Excellent products at competitive costs don’t bring sales. 96% of customers indicate that customer service is key to their brand loyalty and keeps them going back to brands to buy more. If anything matters, it’s the effortless customer journeys and seamless customer experience.

As a result of technological advancements, customers now interact with businesses through various touch points—email, social media, website, phone conversation, etc. This complicates customer journeys and makes it difficult for companies to ensure a good customer experience.

So, how can you ensure a smooth customer experience? By creating a customer journey marketing map.

A customer journey map kills two birds with one stone. It guides prospects smoothly to the next stage and assists you in reaching your marketing objectives. A well-crafted customer journey map will help you become a customer focused business.

Creating a customer journey map might seem cumbersome, but it doesn’t have to be. If you thoroughly go through this article, you’ll be able to map your customer journey skillfully.

What is a customer journey marketing map?

A customer journey map is the visual representation of every interaction a prospect or a customer has with the brand. It maps the path a customer takes to reach from point A to point B and tracks if the customer converts and, if not, then why.

A customer journey map may seem simple – you offer a product to your audience, the customer finds it and purchases it. But no! The buyers’ journey is not a linear curve; it’s a complex multi-platform journey. For example, prospective customers might find your brand through social media ads, Google search, or be referred by a friend.

Customers may engage in different ways – buy your product, subscribe to your newsletter, download a freebie, etc. Optimizing the customer journey process with content encourages customers to move to the next stages and complete the purchase.

Creating a customer journey map helps businesses understand the buyers’ journey through a customer’s perspective as they move to further stages of their journey. And it also helps to know how the customers learned about the product and the friction points.

Here’s how customers seamlessly move through the different stages of their journey at various touchpoints:

Source: Instapage.com

Why create a customer journey map

With constantly changing customer expectations, businesses should chalk out a customer journey map to keep up with them. It helps understand customer preferences and ensures better consumer experiences. Optimizing different touchpoints with content helps customers make purchase decisions.

With 52% of the customers demanding customized offers, personalization has become an important aspect of the customer experience. Customer journey mapping allows you to improve customer experience, ultimately leading to loyal customers.

Here are all the additional benefits one enjoys using a customer journey map:

1. Gives you the customer’s perspective

2. Helps you understand the gaps

3. Helps you mitigate complex customer journeys

4. Enable you to understand emotions and not just logic

5. Improves customer retention rate

If the benefits haven’t convinced you of the importance of customer journey mapping, here are statistics to prove it:

• Companies prioritizing customer experience earn 4-8% higher revenue than those that don’t.
• 96% of customers’ loyalty to brands depends on customer experience.
• Customers tell 9 people about positive experiences with brands and 16 people about negative experiences.
• Customers with a positive experience with a brand are likely to spend 140% more than customers with a negative experience.

5 customer journey phases to know about

As the business evolves, the customer journey also evolves. Therefore, understanding every stage a customer goes through before purchasing is crucial to ensure a great customer experience and building strong relationships with the customers.

1. Awareness phase

Every customer journey starts from an awareness phase. Customers may not be aware of their pain points while looking for a solution. Hence, educational content is vital at this stage. Keeping the prospects updated with thought leadership content and new products ensures a seamless transition.

Address the benefits of the products through your content rather than pushing out promotional content. For example, customers use keywords to search for the problems they’re facing. At this stage, optimize your content with the target keywords and tell them how they can solve it.

The most effective way to educate the audience at this stage is to publish educational material like articles, ebooks, whitepapers, etc.

2. Consideration phase

When prospects move from the awareness stage to the consideration stage, they’re aware of their pain points and actively looking for the best solutions. In addition, they’re aware of your product/service and other solutions available in the market.

They make the buying decision at this stage, and this is the time for you to make your brand stand out from the competitors. Tell customers why they should choose you over your competitors.

Content formats like articles, case studies, emails, etc., are a good way to nurture the audience and build trust, eventually leading them to buy from you.

3. Decision phase

Once prospects enter the decision phase, they are ready to buy from you. But they need a little nudge in the right direction at this stage. So, a testimonial, free trial, or discount code would push them to take action.

In this phase, ensuring a smooth customer experience will give you a competitive edge over your competitors. Answering queries and positioning your business as the authority in your industry will help you score customers.

4. Retention phase

Businesses should stay in touch with customers even after the sale and engage them with personalized offers and cross-selling. Unlike other stages, the retention phase does not have an end – it’s an ongoing cycle.

Compared to customer acquisition, customer retention is more cost-effective. When businesses focus more on creating positive customer experiences and delivering high-quality products, customers are likely to stay loyal to the brand and refer your business to their acquaintances.

Regular communication with the customers, like announcing new product launches, discounts, answering FAQs, etc., keeps the customers engaged and helps foster a loyal relationship with the brand.

5. Advocacy phase

Good customer experience ensures customer loyalty and results in customers advocating the brand or products to their peers. According to a study, loyal customers are 5x more likely to buy from you and 4x more likely to recommend you to their friends. In addition, happy customers do word-of-mouth marketing, leading to an increase in prospective customers learning about the brand.

Most individuals trust a case study and referrals from their friends to make buying decisions. Brands can measure customer advocacy by asking them to volunteer for a case study and understand how they feel about the brand. It also helps understand what’s working and what needs improvement from the customer’s point of view, resulting in the overall improvement in customer experience.

How to create a customer journey marketing map

1. List the objectives of creating a customer journey map

Before a brand starts drafting a customer journey marketing map, it must be aware of the goals and objectives of its organization. What is the customer’s goal? Where is the journey going? What experience is it based upon?

And, to answer all the questions, a buyer’s persona, including the demographics and behaviors, should be chalked out. Having this figured out will help you create the best customer journey maps to achieve your goals and objectives. In addition, a buyer’s persona will help you make the customer journey about them and not about you.

2. Define buyer’s personas and their goals

A business needs to create a smooth customer journey to ensure customer loyalty. But, for that to happen, one must understand the customer well. And creating a buyer’s persona helps you do precisely that.

A customer journey map monitors the experience of one consumer who travels a particular route to access your brand/products. Therefore, to begin with, develop three customer personas: a regular customer, a high-value buyer, and a new customer.

Then, you can start characterizing them by giving them details like name, age, profession, career, personal aspirations, etc. You can conduct client interviews and demographic analysis to get all this information.

3. List all the customer touchpoints

Touchpoints are the places where customers and potential customers interact with the brand. List all the actions a customer takes to reach your brand, like:

• Making a Google search
• Interacting with social media posts
• Reading your blog on the website
• Online ads
• Watching your YouTube video

Integrating content marketing at these various touchpoints will help you reach your audience and help improve customer experience.

4. Find out the customer’s pain points

The next step is assessing all the pain points a customer encounters throughout their journey. A pain point is a roadblock preventing customers from interacting with a brand or results in poor customer experience.

Here are a few roadblocks a customer encounters in their journey:

• Unable to find your contact details
• Abandoning the cart due to high shipping charges
• Price not listed with the item
• Not able to find the product on your site
• Having to call customer care multiple times to resolve an issue

Understanding all the pain points will help you reduce or remove them, resulting in an effortless customer experience.

5. Draft your customer journey map

By now, we have gathered enough information to create the first draft of the customer journey map. Creating a customer journey map is a complex adventure; the first draft helps create the final map.

The first draft doesn’t have to be detailed. However, it should include a customer brief, touchpoints, and pain points. Do you remember the list of touchpoints and pain points we made earlier in this article? We’ll use them in the map and analyze the map for further improvements.

And all this data is used to create the final customer journey map draft in the following stages.

6. Choose the type of customer journey map

Depending on your goals, you can choose from any of the four different types of customer journey maps. Each map signifies different customer behaviors leading to different customer experiences.

Current state mapping:

Current state mapping is the most commonly used map. It displays the customer journey map of the present. It show the actions, pain points, and emotions a customer experiences while browsing through the brand. It helps in highlighting the existing pain points and making changes to them.

Here’s a real-life example of the current state map:

Source: USA.gov

The current state mapping follows the customer journey in detail, giving the brand chances to improve. The map shows how the product hasn’t met the customer’s expectations, allowing the brand to enhance the customer experience.

Future state mapping:

This customer journey map is similar to the current state map, but it is designed to analyze the customers’ future emotions, thoughts, and actions. It helps in analyzing the roadmap for future products and services.

Here’s an example of a future state customer map:

 Source: Bright Vessel

This map is created by assuming the future customer journey. This map is similar to the current state map and has all the aspects like action, thoughts, and emotions.

Day in the life:

This customer journey map helps analyze all the emotions, thoughts, and actions a customer goes through daily. Day in the life customer journey map helps understand how customers’ daily lives impact their experiences with the product.

Here’s an example of a day in the life journey map:

Source: Treasure Data

This day in the life map tracks the travel day of a business traveler. The map tracks his day to find an opportunity to introduce their products in his daily life to improve his experience at the airport and throughout the day.

Service blueprint:

A service blueprint mapping starts with the basic versions of any of the above maps and then includes the people and processes responsible for a specific experience. It helps in understanding the hidden action affecting the customer experience.

Here’s an example of a service blueprint:

Source: Neilson Norman Group

The service blueprint tracks the behind-the-scenes of an appliance customer’s journey, making it easier for the team to understand where they are lacking and improve the overall customer experience.

7. Mapping out the process

We already have all the required data. Now we have to put all the pieces together to create a customer journey map. Start with the customer journey draft we prepared previously. Are there any unnoticed gaps? Is there any more research or information needed?

If the answer to all the questions is a ‘no,’ you can go ahead. It’s time to build a solid customer journey map. You can create a map from scratch, but you don’t need to – there are many customer journey map templates available online that you can download and fill up.

After it’s done, audit it with your team to check whether everything is accurate and precise.

Integrating content marketing into customer journey mapping

The purpose of customer journey maps is to reach the ideal audience with the right message at the right time. Content acts as the catalyst and helps in speeding up the process. Hence, customer journey maps for content are crucial in marketing.

Once the customer journey is chalked out with areas that need more improvement, you can figure out the type of content to be introduced at each stage. It is important to address the customer’s pain points beforehand as it is risky – you can even lose customers.

For example, maybe your customers are Googling to learn more about your business because they couldn’t find much on your site. You can tackle this situation by creating a detailed ‘about us’ section on the website.

Conclusion

Drafting a customer journey map is vital to create excellent customer experiences. Utilize your customer journey map to understand the pain points and address them through solid content marketing campaigns.

To integrate your content marketing efforts with customer journey mapping, you need experts to help you create content.

If you’re looking for a team of experts to help you with your B2B brand’s content marketing and content creation, reach out to us.