If you’re new to marketing your business, it’s pretty easy to feel out-of-your-depth when confronted with marketing jargon, documents and infographics.
At Roobix, we like to demystify those daunting documents wherever we can. While they may look confusing to the uninitiated, most of them actually refer to really useful concepts.
Like customer journey maps, for instance.
A customer journey map is often one of the first documents you will come across in a Managed Marketing Service. At Roobix, it’s part of our Blueprinting process – and it props up all of our recommendations, assumptions, and plans we put together for your go-to-market strategy.
At its heart, a customer journey map (CJM) identifies the path that your ideal customer will take when purchasing your product or service. It helps business owners like you see what they are selling from the perspective of a customer – and discover what might encourage or discourage them from making a purchase.
The marketing term for that purchase is ‘converting’. When someone goes from being a potential customer (a ‘lead’) into a paying customer, they’ve been ‘converted’. A CJM, then, is simply designed to show the best way for your business to convert potential customers into paying ones.
CJM’s are usually split into five stages:
Awareness: Potential customers become aware that your business exists.
Consideration: Potential customers begin weighing up the pros and cons of the purchase.
Purchase: Potential customers become paying customers as they make the purchase.
Retention: Customers remain customers after they engage with your business.
Loyalty and Advocacy: Customers become advocates for your business after a positive experience.
At each of these stages, a CJM will address customer thoughts, actions, touchpoint channels and areas for improvement across each stage of the journey. For example, during the consideration phase, a CJM could sound like this:
Customer thoughts: This product is built with quality materials, but I can get it cheaper elsewhere.
Customer actions: Actively browsing for lower-cost versions of the product.
Channels: Web, email.
Improvement: Incorporate information about the superior design and build of the product in the web description to help convert leads and direct them to select quality over price.
The improvement suggestions in a CJM will always relate to ‘pain points’. Pain points are pretty self-explanatory – they represent any part of the journey in which a customer may falter in their decision to buy.
In the example given above, the pain point is when the customer realises this product is obtainable elsewhere for a lower cost, which discourages them from making the purchase. To mitigate this, the CJM has recommended adjustments to the web copy on that part of the online store. This demonstrates how CJM’s are used to shape the marketing plan for a business. When a number of these recommendations are identified, a CJM paves the best path for your soon-to-be-customers.
Ready to map out the path for your customers? Roobix offers customer journey mapping as part of our flagship Managed Marketing Service.
To find out more about Blueprints and customer journey mapping, head to our Strategy page – or give us a call on 13 30 40!
