The User Journey is the series of steps that represent a scenario in which a user might interact with your brand. This covers re-engagement techniques that will keep your audience intrigued and entertained.
Covered in this article
The main advantages of creating customer journey maps
Buyer Personas
Customer Stages
Understanding Customer Goals
Identify Touch Points
Maintain A Time Frame
Consider Customer Emotion
The main advantages of creating customer journey maps
A user journey (user map) refers to a map of scenarios that outline the story of a customer’s experience (from the first interaction with their business) to a long-term relationship, from the client’s point of view. A typical user journey looks something like this:
1. Get valuable insights: It gives you an insight into customers’ expectations of the brand at each step of their journey. This will in turn help you create customer experiences that motivate customers to reach the last point of the journey = conversion!
2. Understand customer expectations: It allows you to understand the channels and touchpoints your customers are most likely to take to get to your product.
3. Predict and influence consumer behaviour: A detailed user journey informed by the right data helps you predict and therefore change customer behaviour which in turn optimises the conversion process.
A user journey can my customised to your desire, it can be online publications, Wi-Fi signups, newsletters, SMSs, social media re-marketing and more. It ideally has to have the following components to be fully optimised for every scenario.
Buyer Personas
A buyer persona is a representation of your target customer based on detailed market research. It includes demographics such as age, gender, job title, etc. Each buyer persona has separate buying behaviour, and this is why you need to create a different customer journey map for each persona. The persona information you’ve already collected helps you map out a customized journey for that particular buyer persona.
Customer Stages
Before mapping out the customer journey you need to figure out the stages your customer goes through to come into contact with your brand. The customer steps are more commonly referred to as the marketing funnel, which is a customer acquisition model consisting of the following stages – awareness, consideration, decision, and retention.
Understanding Customer Goals
You need to understand the goal your customers are trying to achieve at each customer stage, this helps inform the shape your customer journey map should take. Collect data through surveys, interviews and customer service emails to figure out your customers’ goals so you can align them with the customer journey touch points.
Identify Touch Points
Touch points are the interactions the customer has with your brand at each customer stage on specific web pages or ads. For example, awareness stage touch points are likely to include short-form post-click landing pages, case studies, webinars and your blog, etc.
Maintain A Time Frame
Because you’ll be using real data collected through customer analytics, surveys and interviews you can maintain a realistic schedule as to when each customer stage should end. You should know how long your touch points take to convince customers to move to the next stage.
Consider Customer Emotion
The client’s journey is told from the customer’s perspective. So, keeping into consideration which emotion (whether delight or frustration) your customer is likely to feel helps you ascertain if they will move from one stage to the other.
With clients being spoiled for choice in today’s overcrowded market, it is imperative to keep your brand a quick memory in your clients’ minds. By interacting and engaging with your audience regularly, it becomes quite easy to be the “go-to-brand”. At Velocity Media, we make use of a whole array of services and processes to ensure a user journey that is unique to your scope and your desired conversion