Grow your marketing by growing your knowledge in customer journey maps.
The customer journey map is an important step in creating your best marketing materials – see examples of how it’s done.
Before creating any marketing materials, many marketers find that they can create more refined messaging and increase conversions through customer journey mapping. Creating a customer journey map is a tried and true (if a little laborious) process that helps an agency or business understand who their customer is and what steps they’re likely to take before purchasing a business’s product or service. It can take some time, but this step, as shown by some of these examples, can really help you with your messaging.
Customer Journey Stages
Customer journey maps – also called consumer journey, consumer experience, user journey, or buyer journey maps, depending on the product – are comprised of customer journey stages towards purchase. A map looks at the people most likely to be customers for your product and looks at the steps they’ll like take from your initial marketing materials and through your website to purchasing.
Some of the steps you’d fine on a typical customer journey map include:
- Awareness: This is when a potential customer (“lead”) becomes aware of your product (either your brand specifically or the existence of the type of product you have in general), often through a TV ad, radio spot, web banner, or digital advertising.
- Consideration and Research: A customer starts to look into your product (or similar products) to solve a problem they have. Customers often do their research through reading blogs, reviews, etc.
- Action: This is the purchase or decision stage. Your customer has enough information to make a decision and pulls the trigger with a web purchase, phone call, etc.
- Loyalty: A customer experience doesn’t end after a purchase. You want to create fans of your brand that can either become loyal repeat customers or recommend your brand to other people for word of mouth advertising.
Best Examples of Journey Mapping
The customer journey mapping process can take some trial and error while you figure out what works for your brand, your product, and your people. You can start in a simple Excel spreadsheet, but here are some examples of how other organizations have chosen to tackle this step.
The LANCÔME cosmetics brand uses this brand journey map to follow a typical customer’s path to purchase. It includes steps for the business to take at every step of the customer journey to either provide information, help them make decisions, offer a seamless experience to create fans, or nurture the relationship after purchase.
Another good example of a journey map includes ‘Customer Journey Map with Good and Bad Experience‘ built by MyCustomer.com. It clearly displays the customer personas (typical kinds of buyer), steps towards purchase, and even the kinds of experience a customer might have on their journey – positive or negative – and situations for each, as well as potential steps to direct a customer to take to help avoid any negative experiences.
Does your business or marketing team ever create customer journey maps? Have you found any good customer journey tools that allow you to clearly and concisely map your customer’s path to purchase and help your business meet and nurture them towards that along the way?
