If you have a product or a service, you may be looking into how you can start marketing it. Or you might be thinking of how to diversify your revenue, build a new product and genuinely create further clarity in your business. This is hard to do without a model to follow. But, before you go any further, we’d love to throw you an ideal way.

Why don’t you take a step back and think about your customer and the journey they make to buy or purchase your product or service. And why, you may be wondering? Well, in this next episode, we’re going to go through why we believe it’s imperative to step back and understand your customer journey before making any big plans. With more insight, you can make better and more informed decisions.  

In today’s episode, I’m going to run you through six steps you can follow to help you build a customer journey map for your business. So you can discover the gaps in your business approach and increase your overall ROI. 

Customer Journey Map

A customer journey map is a visual presentation of every interaction an individual customer may have with your brand.  It essentially is a roadmap of the full customer experience from when a customer first becomes aware of your brand to when they make the final purchase.

Understanding the customer journey is fundamental to understanding the customer experience in our business. It encompasses every touchpoint interaction and activity that could be taken by a single customer journey. 

Mapping allows you to identify what points you should be measuring and monitoring. Creating a visual representation of your customer journey can show you the opportunity areas to further explore. It’s more than a linear timeline of steps a customer takes. 

The exercise of a journey map itself allows you to put yourself in the customer’s shoes and see their experience in a holistic way. That way, you can truly understand the what, when, where, why, and how of any customer that may interact with your brand.  

When you understand the complete trajectory of your customer’s experiences,  it should enable you to reduce customer effort and increase customer satisfaction by making smart tweaks to your business approach.

Step 1: Decide What To Measure

Get clear on your goals. Know what to look for as you plot your customer journey. What are you hoping to achieve with your customer?  What are you hoping to achieve with your customer journey map? Scoping opportunities where you can grow your business, adapt your product, etc. A great goal is to have is once you’re clear on the purpose of your map, you’ll know what information you need to understand.

Step 2: Create Your Customer Persona

Start with knowing which buyer you’re focused on and what their general needs and wants are.  Be specific about your persona. Which customer segment are you developing your map for? What is the core product or service it’s going to address? Can you design customer journey maps?

You can design customer journey maps for multiple customers, multiple products, and services,  but clarity is where it is. When you’re clear on both factors, you have a better overview and you’ll know where you can improve. 

Step 3: Define Your Customer Buying Phases

What are the stages your customer goes through between discovering their problem and deciding to purchase your product or service? Which stages happen after purchase? A normal map would list these buying phases horizontally at the top of a map to get a visual representation of the stages a customer goes through. 

It would start with number one, which would be awareness right at the top when a customer realizes that they have a need, problem, or opportunity. Then it moves to the right, to research. When the customer starts to research solutions to determine whether they make a purchase and evaluate their options. Followed by consideration,  they decide if they’ll make a purchase to address their need and narrow down their options.    This moves on to purchase when they choose a solution and buy it and ends with support when the customer uses your product or service, engages with your company, and decides whether to purchase again or not.

Step 4: Move On To Your Touchpoint

Within each phase, you will need to understand where your customer interacts with your brand.  Touchpoints depend on your approach to marketing, sales, product, and customer service. And they may include things like marketing collateral like posters, stickers, billboards, flyers, or display ads. Physical places like your storefront or office space, and digital assets, including your website or social media pages.

Interactions for your team are a touchpoint such as your customer service or sales rep,  purchase experiences, including your pricing page, and checkout process which actually are touchpoints. Any post-purchase follow-up from a company like an email or phone call, ongoing customer support, renewal or the cancellation of your service are all touchpoints to look at.

Step 5:  Add Customer Thoughts, Actions, And Emotions To Your Map

At each touchpoint, try and foresee what the customer is prompted to think, do, and feel.  Become clear on the emotions they feel, the apprehension they may experience, and the excitement they may show when they become your customer. These are all emotions and these emotions tell us a lot.

 How can we approach our customers at each stage of the journey? Do we need to soften our language and become more factual?  Do we need to interject customer testimonials into the process to convince the customer they’re doing the right thing by purchasing your product?  When you address your customer’s emotions, you’re empathizing with them, and doing this is part of a winning formula.

Step 6: Note Your Potential Opportunities

Based on your goals and what you discover through your customer journey map, write down the changes you could make it each touchpoint, or within each phase to improve that customer experience. There are bound to be changes you can make, it is only human to adapt the process and product. But are there any low-hanging fruit opportunities you could address first? 

There’s no correct way to design a customer journey map. You could build it in a simple spreadsheet that includes swim lanes for phases, touchpoints, thoughts, actions, feelings, and opportunities. Some journey maps are more intricately designed with touchpoints and illustrated emotions. A really great way is to go onto Miro, there are great templates on canvas. All you need to do is Google customer journey map on Google, and you will find endless templates to follow with whatever option you decide on going with. Go through the motions and cover each aspect as they’re all incredibly important.

And that’s a wrap! Thank you so much for tuning in. Those were our six steps to building a customer journey map. We’re here every week to teach you how you can turn your unique skills,  your zone of genius into sellable, desirable, digital products, digital products that you can actually package up, market, and make additional income from.

And we can’t wait to hear about the ways you’ve turned your skills into income. See you next time and let’s get growing!

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