Customer journey mapping documents your persona as they move through the process of interacting with your brand. It creates a shared vocabulary between departments and helps you to empathize with your customer at all stages of the buying cycle.
Episode Show Notes
Introduction Definition of Journey Mapping
(0:00 – 1:48) Introduction To Iterative Marketing Podcast- Customer Journey Mapping: The Iterative Marketing Podcast provides marketers and entrepreneurs with actionable ideas, techniques, and examples to enhance their marketing results. The podcast hosts Steve Robinson and Elizabeth Earin introduce this episode, which delves into customer journey mapping, a method for improving customer experiences. To access additional resources, visit brilliantmetrics.com, where you’ll find a blog and a LinkedIn community group.
(1:48 – 2:50) Customer Journey Mapping: Definition: The episode emphasizes the importance of customer journey mapping in the marketing process. A journey map documents the customer’s thoughts, feelings, and experiences as they move through the sales cycle, from initial awareness to post-purchase. This valuable tool helps organizations understand customers’ motivations and barriers, allowing for better targeting of collateral, auditing of customer experiences, and additional benefits that will be discussed later in the show.
Going Beyond the Sales Funnel
(2:50 – 5:58) Mastering the Art of Customer Journey Mapping: Beyond the Sales Funnel: This section of the episode highlights the significance of extending customer journey mapping beyond the initial sale, encompassing the entire customer experience. Models like AIDA (Awareness, Interest, Desire, Action) and See-Think-Do can be adapted to include additional stages such as Grow and Give. It’s crucial to recognize that customers’ journeys aren’t strictly linear; they may move back and forth between stages based on their needs and circumstances. Additionally, customers may cycle back to the beginning of the journey, becoming unknown to the brand again, highlighting the need to maintain ongoing engagement and monitoring of the customer experience.
(5:58 – 8:16) Going Beyond Personas: Using Customer Journey Maps to Enhance Customer Understanding: This section emphasizes the importance of customer journey maps in understanding the customer experience. While personas are useful tools, they only provide a snapshot of a customer at a single point in time. On the other hand, a customer journey map captures the entire process, revealing pain points, motivations, and distractions. This helps marketers and other departments within a company to empathize better with customers and create actionable strategies. The customer journey map essentially tells the story of a persona as it evolves over time and interacts with various aspects of a business.
(8:16 – 11:49) Using Customer Journey Maps to Guide Customers at Every Stage of the Decision-Making Process: It is important to involve different teams, such as sales, customer service, product development, and operations when creating customer journey maps. These maps help marketers understand the customer lifecycle and find ways to extend it or transform customers into brand evangelists. They also enable a shared vocabulary for discussing when and how to target customers.
The customer journey map helps set realistic expectations, as customers may be at different stages in the decision-making process. It’s essential to guide and provide the best experience for customers at each stage rather than pushing them to move to the next stage. By offering the correct information and support without being pushy, brands can create better experiences that encourage customers to choose them over competitors.
Charity Outreach
(11:49 – 12:51) Charity Break: University of Minnesota Eric Tobias Johnson Music Scholarship
Providing Value at Every Stage
(12:51 -16:33) Maximizing Customer Satisfaction with Comprehensive Customer Journey Maps: A customer journey map is a document that outlines the thoughts, feelings, and motivations of a persona at each stage of their journey with a brand. It helps marketing and sales teams craft emotionally appealing content and address unexpressed concerns. The map also highlights the importance of brand attributes at specific stages, as needs may evolve over time. Understanding these dynamics leads to more effective marketing and sales strategies and better overall customer experiences.
(16:33 – 17:51) The Art of Timing: Using Customer Journey Maps to Showcase Different Facets of Your Brand: Just like in dating, brands have multiple layers and facets that make them unique and interesting. The key is knowing when to reveal those different aspects to customers during their journey. By documenting and understanding the customer journey, the entire organization can align on when to showcase a brand’s various attributes, such as its softer side or its innovative aspect.
Another important aspect of the customer journey is setting realistic expectations. This helps in managing the customer’s experience and ensures that they are not overwhelmed or pushed too quickly through the journey. Understanding when a customer is ready to move to the next stage and tailoring the experience accordingly is crucial for building a strong, long-lasting relationship with them.
(17:51 – 21:11) The Art of Customer Influence: Providing the Right Messaging and Brand Attributes for Each Stage of the Journey: Influencing a persona as they move through the journey is not about pushing them from one stage to another. Instead, it’s about creating a phenomenal experience and providing the right messaging for each stage. Key messaging and appropriate brand attributes help inform and reassure customers, meeting their needs and making them feel comfortable throughout the journey. This ensures that our brand remains at the top of its list when they’re ready to move forward.
(21:11 – 23:53) Strategic Customer Journey Mapping: Above and Below the Line Content to Drive Customer Engagement: The customer journey map consists of two sections: above the line and below the line. The first part involves discovering the persona’s thoughts, feelings, and the aspects of the brand they want to experience, while the second part focuses on creating content and aligning it with channels and media. The key is to create content that’s valuable enough for customers to exchange their contact information or overcome distractions and competing information. By providing content that customers would “pay for” in exchange for their information, we create a stronger connection and increase the chances of them engaging with our brand.
Creating Comprehensive Customer Journey Maps
(23:53 – 26:16) Building Comprehensive Personas and Customer Journey Maps for Targeted Marketing Strategies: To create an effective persona and understand the customer journey, it’s crucial to involve representatives from all relevant departments to get a well-rounded perspective. Gather and analyze customer data to create comprehensive personas and conduct customer interviews or surveys for additional insights. Map out the customer journey, considering different stages and experiences, and identify key messages, content, and touchpoints for each stage of the journey. Regularly review and update your personas and customer journey maps to ensure your marketing strategies remain targeted and deliver a seamless customer experience throughout their journey.
(26:16 – 28:08) The Power of Simplicity in Creating Effective Customer Journey Maps: When creating a customer journey map, it’s important to remember that the goal is to uncover and understand the existing journey rather than to create a new one from scratch. To do this effectively, involve representatives from various departments to ensure the journey reflects reality. Simplicity is key in the journey mapping process, as it’s easier to split stages later on if needed rather than trying to merge overly complicated stages. By keeping the customer journey map simple and focused on customers’ actual experiences, marketers can better align their messages, content, and touchpoints with the context in which the persona is engaging.
(28:08 – 29:39) The Art of Customer Journey Mapping: Understanding the Static and Dynamic Components: When creating a customer journey map, it’s essential to understand that the above-the-line portion is generally static, representing the customer’s thoughts and experiences, key brand attributes, and stages in the sales process. This part of the map is unlikely to change unless significant alterations to the sales process, organizational structure, or product/service offerings exist.
The below-the-line portion of the map, on the other hand, represents the key messages, content, and channels used to engage with the customer. This part can vary and change over time as marketing strategies evolve or the organization’s content and channel offerings expand. It’s essential to approach the customer journey mapping process as a field researcher, trying to accurately portray and understand the customer’s experience along their journey.
(29:39 – 33:37) Maximizing the Value of Marketing Documents in Customer Journey Mapping and Collaboration: It is important to not let valuable marketing documents, such as personas, become forgotten. These documents should be incorporated into the everyday language of marketing departments and shared with external vendors and team members. To make the most of these documents, they should be made visually and easily accessible.
Using these documents can help identify content gaps and improve the customer experience. By analyzing the customer journey from end to end, marketing teams can recognize opportunities for better customer engagement, consistency, and collaboration between different departments. The customer journey helps ensure a consistent experience, whether through collateral, digital ads, or customer service interactions.
Additionally, the hosts emphasize the importance of involving external vendors in understanding the bigger picture of the customer journey, ensuring their contributions are aligned with the overall strategy.
Join Us Next Time
(33:37 – 34:18) Conclusion: The importance of aligning media and content will be explored in greater detail in an upcoming podcast. This concludes this week’s episode. Join the next podcast, which will cover aligning media and content with a brand’s persona and customer journey. Join us and start achieving better results! Goodbye until next week.
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The Iterative Marketing Podcast, a production of Brilliant Metrics, ran from February 2016 to September 2017. Music by SeaStock Audio.
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