to understand their experiences.
Customer Journey and Content Marketing
Content is a powerful tool for reaching prospective customers but the key is identifying what kind of content you should produce according to the customer journey.
Incorporating content marketing into your digital strategy is brilliant, but not if it’s just random blog posts. It must offer value not something your customers don’t need.
Each stage of the customer journey can help give direction to the kind of content you should create.
Customer Journey Benefits
Increased Sales: If you can solve a pain point and answer any questions that people have they are likely to convert to paying customers.
Customer Retention: Keeping customers loyal.
Onboarding process: Optimise the customer onboarding process to increase conversion.
Create Experience: Benchmark your desired customer experience against what they actually receive.
Customer Persona: Understanding the different stages in a buyer personas as a transverse from a prospect to the customer through the buying funnel.
Create the Perfect Journey: Create a logical order for the buyer’s journey.
Understanding Customers: understanding your customers more about their needs and requirements.
Personalisation: Taylor the experience you want your customers to have.