Mapping Out the Customer Journey – What You Should Consider

In your quest to better understand and serve your customers, you may have stumbled across the Customer Journey Map. You’ve probably read about how using the Customer Journey Map has helped businesses form lasting relationships with their customers.

It’s true, through mapping the customer journey, businesses gain insights into the pain points of their customers, allowing them to improve the customer experience by defining what drives their current and prospective customers to purchase.

So, what is the secret to your business getting the most out of the map? Take these key points into consideration…

Your target customers

Simply put, marketing to everyone is never a good idea – you end up not converting anyone. Worse still, by not delivering a message specific to their needs, customers may close your channel of communication with them by opting out of your newsletter, for example.

You can avoid this result by building your own customer avatar. The customer avatar is a mock representation of your target customer. This is where you put all of the relevant information about your target customer like gender, age, education, residence, income, and hobbies, their pains, their desires — information that would guide you on which strategy and content you’ll use.

You build your customer avatar by interviewing your target customer in person, sending a survey to the relevant people, or engaging them on relevant social media groups and forums. By the time you’re done building your avatar, you’re ready for the next step.

Your direct competitors

If you’re not standing out from the competition, how will your audience remember you? Brand recall is a huge loophole that your savvy competitors will continue to exploit.

The best way to fix this is by identifying what your competitors are doing and how their audience are reacting to the message that they are delivering. Find out what their most satisfied and dissatisfied audience are saying.

From there, you’ll gain valuable insights that would help you devise a new selling angle that makes you stand out from the competition and stop competitors from taking away your customers.

Designing a tailor-fit customer journey map

After building your customer avatar and learning more about your competitors, it’s time to design a customer journey map tailored to each customer avatar.

The question you should ask yourself is ‘What are my direct competitors doing that worked so well with my target market?’.

From there, think of ways to adapt what your competitors are doing into your own Customer Journey Map and highlight what makes your business different.

The next step is to review your customer avatar. To make them move along your map, use the path of least resistance and leverage on what you’ve learned from building your customer avatar.