Understanding your customers is essential for any marketing strategy. One powerful tool for identifying customer pain points at different stages of the buyers’ journey is a customer journey map.
A customer journey map provides a visual representation of the buying process. It shows the different stages that potential customers go through when considering whether or not to buy your product, how they interact with you throughout their experience, and what barriers may be preventing them from making purchases.
The goal of mapping out your customer’s journey is to understand your target market better. Like how your target market learns about your product/business/brand, what catches their attention, when they decide to purchase your product/service, up to why they decided to do that. Eventually, you will know how you can guide your potential customers effectively and efficiently from the start of the customer journey till the end.
Creating a customer journey map will help you identify areas (or specific parts of the customer journey) for improvement so you can deliver better customer experiences which will lead to increased revenues.
The Customer Journey Mapping Process
The most important part of this exercise is asking the right questions to your customers and the people who sell or service them. Customer journey mapping is a collaborative process that requires input from salespeople, marketing teams, and C-level executives.
When creating this map, it’s important to consider where you touch consumers throughout their buying cycle:
- During initial research
- When they are in the evaluation phase during purchase negotiations
- When a purchase is made
- After the purchase is made
- When you want to offer an upgrade or upsell
- When the upgrade or upsell is made
Do note that your customer journey might be more extensive or much simpler than above. Every customer journey is different. You might have different products and if you’re targeting different markets, there will be different journeys as well.
Customer journey mapping also involves asking open-ended questions so that you can get all of the insights from customers. We definitely recommend you also incorporate your marketing or sales funnel into this customer journey.
Once you have conducted this exercise, the next step is to identify the specific pain points that customers experience which will lead them to find you. Then prioritize which issues are most important and how they can be addressed by your product or service.
Customer journey mapping allows your business to get a clear picture of your customer’s buying process so you can better understand who your ideal clients are and what keeps them from becoming your customers.
Challenges That You May Encounter During Mapping Process
A key challenge when creating a customer journey map is deciding who should participate in this process. It is a collaborative exercise that requires input from multiple departments within an organization, and therefore it’s important to decide who should be involved in the process.
Other challenges include:
- Deciding what topics need to be included. Customer feedback can come with lots of different data points which makes it difficult to identify which ones to prioritize.
- Determining the right format for mapping. Customer journey maps allow you to visualize and communicate customer interactions throughout their buying cycle. These maps come in various formats and there are many tools that help identify this data in a visual format, but it can be difficult to identify which one will work best for your data.
- Finding the right time frame. Customer journey mapping is a long-term exercise that requires consistent input from all team members throughout each stage of the buying cycle. This can be difficult to keep up with, especially when there are multiple projects that need to be completed.
Here Are Some Questions to Ask When Mapping a Customer Journey:
- Where are your customers in the buying process?
- What touchpoints have they had with your sales team or marketing efforts throughout their journey?
- How does each department interact with new prospects and existing clients?
- What does our customer base look like? Who makes up this group? What types of interactions do they have with our brand?
- What is the profile of a customer who does not purchase from us?
- Why do you think this type of person doesn’t buy from us, and what can we do to remedy that situation?
- What are their pain points throughout the buying cycle?
- How might we be able to influence them during each stage?
- What are our competitors doing to attract and retain customers?
- What do we see them doing that works well for their target audience, and what could be improved upon?
- How does this compare to how we approach the market?
Final Thought
When it comes to marketing, understanding your customers is key. If you want to reach the people most likely to buy from you and need help doing so, customer journey mapping can be a powerful tool for digital marketers. Do you have this mapped out?
If not, it might be time to invest in creating one! Contact us at kaliber.asia if you’re looking for more information about building an effective customer journey map and incorporate it into your own strategy!
