How is a customer interacting with your brand during every online or offline visit? Where do their frustrations lie, and at what points are they impeded when trying to make a purchase?
These questions are answered with customer journey mapping, a strategy that allows companies to take all the points where consumers interact with their business, both online and offline and connect those points to reveal a map that shows a customer persona. Digital and physical touchpoints have to work together seamlessly, and still do what each touchpoint does best on its own, according to Forbes.
Primary Purpose of Customer Journey Maps
Customer journey maps are helping companies understand their customers better so that more relevant marketing strategies can be created, and releases for offers can be timed to generate purchases. A real-time approach to data and analytics influences the customer, as do insights about how the market is defining businesses and their competitors.
Advanced marketing insights are paramount to developing integrated strategies and communications plans for customers and enable businesses to visualize customer journey maps to ensure that customers are reaching their goals when interacting with a company’s website.
Challenges Are Impeding the Customer Journey Mapping Process
Customers are twice as likely to talk about negative experiences with a company than positive ones. This is a compelling reason for businesses to create customer-centric experiences that mitigate frustrations and help them move seamlessly through your site towards a final purchase.
However, marketing insight (MI) professionals report that there are challenges in designing an effective, useful journey map. When marketing teams are tasked with building a journey map to help understand customer experiences, it can fall short in specific areas, particularly when marketing insights aren’t properly applied.
In that instance, journey maps tend to be too generalized or process focused, which leads to problems in making decisions by using the map.
- Without marketing insights, journey maps can be too generic, not narrowing in on specific customer segments and attributes to develop a complete customer persona.
- The diversity of customer bases and the number of interaction options poses challenges in identifying the start and end points of the customer journey.
- Compiling customer information from both customers facing and non-customer facing functions can sometimes indicate a divergent understanding of consumer identities.
- Plotting out customer touchpoints based on defined customer stages garnered from market insights can be difficult without tapping into organizational marketing components.
How Marketing Insights Impact Visualization Capabilities
Market insights are a driving force behind visualizing the customer journey, to such an extent that it generates real-time decision making through a visual representation of customer information moving through your business.
Customized marketing insights provide information that allows businesses to define the customer journey in the proper stages, plot touchpoints, and determine if customers are reaching their goals.
Visualizing customer journey maps are integral to business progression in a digital environment, and market insights give businesses a detailed understanding of customer motivations for interacting with your organization.
Benefits of Analyzing Customer Journey Map
Market insights also provide information that’s used to create customer journey maps that show a customer on an intellectual and emotional level. It builds more than simply a disconnected series of customer data points; it provides targeted insights into the entire customer journey.
With this information, businesses can flesh out their customer journey map and benefit with:
- Delivering more relevant products or services.
- Gaining feedback about specific points along a customer journey.
- Providing messages and information to customers that target their unique interests.
- Offering new products based on previous sales, and entice customers to join support features, communities, and technical resources.
When you have taken all of this data from multiple sources and connected it to a single customer, you will have a view of how your customer data is moving through your business. With a clear customer journey map, businesses are better able to deliver a great customer experience, because you can now target each customer.
Insights to Lay the Foundation for an Effective Customer Journey Map
Understanding how to use marketing insights to visually represent customer journeys is how businesses are prioritizing their customer-based initiatives. Diagnosing causes that are negatively impacting the customer experience as someone interacts with your brand begins with an origin point, i.e., obtaining the right advanced insights.
Research Optimus (ROP) enables businesses to focus on high involvement touchpoints and visualize customer journey maps to drive brand identity value. With a dedicated, on-demand marketing analytics team, ROP provides the skills to help companies gain customized marketing insights to develop their customer strategies to their best advantage.
– Research Optimus
