How to Win Clients and Influence Markets with Your CUSTOMER JOURNEY

If you want to figure out how to get into your customers' minds, customer journey mapping is the most effective way to do so. Taking a walk in your customers' shoes is a necessary process that, when done right, yields positive impacts on your business.

What is customer journey mapping?

A customer journey map is a visual representation of the customer or user journey. It helps you tell the story of your customers' experiences with your brand across all platforms- social media, email, livechat, your website, etc. This process also helps business leaders gain insights into common customer pain points. These insights can be leveraged to deliver a more optimized, streamlined, and personalized experience for your customers.

Benefits of Customer Journey Mapping

Customer journey mapping allows your business to optimize the customer experience from the initial touchpoint, through the sales process, onboarding process, and even while retaining your client after the initial sale. Other benefits include:

• Comparing your customer expectations against the experience they actually receive, allowing you to make adjustments where you see fit.

• Uncovering your customers’ motivation to buy from you, giving you insight into their pain points so you can tailor your products or services to help fix them.

• Understanding the differences in buyer personas as they move through your sales funnel from prospect to conversion so you can optimize the process for each.

• Creating a logical order to your buyer journey allowing for any friction during the process to be remedied.

However, the biggest benefit of customer journey mapping is simply understanding your customers more. The better you understand their expectations, the more you can tailor the customer experience to their needs.

Mapping Out Your Journey in Six Steps

Step 1: Gather qualitative and quantitative data on your audience.

Before you begin, you need to collect data on your audience. Make a list of where they come from, their age, gender, interests, etc. Social media is a great place to see what kind of people are most engaged with your pages. Then, compare this data with your website to check for similarities. .You can check your website’s analytics to see which pages and sections your customers are interacting with the most ad which pages have the highest bounce rate. Another way you can gather data is to simply ask- send out surveys and ask for input. These are all good places to start.

Step 2: Use your newfound data to build a buyer persona and set clear goals.

Analyze the data you collected for similarities in geography, demography, behavior, challenges, and pain points. These similarities will aid in the development of an audience persona and the establishment of clear objectives for the issues that must be addressed. The customer is king, and now that you know more about them, you can keep them at the heart of your offering.

Step 3: Identity all touchpoints.

Customer journey maps visually represent all of your customers' experiences and interactions with your brand, and each journey is unique to business processes with different touchpoints. It's critical to keep track of the touchpoints your customers use to contact/interact with you. Analyzing your website's initial touchpoints isn't enough; you also need to collect data from various sources (social media channels, targeted ads, marketing content) and track how customers navigate your website. By gathering this data, you can determine how accessible you are and whether there is room for improvement. Providing your customer with the right information at the right time is a critical component of converting them.

Step 4: Analyze the phases of the customer journey: discovery, consideration, purchase and retention.

The customer journey is generally divided into four major stages, and analyzing each of these is critical for mapping your customer's journey with your brand.

Discovery: It all begins when a prospect discovers your brand and attempts to comprehend what you have to offer. At this point, potential customers are aware of their problems and are looking for a solution. Your prospect may be starting a new business, needing assistance with automating a process, or have a brick-and-mortar company that is establishing an online presence for the first time.

Consideration: Prospects are aware of your brand and the solutions you can provide them during this stage. They're weighing options and comparing your brand to others, and you need to establish yourself as the best option on the market. Make sure they have easy access to everything they need to hear in order to make an informed decision. The prospect is aware of the major issues that you will resolve for them.

Purchase: There may be a purchase after you gain insight into what your prospects think of you and how they interact with your brand. Your customers have weighed all of the options and have decided to purchase your product. It's best if you keep mapping their journey to ensure they have a pleasant experience when purchasing from you.

Retention: The final step in the customer journey mapping process is to ensure your customers' satisfaction. Giving them the best and most timely solutions to their problems helps them remember you and makes them loyal to your brand. The goal is to get them to continue to purchase from you and become customers for life.

Cheat Sheet: Questions to Ask at Each Stage of the Customer Journey

Step Five: Test the journey yourself.

If you don't go on the journey, the customer journey map is incomplete. While it is necessary to analyze the mapping process, making an effort to try it yourself adds the finishing touches to the process. Follow each of your personas through the four stages of the process, adding any new information you discover along the way.

Step 6: Optimize your journey.

Now that you have a complete customer journey map, complete with your own journey experience, make sure your main channels and customers’ first points of contact (Google My Business/websites/social media/marketing material/ads) have the correct information about you. Address any issues that arose during the customer journey mapping process to ensure your customers have a positive experience with your brand.

Customer journey mapping is a fantastic tool for helping businesses become more customer-centric. Addressing the challenges clients have along the way and understanding their motivation will offer you a greater knowledge of what they want from you, allowing you to better serve them.

Have questions about your customer journey? Book a call with us today and gain some insight on how you can optimize your funnel to win clients!