in Branding Blog Articles, Digital Marketing

What is “Customer Journey” and Why You Should Care

Understanding Your Brand’s Customer Journey

How and why do your customers become your customers? If you are unable to answer this question with specifics, then you need to take a look at your brand’s customer journey. Your customer journey is different from your sales funnel: It is a little less defined than a sales funnel and can be seen as the step before the funnel begins. It tracks how people even become a visitor in the first place and helps you zero in on what is getting people’s attention the best. If you want to define your customer journey and start getting the best possible leads, this blog is for you. Keep reading to learn more about what a customer journey is and how you can fine-tune it to a lead-generating machine.

What is the Customer Journey?

The customer journey consists of actions your customers take before and after they make a purchase. It should be part of your overall marketing strategy to improve lead generation and enable more effective marketing. By understanding the different actions your customers take before and after a conversion, you can start brainstorming new marketing tactics to improve the customer experience and keep them coming back for more.

Ultimately, a customer journey map tells a story about how customers interact with your brand, including how they first discovered your business to whether or not they’ll make a repeat purchase. The journey lays out different interactions someone could have with your brand, although not every customer needs to use all those touchpoints before converting.

Five Stages of the Customer Journey

The customer journey is broken down into five phases. Knowing each of these phases is essential to improving your customer journey as a whole. Each and every step is important to move them along to the next and, ultimately, down the sales funnel. Improving each phase, or step, can be done by first understanding your business goals.

Examples include: Turning occasional customers into something more loyal and regular, wanting customers to download an app, or getting more people to subscribe to your newsletter. What is the ultimate thing you want them to do in order to start going down your sales funnel?

The five phases of the customer journey are Awareness, Consideration, Decision, Retention, and Advocacy.

Awareness

What is the touchpoint that got someone to notice you? Some examples include:

There are endless ways for people to find your business, but what are the ways you are actively putting yourself out there? Understanding your initial touchpoint and how people got to you is very important. This is the most essential step because it’s what will get your target audience to either notice you or look over you completely. If they’re looking over you, it is time to change things up. There should be no reason for a member of your target audience to miss this initial step.

Consideration

This stage is exactly as it sounds: It is the phase where your potential new client or customer is deciding which direction to go in. Perhaps you are a dental office, and there are multiple in the area: Is yours more convenient? Do you offer more services? Are you highly specialized? Do you have more, better reviews? Is your office more appealing and inviting design-wise? Is your website easier to use?

This stage is where you need to outshine your competition and show off that competitive edge. Make sure your potential customers or clients understand why you are different, better, more experienced, and the right choice for them. If you’re not sure what makes you different, now is the time to do some competitor analysis and find what can make you stand out.

In this stage, your potential new lead has likely signed up for your email address, checked out your website, signed up for a demo, or read through your Yelp reviews.

Decision

This is the stage in which your hot new lead finally makes their choice: It’s you! This is where your lead will finally reach out to you and let you know they’re ready to move forward. This can include booking an appointment, calling you for more information, coming in to see your office, or requesting a meeting with you.

In many cases, especially in the B2B world, there is one more hidden step. B2B decision-makers often whittle down their list and make a final decision after they’ve met with you, made an appointment, done your demo, called you, or toured your office. It can require a little more follow-up and showing off your peacock feathers until they’ve finally made that decision.

Retention

Just because your customer has decided to go with you, that does not mean your work is done. In fact, this is where many businesses fail. Just because you’ve got a new customer, that doesn’t mean they’ll necessarily stay one. As they say in showbiz: It’s difficult to make it, but even harder to stay there.

Did you know that, according to Forbes, it can cost four to five times more to acquire new customers versus retaining current customers? The key to this step is making sure your current customers feel special and like they have exclusive access to you.

Keys to this phase include:

Offering your current customers exclusive deals, birthday coupons, referral rewards, and more
Sending surveys to your current customers to see how you can improve their experience
Email lists, phone calls, or mailing lists with exclusive information and deals
Reminders to make a new appointment, such as if it’s been almost six months since their last dental cleaning
Personalized solutions for their specific needs
Offering exclusive cross-promotion opportunities with other businesses and brands within your target audience’s interests
Use the power of email marketing automation to follow your customer’s behaviors

Advocacy

Do your customers and clients love you? How do you know? Getting your customers to advocate for you is the last, and probably most difficult, stage in the customer journey. Reviews, testimonials, and referrals are the backbone of many businesses. They can really make or break things for a lot of brands, but they are essential during the crucial Consideration stage.

Asking your customers to leave reviews is easy, but will the reviews always be good? According to a 2021 report by PowerReviews, over 99.9% of customers read reviews when they shop online. Furthermore, 96% of customers look for negative reviews specifically. This figure was 85% back in 2018.

In addition, having a large number of reviews will add to your brand’s reputation in a positive way. People tend to gravitate to the business with the larger number of reviews (even if there are some negative ones) because there is strength in numbers. Always make sure you’re asking for reviews and testimonials while also understanding that you may get a negative one here or there. You can’t please everybody, and you can take it as a learning lesson moving forward.

How to Improve Your Customer Journey

Now that you understand all the phases of the customer journey, its time to understand how you can improve your own. The fun part about marketing these days is that there is an abundance of data available, which makes it very easy to track what your target audience is doing, where they are, how you can get in front of them, and how you can stand out among the competition. Specifically, you’re going to want to perform a target audience analysis, a source analysis, and bring in the workflow automation to help you along.

Target Audience Analysis

Arguably the most important step in any marketing plan—customer journey, brand guide, or anything in between—is first performing your target audience analysis. You need to have a clear picture of who you are marketing to, why, and what you want them to do.

You should know just about everything about your target audience. This list should include their gender, their occupation, average income, geographic location, where they shop, how they talk, who influences them, and much more. In fact, a common practice among marketing agencies, including Navazon, is to perform an empathy mapping exercise. This exercise will result in a profile of an actual person with a name that you will base your entire marketing strategy around.

Source Analysis

How do people actually find you? This answer may be wildly different from how you want people to find you and how you’re paying for people to find you. What sources are providing you with the most leads? What about the least?

By understanding which sources are providing you with the most leads, you’ll know where to focus your advertising efforts and dollars. By knowing what channels are providing you with the least amount of leads, you can begin to understand what you need to fix or omit altogether.

You can also pinpoint exactly where customers may be dropping off during the Consideration stage. What pages are they bouncing from? Where, in the form, do they stop filling out fields? You can use this information to make updates to your journey and perfect it.

Bring In the Automation

Luckily, there are many ways you can automate your customer journey with workflow automation. Some examples include:

Tools for Target Audience Research
Tools for source analysis data
Abandoned cart reminders
Pop-up welcome forms
Celebrate birthdays
Encourage reviews and testimonials
A/B test new marketing material
Appointment reminders
Many more

Driving up repeat business is the most essential aspect of your customer journey, and automation can help do a lot of the work for you. If you’re not sure where to start when it comes to your business automation, Navazon can help create a custom solution for you and your business.

Perfect Your Customer Journey with Navazon Digital

Ready to perfect your brand’s customer journey? We are experts in that.

Navazon helps businesses increase profits through data-driven marketing that expands opportunities and reduces risk. As marketers and entrepreneurs, we understand the value of developing a memorable brand through creativity and consistency. This is accomplished through targeted graphics, videos, and websites that reflect our proven, time-tested methodologies and detailed analytics. It is an approach that’s proven effective for companies of all sizes, from start-ups and medium-sized businesses to large firms with an international presence.

We are content creators who listen to our clients so that we can formulate ideas and strategies based on your unique goals and philosophies. Using our analytics-based approach, we consider those goals and study not only your tendencies but those of your competition and the market as a whole. Equipped with this knowledge, we develop a powerful plan, test it, and then roll it out on a modest scale. Once we arrive at the winning formula, we can scale up rapidly to meet even the most optimistic growth projections.

At Navazon, we do not believe in “one size fits all.” Every part of the marketing plan is customized to address your unique niche and positioning strategy. It’s how we excel. It’s why we succeed.

Schedule a free consultation with us now! Visit us at navazondigital.com for more information.

Tags:

customer journey, lead generation, target audience

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