Your customer’s journey is the process from initial first contact all the way up through the sale, and becoming a (hopefully) long-term customer. A deep understanding of this process enables you to market better to your customers and be more empathetic towards wherever they may be on your journey’s timeline.
Below we highlight the importance of understanding your customer’s journey through a tool called a customer map, and highlight how building a map of your own can improve your marketing efforts.
What Is A Customer Map?
Customer mapping can be an incredibly complex process, but it doesn’t have to be complex in order to be useful. Even a simple understanding will go great lengths to improve your marketing.
Typical Elements Of A Customer Map
The customer map includes certain touch points where your customer will be interacting with your company. Some elements are more important that others like the initial contact and the actual closing of a sale. But, it’s still important to understand the entire interaction.
Below we highlight the most common elements your map should include.
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First Contact
This is the initial point when a customer learns about your business. This can be through a variety of points, such as social media, a guest post, your company blog, or the search engines. That’s why it’s important you have a consistent brand across every platform.
You need to make a good first impression with your audience. Other wise you run the risk of them choosing one of your competitors.
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Research Phase
During the research phase the customer knows they’re actively looking for a solution, and you might be the one to provide it to them. They’ll be reading up on your service, checking out your competitors, and looking at your testimonials.
It can be helpful to provide a lot of educational materials via your blog to ensure your potential customer that you’ll do everything you can to help them. Building trust during this phase is absolutely critical.
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Purchase
You want to make it as seamless as possible to buy from you. Any friction throughout the sales process can derail the sale. Take a look at how simple it is to buy almost anything in the world from Amazon.com. This is done for a very specific reason.
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Follow-Up and Retention
After purchase you’ll want to build a long-term relationship with your customer. After all, it’s much more costly to acquire new leads, than to sell consistently to old customers.
Maintain a relationship with your customer through email marketing, social media, or other means to ensure you remain at the top of their mind the next time they decide to make a purchase.
How A Customer Map Can Improve your Marketing
Your customer journey map should be flexible and change as you learn more about your customers. This will help you to build a tighter funnel that speaks at an emotional level and addresses any objections that might arise.
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Help You Better Understand Emotion
By mapping out each phase of the journey you can associate different emotional states with each point of contact. Since we make our decisions primarily on an emotional level (link), this will work to lead your customers to the end goal.
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Better Understanding Of Objections
Do you know why your customers aren’t buying what you’re selling? With a customer map and the accompanied data you’ll be able to uncover potential reasons for your customer abandoning the process. Over time you can incorporate these objections into your funnel and create a better customer experience overall.
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Develop Knowledge Of Different Segments Of Your Market
Understanding the inner world of your customer will lead to marketing campaigns that resonate with your audience on a much deeper level. Chances are, you’ll have multiple segments of your audience. Over time, you’ll be able to create customer maps for the different personas you’re targeting.
The more refined you can get in your approach the better your chances are of speaking directly to someone’s deep needs and desires.
Your customer map is an important part of creating a more fulfilling customer experience, and through that driving more sales to your business. Looking for a custom marketing strategy to get inside the heads of yous customers? Reach out to our team today.
