Creating a customer journey map is becoming increasingly important in many companies and can have a lasting impact on many companies' marketing performance. It offers marketing and sales new approaches and a review of previous activities. Our Customer Journey PowerPoint template is available at the end of this article.
A customer journey map is essentially a visual description of all the points of contact between a customer and your company, in which the marketing steps you have initiated accompany the customer comprehensively and support them from the initial awareness of the company or a product to the final purchase.
The customer journey map not only supports you in planning the various marketing measures and campaigns, but also effectively shows at which point the customer is touched or addressed by which measures. By evaluating the various data, you can even evaluate and determine the effectiveness of the individual campaign elements.
Customer loyalty is becoming increasingly difficult. For targeted marketing across all available marketing channels, however, the individual measures must be optimized for the customer and adapted to their needs and desires. The Customer Journey Map allows you to visually assign the measures to the various touch and interaction points of the customer and the company and to identify and rectify errors and problems within these processes more quickly. In addition, the visual representation allows you to recognize any synergies more quickly and thus benefit from them in the long term as a company. A customer journey map also serves as an argumentation strategy and can be used to support your own argumentation in budget negotiations, for example. Finally, the intended measures and their goals are comprehensively and clearly documented on the customer journey map.
The success and accuracy of a customer journey map depends above all on the available and evaluated data within the company. The more precisely you research and process the required data, the more effectively it can be used to determine the buyer persona and thus the customer journey. You can draw on different data sources within your company as well as external data sources. Internal data sources include, among others:
External sources can also be used to further improve the data situation. Here you can draw on the following sources, among others:
All sources should not only be comprehensively evaluated, but also compared with each other. This allows you to confirm or reject hypotheses and significantly increase the quality of the actual data. It is important that you prepare the data comprehensively so that the buyer persona can be defined in the next step.
As a rule, target groups are already defined and subdivided accordingly. The buyer persona now represents a typical representative of the respective target group. Consider their wishes, their priorities, their values, their goals and many other factors in order to have the buyer persona act logically and consistently based on this data and content. In order to define a buyer persona, in addition to the relevant hard factors, you should always try to switch to the perspective of this person and check the logic of subsequent actions. If possible, develop your own questionnaire with which you can accurately map different buyer personas again and again. The questions that should be asked here are:
These are of course many questions, which are not always easy to answer. But with every question answered, the personality behind the buyer persona grows, which makes his movements and decisions more comprehensible.
Once the buyer persona has been developed, the next step is to define the customer journey map. Ideally, this visualizes all so-called steps. A step is a touchpoint, i.e. a point of contact between the company and the buyer persona. This can be a direct contact, but also the viewing of an advertisement by the buyer persona. Consider all potential touchpoints from the customer's first attention to their purchase from the company. Eliminate unimportant and inappropriate touchpoints and think carefully about which other touchpoints could still be important. The movement of the customer along these touchpoints is later displayed visually in the customer journey map. However, a list is initially sufficient for the collection. It is often helpful to work together with colleagues from the individual departments to define and cover all possible touchpoints. But that's not all. Because each touchpoint can take place on different channels.
Marketing and sales channels are very many in many companies. For this reason, the channel that is used at a touchpoint must of course also be taken into account.
Let's take a direct example: The touchpoint of the buyer persona is a free initial consultation by a company employee. There are three different channels to choose from. Such an initial consultation can take place by telephone, at a face-to-face meeting with an employee or also through an online meeting.
Depending on the channel, the customer journey map can change and shift. By prioritizing individual channels and possibly even eliminating individual channels for the buyer persona, the customer journey can now be made much simpler and, above all, more straightforward. This makes it much easier to work on the customer journey map and helps to keep it lean and clear.
Now comes a very difficult part of creating the customer journey map. This is because you need to fill the buyer persona with life and use it to check the customer journey map for errors and weak points. For you, this means that you have to slip into the role of the buyer persona in order to find these weaknesses. Consider the feelings and emotional reactions of the persona for each touchpoint. These feelings can give you important clues as to whether information is missing at a certain touchpoint, for example, or whether the customer is being left alone or even overloaded with information at a certain point. Above all, the customer's need for information is of crucial importance. So use every opportunity to visualize the information acquisition and the information possibilities. The further the buyer persona progresses along the customer journey, the greater the need for information usually becomes, as a purchase decision is imminent.
Once you have gone through all the steps, you now need to create the actual customer journey map and visualize the results. You can use a wide variety of media and tools to do this. If the customer journey map is only needed within your department, you can use a simple flipchart, for example, to complete the visualization as quickly as possible. There are also some helpful tools that make it easier for you to visualize the customer journey map. These include, among others:
The only important thing is that you choose an easy-to-use tool so that the customer journey map can be easily visualized and thus used.
It may of course be tempting to extend a customer journey map once it has been created to other sub-areas or other target groups and buyer personas. However, this can often lead to considerable problems. This is because the basic data and, above all, the basic preliminary considerations regarding the buyer persona are omitted in these steps. As a direct consequence, the touchpoints and steps can no longer be adequately assigned to the persona. This initially leads to minor discrepancies, which quickly and at an ever-increasing pace lead to errors and miscalculations. In the simplest case, you no longer meet the customer and target group with your marketing due to such a map and potential sales are lost. In the worst case, however, you address the customer so inappropriately to the target group that they turn away from the company completely and can therefore no longer be acquired as a customer. For this reason, it makes perfect sense to invest a lot of time and energy in the customer journey map, as this investment pays off in the long term through effective and, above all, lasting customer relationships.