How do customers become customers? It might seem like a simple answer at first. After all, your business has a product or service that people want. You only need to tell them about it and assist them in their efforts to make a purchase.

At one point or another, this explanation may have been true. However, in the new digital world, the consumer journey is far more complicated than that. In fact, thanks to social media, digital marketing, and other major advances in technology, more and more businesses are seeing their “familiar” customer turn into mere numbers on a sales spreadsheet.

And with the internet leveling the playing field for businesses all around the globe, understanding where your customers come from, who they are, and how to keep them is more important than ever.

Consumer Journey Mapping: The Basics

Given the information related above, it should come as no surprise that customer needs are changing rapidly. In fact, the vast majority of consumers now consider their experience with a brand to be more important than the products and services themselves. Couple this with their ever-growing desire to be “connected” to the companies they buy from, and you will see either a problem, an opportunity, or both.

A consumer journey map is, in effect, a sort of visual representation of a client or shopper’s experience with your brand. It takes into account various touchpoints, including interactions on social media, email messages, and other communication channels. As you lay this information out, you can effectively step into the shoes of your customer.

By putting yourself in this position, you can better identify which parts of your marketing and digital footprint are working for them and – most importantly – which are not.

Why Consumer Journey Mapping Matters

The through-line of the marketing process has always been understanding what the customer wants. As digital communication becomes the norm, however, there are fewer and fewer direct interactions with customers from which one can glean this information. Consumer journey mapping solves this problem in a simple, straightforward, and effective way.

Through the mapping process, you can:

·         Better optimise both customer outreach and onboarding

·         Understand how different buyer personas move through your sales funnel

·         Measure what you promise your customers against their actual experiences

·         Design a more impactful journey for each persona type

Again, understanding who your customers are and just what they want is the first, middle, and final step to successfully satisfying their needs and maximizing retention. With mapping, you can accomplish this with great accuracy.

The Mapping Process

The mapping process itself is more of an exercise than anything else, but it is nonetheless an exercise that provides extraordinary and valuable insight. It starts by mapping out every single possible touchpoint your company has. These might include your website, social media channels, banner advertisements, and interactions with your sales team.

The next step is to list key events (such as posting a Facebook comment or purchasing a product) as well as any “pain areas” that might occur throughout the user experience. From here, you can start constructing a comprehensive visual made up of actions and resolutions. The final result might actually resemble a game board, with each individual “player” taking a different route to get to the end.

And much like “Life” or similar board games, there are player pieces. In this case, these are the individual “buyer personas” that represent members of your target audience. As you map their journey, you will move these personas through the touchpoints until they reach the goals those points are intended to accomplish.  Most marketing teams will already have such personas constructed (or at the very least templatized) based on customer behavior patterns, needs, motivations, and demographics.

Professional Consumer Journey Mapping

Now, it’s possible to understand the concepts behind consumer journey mapping while still having no idea how to create one. Moreover, it often takes some professional insight to analyze the final consumer journey map for useful, relevant information.

Fortunately, this is not a process your brand needs to go through alone. With the aid of a professional, you can leave no stone unturned in your efforts to identify various customer types, their needs, and which parts of your outreach are working and which are not. Here are just some of the benefits of using a professional:

More Intuitive Research

We mentioned before that consumers are largely concerned with the relationships they have with the brands these use. With third-party consumer journey mapping, you can get honest, high-quality information about the nature of those relationships via surveys, questionnaires, and email marketing techniques. In many cases, customers will be far more honest about what they want and don’t want when they feel there is a barrier between their opinions and the brands they use.  

Objective Reporting and Advice

Another potential barrier to self-administered consumer journey mapping is the opinions of your own team members. For instance, the team who runs your social media outreach might be reluctant to criticize their own efforts, regardless of what the data says. With a third-party company, you get honest, straightforward, and reliable feedback.

Better Data Analysis

Consumer mapping might be easy if you only have one customer persona and a single touch or access point. However, how many businesses can make this claim? Indeed, as your consumer journey map becomes more complex, it will be harder to pull out relevant and useful data. That’s where a marketing professional can be of great assistance. With their experience and qualified insight, they can ensure you explore all possible journey contingencies and get every last bit of information from the process.

Conclusion

In the new, digital world, consumer journey mapping is an essential step in understanding who your business’s customers are and what they want. Only by taking advantage of this unique process can you truly claim to be maximizing your efforts at customer attraction and retention.