One vital aspect of your marketing strategy is understanding who your audience is and how they think. Sure, while it’s almost impossible to get into the mind of each individual lead that comes your way, digital customer journey mapping can help put you in your leads’ shoes and show you how best to approach and nurture them through the sales funnel.
What is Digital Customer Journey Mapping?
Digital customer journey mapping is the process of creating a visual customer journey map that walks you step by step through the customer’s journey. This map starts at your initial touchpoint and should walk you (and your customer) through the entire sales journey from start to finish. Doing so allows you to visualize the journey from the customer’s perspective, rather than the seller’s.
Creating a Customer Journey Map in 5 Simple Steps
Digital customer journey mapping isn’t as tedious as it may initially seem. You can get started with these five simple steps:
1. Defining Your Ideal Customer
Carefully defining who your ideal customer is will require you to work out detailed customer personas. Outline the ideal customer who would benefit the most from what you have to offer. A typical customer persona will include:
- Age
- Gender
- Education
- Hobbies
- Location (great for local SEO purposes)
- Job Title
- Income
- Goals
- Challenges
- Values/Fears
By outlining this information early on, you’ll be better able to identify where they belong later on. So, as tedious as this step may seem, you must begin here and provide as much detail as possible.
2. Clearly Identify Your Customer’s Pain Points
When a consumer makes a purchase, they are looking to solve a problem – this problem is their pain point. Customers head online to start researching solutions to these pain points, which is how they stumble upon brands.
Not quite sure how to pinpoint these pain points? Then think in reverse: You have a product/service – what problem is your product/service solving for customers? That problem is your customer’s pain point.
3. Understand Your Customer’s End-Goal
Are your customers searching for educational materials? Are they looking for a service or a product?
Your ideal customer may not be interested in making a purchase right off the bat. Instead, they may be seeking educational materials. So, instead of trying to sell to this customer, their journey would require more nurturing and relationship building. In the long term, your relationship-building efforts could lead to a conversion down the line.
However, if your customer is looking for an immediate purchase, you’ll want to consider how to make their journey quick and efficient.
4. Map Out Their Journey by Defining Each Touchpoint
Begin the digital customer journey mapping process by defining each touchpoint necessary to guide the customer to their end goal. Research shows that the average number of touchpoints in the sales process is eight, meaning the lead needs to interact with your brand at least eight times before committing to a purchase.
However, depending on the customer’s end goal, that number could be as few as two or three, or as many as 10 or more.
Consider the example of a customer seeking educational content. You know they need to be nurtured quite a bit before you approach them with a sale. So, their journey may look something like this:
- Initial touchpoint – reads a blog on your website
- Signs up for your email newsletter
- Receives your welcome email campaign – clicks through to learn more about the brand, may see a product on your page and click on it, but doesn’t purchase
- Receives an abandoned cart email regarding the product that also includes customer testimonials
- The customer clicks through and makes the purchase.
That’s at least five touchpoints (depending on what your welcome email campaign looks like). Remember, you always want to educate your audience and build relationships so that scammy tactics won’t work.
5. Implement, Research, Analyze, and Improve
You’ll want to run your customer journey for a predetermined period to assess its effectiveness. Once that period is up, you’ll want to carefully analyze it to see what was working and what wasn’t. From there, you can make the necessary improvements and restart the process until you begin to see more conversions.
Conduct Expert Research with CadenceSEO Consulting
Conducting customer and market research may not be the most fun thing to do. That doesn’t mean it’s unimportant. In fact, without it, you are simply flying blind, and that’s no way to conduct business.
Let the skilled research team at CadenceSEO Consulting take over the task of conducting your market and consumer research. In return, you will receive a detailed report that can help you improve both your digital marketing and business strategies.
Ready to get started? Then contact us today for more information!
