Understanding and Using Customer Journey Maps for Better Marketing

Getting into the minds of your customer can be challenging for any company. It may create confusion when you see customers spending time on choosing products on your website and then leave just before committing to the purchase.

Whatever the confusion may be, the root cause is that you may not have a clear understanding of the customer journey. The customer journey is the path a customer takes with a company in order to achieve a goal.

Customer Journey Mapping Becoming More Important

Data and privacy have been two prominent topics in 2019 and it’s easy to see why. There is more customer data available than ever before. With the help of automation and AI, companies are able to analyse data points to get insights on how to target customers.

Many brands, however, fail to extract valuable insights and move from measurement to a set of actions. And it’s not as easy as it may seem to strike the perfect balance for the right person, at the right time, in the right place conundrum. One of the reasons for this is because many marketing teams view the customer journey as a linear funnel. In reality, the customer journey is erratic and may loop in and out of a certain stage to get more insight about a product or put on hold a purchase decision.

Customers experience brands in unique ways, skipping ahead and looping back whenever it makes sense for them personally. Using a traditional sales funnel to understand and predict behaviour will not yield the most effective results. That is why it’s important to have a grasp on your own customers’ journey maps. These are based on a flexible framework that helps you understand how customers experience your brand.

Customer journey maps help drive three important marketing initiatives:

Build a better product — Customer journey maps give insights into consumer behaviour within your customer experience cycle, which can help you make improvements. The more you know how people engage and interact, the better you can understand what points in your experience work well and which ones need adjusting.

Put the customer at the centre of your business — With the help of customer journey mapping, you can design a marketing strategy with the customer at the centre of it. The more you know about how customers use your product, the more you know how and where to start engaging with them.

Ensure your marketing efforts are in the right place — Your marketing efforts should be driven not only by the company’s product but also by the customer. To get the digital experience right, it’s important to learn from the customer journey map and focus your effort on the map points that help the customer move to the next stage of their journey.