In order to properly understand the customer journey from the perspective of your customers, you need some empathy. It is often extremely easy for companies to see their customers' path to conversion as relatively straightforward - but of course this is not practical. The supremacy of social media in browsing in particular has led us to speak of completely differently distributed touchpoints in online marketing today than was the case just a few years ago.
Whether you are primarily maintaining your own website, focusing more and more on performance marketing or working with influencers and brand ambassadors: Your goal must be to be able to accompany the customer journey technically and, of course, in terms of content across all touchpoints. We reveal how this works in this overview.
The customer journey is classically divided into five phases and does not necessarily end with the conversion.
In the first phase, you create awareness of your brand, what your company stands for and what problem you can solve. This is where your social media posts can make a valuable contribution. For many customers, they represent the first touchpoint of the first stage of the customer journey.
In the second phase, customers consider buying a product, but not necessarily from you. In this phase, opinions and guides are obtained and prices and offers are compared. Customers are often still waiting for the one incentive that will tip the scales in favor of the purchase decision.
The conversion is of course the goal of the customer journey, but not the final destination. Good feedback and positive reactions without final conversions are a start. But ultimately, a marketing team can only achieve its goals if the company can also benefit economically from social media marketing.
Social media in particular makes it easier to understand that loyal customers who are happy to shop with you again are a decisive success factor. You can continue to communicate relevant content to your site's subscribers via Instagram, Facebook and the like without having to explicitly advertise. Tailor-made ads also place relevant offers that really match the preferences of your target group.
The ultimate goal of the customer journey is brand advocacy. In this final phase, customers become ambassadors for your brand. This does not always have to be done explicitly, even interaction with your brand on social media improves your organic reach. Comments, taking part in competitions or sharing posts show a connection in terms of content - it gets even better if customers recommend your products on their own or share the fun of your brand with an @-tag.
It is already easy to understand that the customer journey can become infinitely complex. After all, not every phase can be equated with a single touchpoint.
Taking awareness as an example, potential customers may hear about your company for the first time at the beginning of this phase. Awareness is then expanded via posts shared from the customer network and your ads.
On social media, it is also worth differentiating between Paid (ads), Owned (own website or own channel) and Earned (reviews, tests, recommendations from users).
Social media offer companies the advantage that the quality of touchpoints can be very easily visualized as a statistical analysis. This gives you crucial insights into user behavior and the data you need to track ads and generate additional touchpoints.
Successful campaigns often manage to accompany users from touchpoint to touchpoint. For example, after existing contact on social media, a post can be linked to your own page. In addition, thresholds can be integrated into the campaigns via which triggers such as calling up an info page or abandoning a full shopping basket trigger very specific reactions.
Not only should purely quantitative, binary triggers be set here, but the diverse analyses on social media can be used to assign different scores to the touchpoints. This is because the moment of truth can be used to determine how decisive a touchpoint actually is in the customer journey.
This moment is the decisive touchpoint for the initial purchase decision and it is now possible to clearly categorize which touchpoints customers have previously passed through.
This allows you to streamline your customer journey and identify touchpoints that perform better or worse. Especially after the purchase, your behavior plays a decisive role in the long-term success of your brand. Touchpoints that build loyalty and encourage existing customers to become more involved are an important sign that you, as a brand, still care about your customers even after you have had their money in your account for a long time.
And while newsletters continue to be an important part of a customized feedback loop for your customers, social media has the advantage that every interaction with you grows your organic reach. Good marketing with brand ambassadors and loyal customers therefore automatically generates new touchpoints for people who may never have heard of your brand before.
The most important factor for users is of course the quality of the content that you offer at the touchpoints. This can refer to linked articles, the information content of your posts or simply the quality of your images, videos or stories.
However, this quality is not a purely measurable factor, but is also related to the phase of the customer journey in which the target group currently finds itself. While you create stories and posts for all followers, you have more freedom with ads to offer the perfect content via marketing automation, triggers and lead scores.