Customer journey mapping is an important part of any brand’s marketing strategy. A customer journey map helps you to visualise and truly understand your customer’s interactions with your brand, allowing you to tailor your business and marketing strategies to fit. In this guide, I will provide a comprehensive overview of the topic. From reading this guide, you will learn what customer journey mapping is, where it fits in with digital marketing, what exactly is in a customer journey map, why it is important, how to do it, as well as some examples of customer journey maps for B2B and B2C companies. This will give you the knowledge you need to create your own customer journey map and start a more successful, customer-centric approach to doing business.
Table of contents
- What is customer journey mapping?
- Where does customer journey mapping fit in digital marketing?
- What exactly is in a customer journey map?
- Stages/episodes
- Customer needs and pain points
- Actions and touchpoints
- Experience gaps
- Solutions and opportunities
- Why is customer journey mapping important?
- How to do customer journey mapping
- Examples
- Conclusion
What is customer journey mapping?
Let’s begin by defining exactly what customer journey mapping is.
A customer journey map is a visual representation of your customers’ interactions with your brand, product or service.
This important exercise allows you to understand exactly how your customers come into contact with your brand, product or service – and how they become aware of, consider, decide to order from, and advocate your brand.
By defining the stages of the customer journey, you can better understand the customer’s actions, reasoning, and get in depth into the emotions that they experience.
Visualising the customer experience in detail may unveil common pain points and experience gaps that need to be addressed. These insights will help you to identify how to solve any problems or even seek new opportunities at each stage.
Customer journey mapping can also influence the organisation of your company or brand to prioritise a customer-centric experience.
Where does customer journey mapping fit in digital marketing?
Below, I have created a chart looking at all the steps that marketers go through when setting up some kind of marketing campaign – for example, when launching a new product or expanding into a new market.
Let’s look at these seven steps in a bit more detail:
- The first step is to understand what your goal is, whether that is solving a challenge (e.g. launching in a new market) or an actual problem (e.g. having a negative reputation associated with your brand in a particular market). It is very important to determine what your goal is at the very beginning, so that you do not get side-tracked by all the information that you are going to receive throughout the process of creating a campaign.
- The second step is doing your market research and competitor research. You want to snoop about a little and see what your competition is doing, what kind of content they are creating, and how users in your target market interact with that content. There is a tonne of information that you can get from market research. Webcertain has done a full webinar on market research, which you can watch here if you want an in-depth look at this.
- The third step is persona research. Webcertain has also done a full webinar on persona research, which you can watch here. Persona research is very important for customer journey mapping. In fact, it is very difficult, if not impossible, to do high-quality customer journey mapping without persona research.
- The fourth step is conducting the customer journey mapping. Its role is to connect all the other research with your campaign strategy.
- The fifth step is creating your campaign strategy. Once you have a customer journey map, it is actually very easy to create a strategy based on this map.
- Once you have got the strategy, you can do your campaign planning.
- Then, you can launch your campaign and run it and analyse it and so on.
The first four steps are like the solid foundation. The other steps can branch out into different directions. Customer journey mapping is something that you can apply to many different areas of digital marketing, whether that is social media, content, paid campaigns, SEO and/or translation; it really is an overarching exercise.
To make this a bit more memorable, I have taken all this and simplified it into this beautiful cake!
If you want to think about where customer journey mapping fits in the cake: your research is your sponge, it is the base, it is what keeps everything together; your campaign is the beautiful topper and all the decorations that potential customers see on the surface; and the customer journey mapping comes in the middle. It unites your research with your campaign.
Customer journey mapping is the last bit of research that you need to do before creating a strategy. It is also the next logical step after performing persona research, as it helps you to see how your personas behave at each step of their customer journey. Here at Webcertain, we do not do customer journey mapping without persona research, because they simply go so very well together.
What exactly is in a customer journey map?
Before I get into the process of how to conduct customer journey mapping, let’s summarise what is actually visualised in the customer journey map itself.
Stages/episodes
These are the stages that customers experience as they interact with your company or brand. Episodes are diverse, depending on the business and the customer’s journey. In general, however, the episodes are:
- Awareness: At this stage, the customer discovers the company or brand, often by being the target of their marketing efforts.
- Consideration: At this stage, the customer knows about the company or brand, and willingly puts in the effort to learn more about them.
- Decision: At this stage, the customer decides whether to go with the company or brand, based on how well they fit their needs.
- Purchase: At this stage, the customer makes their purchase. Here, the focus should be on fulfilling the customer’s expectations, as they are now in direct contact with the company or brand.
- Receiving: At this stage, the customer receives the product or service.
- Advocating: The customer’s positive experience leads to this stage, where they willingly advocate the company or brand.
Customer needs and pain points
This outlines what customers need in order to be at each stage. The needs can be categorised into functional, emotional and social, depending on the business objective. If you map out the needs, you also need to map out the pain points, as they both determine whether the customer continues with or quits the process. This will help you to identify the emotions of the customer at every stage, positive or negative.
Actions and touchpoints
By knowing and understanding everything customers do in each stage of the buying process, you also know what touchpoints they encounter. For instance, the customer might be exposed to paid advertising whilst reading content online, or ask questions to peers through a messaging platform, or use social media for different purposes. This part explores where to reach the customer and how to understand their behaviour.
Experience gaps
This is the part that summarises the findings and insights that have already been mapped out. This is where you can analyse the gaps between the customer needs and pain points and solve them by utilising the touchpoints.
Solutions and opportunities
This is the final and perhaps most important part of the customer journey map, where the experience gaps are analysed. Solutions or opportunities are brainstormed and developed to fill the experience gaps, which will improve the customer experience in that particular stage.
Why is customer journey mapping important?
Customer journey mapping is an important part of any brand’s marketing strategy. This section will explain why. Here are three top reasons to perform customer journey mapping:
- Customer journey mapping creates an overview of the customer experience and maps how customers move through the sales funnel.
- It allows you to identify opportunities to improve and enhance the overall customer experience.
- For us as content marketers, it can also determine what content you need to create and the best way to approach it. In a world that is oversaturated with content, it can be very hard to come up with content ideas. But having a customer journey map is like your customer telling you exactly what kind of content they need and it makes the job so much easier.
Want some numbers to back up these claims? No problem! Here are some stats that demonstrate why customer journey mapping is important in the context of achieving your marketing goals:
- Customer-centric companies and brands are 60% more profitable than those not focused on the customer.
- 80% of customers consider their experience with a company/brand to be as important as its products/services.
- 88% of customers say a positive customer experience makes them more likely to purchase from a company again.
- On average, well-engaged and satisfied customers buy 50% more frequently and spend 200% more annually.
- Looking at B2B, 86% of business buyers are more likely to buy if a company understands their goals.
- According to research by McKinsey, B2B companies that switched to a customer-based experience approach typically saw a 10 to 15% growth in revenue, higher client satisfaction scores, improved employee satisfaction and a 10 to 20% reduction in operational costs.
How to do customer journey mapping
1. Set a goal
Start by defining your business objective. Decide what you are aiming to achieve (e.g. a brand awareness campaign or launching a new product/service). Determining the direction of the customer journey at the start will make the insights more actionable.
You should also define the customer that you want to focus on. The persona’s main needs should already have been stated and researched by this point. This is why prior persona research is vital. Having this clear persona will be helpful for reminding you to tailor every stage of the customer journey map towards them.
If your persona research has dug up multiple personas, you should choose the one that is most relevant to your goal. You could also think about which one is the “core” persona that you most want to target.
2. Collect the data
Next, you will want to use qualitative and quantitative research methods in order to collect data about your customers’ journeys.
Here are some of the qualitative research methods you could use:
- Interviews: This is placed at the top because conducting interviews (i.e. literally having conversations with the customers) is the best way to understand their customer journey. You should aim to interview three to five people – this is usually sufficient to get a good range of answers without those answers becoming repetitive.
- Remote observations
- Focus groups
- Qualitative surveys
Here are some of the quantitative research methods you could use:
- PPC performance
- Heatmap analysis
- Web analytics
- Quantitative surveys
3. Visualise the data
List and map out the collected data, fitting it into the appropriate stages to illustrate the journey and the critical moments.
Split the persona’s pain points, desires, touchpoints and core needs into several phases, and evolve the hypothesis map based on the findings of the research.
4. Analyse the data
Based on the visualised customer journey map, analyse the gaps in the customer experience, the information overlap, the significant pain points and the critical stages.
This step allows you to see the range of solutions and opportunities at each stage, as well as to focus on the areas where your customers’ needs are not met, i.e. to identify any areas needing improvement.
You should expect the whole process of producing a customer journey map to take a minimum of one month. Allowing yourself less than one month could be setting yourself up for failure. It may even take longer than one month, depending on how many people you want to interview and the goal you have set up. You should also be aware that if you are interviewing people, this will mean you are dependent on their time, so this again might mean the process takes longer, if they have limited availability.
Examples
To aid understanding, here are two examples of successful customer journey mapping, one for a B2B business and one for a B2C business.
B2B example
Step 1: Set a goal
The brand is an interior design studio focusing on working spaces, restaurants and retail spaces. It has created a whitepaper about spatial design trends for businesses. Its goal is to get more prospective clients to download the paper.
The target persona is a shop owner based in London who started their business online and is currently expanding to offline stores as well. Their core desire is to have an established brick and mortar shop by the end of the year. If they had to summarise their ultimate aspiration in one sentence, it would be: “My brand will go national and international with its unique design.”
Based on the persona research, you know that the key sources of information (touchpoints) for this persona are:
- Digital media: Social media apps, podcasts, news aggregators, search engines.
- Messenger apps: WhatsApp, Slack.
- Offline: Thursday pub after work, TFL commuter, Evening Standard reader, joins enterprise communities in London.
Step 2: Collect the data
The following are some good questions to ask this persona in the interview:
- “How do you keep up to date with current affairs?”
- “Can you explain what kind of social media you use daily?”
- “Are you someone who is well-informed about trends? How do you find them?”
- “What kind of influencers do you follow? Why?”
- “What is your vision for your business?”
Step 3: Visualise the data
Based on the information gathered in the interviews, you are able to create this customer journey map:
Step 4: Analyse the data
When you analyse the customer journey map, you realise that the critical stages for this persona are awareness, consideration, and growth and expansion.
The persona heavily focuses on certain publications and topics. You should use them to create relevant content, as well as in your targeting criteria for your PPC campaigns.
You should tailor your content into several different topics, such as aesthetic, education, and spatial design and its functions. Short video should be used organically or in paid social media campaigns to capture the persona’s attention.
This persona relies on reviews. For them to download the whitepaper, they need information about the brand’s work, including client testimonials. Build a space and incentive for current clients to share their own experiences and advocate your brand.
B2C example
Step 1: Set a goal
The brand is a food and beverage company. Its goal is to launch a new product into Asian markets.
The target persona is a woman in her 20s who is very sociable. Persona research has identified this type of person as the ideal customer for this brand.
Step 2: Collect the data
The following are some good questions to ask this persona in the interview:
- “Would you take me through your day-to-day life from when you wake up until you go to sleep?”
- “Do you follow any influencers or anyone you subscribe to? If so, who, why, and how often do you watch them?”
- “What kind of topics do you think are interesting?”
- “How do you get information? Do you watch or follow news? Where do you get your news?”
- “What is the last brand you saw recently? What do you think about it?”
- “If you get interested in a product or service, what do you do?”
- “Are there any brands/products/services you like? Why?”
- “How do you like brands/products/services to present themselves?”
- “How do you find out about brands/products/services in the first place?”
Step 3: Visualise the data
Based on the information gathered in the interviews, you are able to create this customer journey map:
Step 4: Analyse the data
When you analyse the customer journey map, you realise that the critical stages for this persona are awareness, consideration and receiving.
It is important to create excitement for the persona when they discover your brand. You should start by creating content with influencers they follow and an attractive paid social media campaign to support the influencer content.
This persona is very sociable, so you should create content on your social media about different social activities that the persona does with their friends, such as going for picnics, hanging out and creating memories.
Content created for this market has to be inspiring with an aesthetic that is palatable for them. This persona comes from a very artistic background, and therefore art-based visuals are enticing for them.
Conclusion
I hope this guide has provided you with a useful introduction to the topic of customer journey mapping. By doing the research to truly understand your customers’ interactions with your brand, you can create a better, more seamless customer experience for them, addressing their pain points and taking action to provide them with the best possible support at every single stage of the customer journey. This should ultimately lead to happier customers, a better brand reputation, and better business. Good luck!
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