Customer Journey Mapping has become an incredible tool for envisioning the customer’s experience, but why? How do you create them and what is the best way of going about it?
Why journey map?
Journey Mapping is an essential tool when it comes to understanding the customer. Businesses of any size and from any sector benefit from Journey Mapping.
Sales managers/marketers – Journey Mapping helps sales managers and marketeers in hitting their targets. Research by the ‘Aberdeen Group’ companies who map the Customer Journey saw an average increase in revenue of 24.9% from associated marketing campaigns.
Copywriting – Journey Mapping can help to understand the questions users have and their emotions which meets the customer’s needs.
Designer – Journey Mapping can help in the understanding of the context of users where you can achieve a clear picture of understanding imagery that resonates with them and visually appeals.
How to journey map – the high level.
There are 6 key common areas that can be taken into consideration when Journey Mapping. These are:
- Tasks. What is the user trying to achieve?
- Questions. What does the user want to know?
- Touch points. How does the user interact with the organisation?
- Emotions. How is the user feeling at this stage in the process and what are the customers needs?
- Weaknesses. What let’s the user down at this stage?
- Influences. Who or what is helping to shape the users decision?
Every user will have different needs and have different thoughts at each stage of the journey, so taking all of this into consideration is key.
Personas
Creating a customer persona is one of the best ways to determine the type of customer the service wants to map. They reflect characteristics like personal attributes, goals, motivations, attitudes, etc that you can take into consideration when targeting customers.
How to create customer personas
Creating a customer persona is simple with these questions that you can ask yourself:
- Which channel are they using to engage with you?
- What does your customer expect from your service?
- Give the persona a name.
- If you’re working with them in a B2B environment, understand their role.
By making the persona as accurate as you can, you are more likely to achieve the best response from your customer. You may need to create multiple personas if your customers are diverse, but starting with one can help to create the first customer journey.
Why personas matter?
Personas can be an extremely helpful tool for branding, marketing, strategy, etc. Customer personas are not only an invaluable tool for understanding the needs and behaviours of specific audiences, they can be very helpful to inform business strategy and brand strategy.
Content driven by personas?
By using data to define your customer personas, the more direction you’ll give your strategy. Here are some of the data sources for building personas:
- Social Media Networks.
- How they interact and move around a website.
- Customer and Email Database.
- Software which can show you which organisations are visiting your website.
- Customer feedback.
By using these data sources, you can easily determine what kind of content the persona needs by their age, gender, job, and more. Then, it becomes easier to serve content in the media form they want.
