How can you turn a lead into a customer? The journey from point A to point B is challenging, both for the customer and you, the business owner. Not only do you need to satisfy the customer’s needs throughout the journey, but also you need to make sure you are doing it better than your competitors.
In fact, you must know your customers inside and out to compete against your competition. To avoid the unwanted scenario of losing the customers, you need a plan, which should ideally comprise answers to this question: “How can a potential lead become a qualifying lead that eventually converts?”
Rightfully called “customer journey mapping,” you must understand each of its phases and use it to your advantage. This will help you shape the marketing landscape of your business. Let us take a look at it and all of the benefits of customer journey mapping.
Phases of customer journey mapping
1. Define objectives
To start with, defining the objectives is the stepping stone of every journey. The most significant focus should be put on the buyer’s persona. Discovering their goals, triggers, motivators, and fears will bring you closer to their needs and the shape in which they want to have their solution handed.
2. Identify buyer goals for shopping from you
The next step is to list all the goals of your ideal buyer persona. You can look for answers within your existing customers by exploring how they came to your website, their prime interest, what drew them to you, and, most importantly, the deciding factor that made them make the purchase. You will get a lot of info based on which you can start shaping the buyer’s journey for future customers.
3. Highlight the weak spots
Apart from finding how the customers got to you, you should also find out how you lose the potential customers on the way. What is it that you do wrong that makes them lose interest and find the next best thing. This means that revealing your strategy’s weak spots is sometimes even more critical because you can use that info to improve the strategy.
4. Analyse your user experience
Another essential step of shaping the customer journey map is ensuring that the user experience you are providing on your website is clear and engaging enough to progress the leads through your marketing funnel to the finish.
5. Test the journey
The last phase is to test the journey before starting to implement it in real life. You can do this by putting yourself in the customer’s shoes and progress from point A to B to make sure everything is covered. As the customer journey map is a constant work in progress, never settle – always adjust it to fit the needs of the customers and to follow the latest trends in marketing and your industry.
Benefits of customer journey mapping
Once we are clear about what it is and its phases, it is time to see what you are gaining from after crafting the superior customer journey map:
1. Learn who your leads are
With the customer journey map, you get introduced to who your leads are and their needs. You understand what their goal is and why they are interested in your products or services.
2. Learn where the leads discover you
Another benefit that the customer journey mapping brings you is understanding where your leads come from. You get insights into how they discovered you. And most importantly, you can use this data to place more focus on those marketing platforms to increase the organic traffic even more and get more qualified leads.
3. Enable lead nurturing campaigns
When you collect the info about how successful your email marketing, content marketing, and social media activities are, you will be able to focus on creating nurturing campaigns that provide the ultimate customer’s experience.
4. Get feedback
Of course, there might be obstacles along the way of mapping the customer’s journey. However, you will be able to get feedback on the common pain points and find solutions. Feedback is essential as it is the only cursor that shows the direction in which your business is advancing.
5. Cross-sell and up-sell
Finally, with the customer journey mapping, you will be able to find opportunities for cross-selling and upselling and develop your business into a well-recognisable brand that is enjoyed by many loyal customers.
Does it stop after the purchase?
It is crucial to understand that the customer journey does not stop after they make the purchase. Not at all. It continues with ‘thank-you’ emails and other various forms of interaction, including offering them more unusual deals in the future that will make them come back and buy from you again.
The threat of not mapping the customer’s journey
After all, everything you have to lose is pretty apparent if you do not perform customer journey mapping. All the insightful data about the leads and their needs, emotions, and goals will be unavailable to you, making you incompetent to know their buyer’s persona.
The risk is enormous, and you cannot leave it to luck. Even though you try to use different marketing strategies and be present on every social media platform and pay for sponsored ads, it won’t matter if you are not getting to the customer.
For example, you sell the most delicious pizza, and the photos of promoting it will make customers drool. And if you do not know how to find the customers who will like to eat this pizza (if you have no info from a customer journey mapping), you might end up offering it to people who do not eat pizza at all. In such cases, it does not matter that you have the best pizza, and you have paid for photos that are impossible to overlook.
This allegory relates to any product or service there is in the business world. To offer it to the right people, first, you need to find the right people. And once you find them, you need to know how to bring them from point A (being a lead) to point B (make the purchase) and possibly to point C (become loyal customers). For that, you need a customer journey map.
Hannah Derby is a digital marketer who is enthusiastic about trying out the newest trends and innovations in the digital marketing industry and helping businesses advance. She also uses her knowledge and expertise gained from a JTF Marketing training that raised her interest in the marketing automation industry.
Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this blog post are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of Think Little Big Marketing.
