Why Do You Need a Customer Journey?
Customer journeys are models of how a customer makes his/her buying decisions about a product or service (or even non-profit actions like donations). Unlike a sales funnel, which looks at these transactions from the company’s point of view, the customer journey shows the step-by-step process of making decisions undertaken by the customer. Imagine, for instance, the last time you booked a vacation. Some of the steps you took might have included:
- daydreaming about vacation experiences
- researching potential destinations
- researching specific hotels and flights
- comparing reviews of hotels
- looking for deals on hotels
- considering an individual hotel and looking at its amenities on its website
- ….et cetera
And that’s before booking! There are then the experiential and post-purchase steps!
Customer journey maps should be specific to each individual type of customer (or persona) that a company has. Some models are simple and straightforward, while others show the many touch-points and influencers who may affect a customer’s journey.
Regardless of how your customer journey is laid out, using it to create a content marketing plan requires you to consider your customer psychographically (to understand their drivers), qualitatively (to understand their changing needs over time), and quantitatively (to understand their behaviors along the journey).
Having customer journeys mapped out allows your company to be more strategic in not only how you create content for your audience, but also how your audience may interact with your marketing, sales, and customer service teams.
In other words, customer journeys should serve as a backbone for alignment throughout your company.
For more insights into how to create stronger customer journeys, click through these slides from my recent presentation at Leadscon.