How to Create Customer Journey Maps

We have mentioned the importance and benefits of customer journey maps before in our other blog posts. Customer journey maps are, in summary, are guides that follow your customers from the moment they discover your product until they purchase, highlighting the important points.

Customer journey maps help you to find the weak spots, problems, and mistakes on your digital marketing strategy, and see them more clearly so you can fix them. In addition to that, these maps also show you just exactly where your customers feel hesitation about buying your product and what they think while comparing you to your competitors, thus, handing you a chance to correct your strategy and offering your customers a better experience.

All of these benefits prove how important customer journey maps are for digital marketing. To use this very helpful tool, there is more than one way. We are offering a detailed guide for the companies who want to make customer journey maps a part of their digital marketing strategy. Read below to learn more about them.

Locate the Touchpoints on the Map

Any point your customers get in contact with your brand is called a touchpoint. This doesn’t have to be any kind of physical or verbal contact. A potential customer seeing a social media post of yours can be called a touchpoint. These touchpoints are quite important because they affect how your brand is percieved by your customers.

There will be several touchpoints between you and your customers until the product is purchased. Examples for touchpoints can be listed as browsing your social media accounts, reading your customers’ reviews on your website or other websites, calling the customer service about your products. It’s very crucial to spot all of your touchpoints and put them on your customer journey map. If you forget even one of them you will miss the chance to improve that part of your strategy. For example, think about interacting with your customers on your social media comments. This is a touchpoint for other customers who witness that too. If you are aware of it, you can be more careful with your interactions.

Finding touchpoints will help you to have a draft of your customer journey map. From that point it is going to be easier to create the map.

Create Fictional Customer Personas

If you collect enough data and process it correctly to segmentize your audience you can have more information about your customers and then create fictional customer personas for your customer journey maps. These personas can differ from “ married, college graduate, working mother” to “high school-age students, living with their parents” and take different forms. These personas are going to help you to shape your maps according to your potential customers.

For this step to be successful, you have to make collecting data a non-stop process and always process it as best as you can. While creating your customer personas always keep in mind demographics such as age, socioeconomic standards, location, education, gender. Every different fictional persona might have different touchpoints on your map. People of younger age would discover your brand through social media while older ones might react better to email marketing.

Design Your Scenarios

There are several types of customer journey maps, nearly 4 or 5. You don’t have to invest in all of these types of maps for your company of course, but if you do you will benefit from it.

Find Out Where the Difficulties Lie

Find out exactly where your customer feels hesitation or have difficulties while discovering or purchasing your product and locate them on your maps. These will offer you a chance to make the necessary improvements because now you can see the weak spots of your marketing campaigns more clearly. For example if a customer waits too long after discovering but before purchasing your product the reason might be a lack of information or customer reviews.

If you have active social media accounts maybe you can offer customer service through DMs or add a live chat option on your website. Choose the best kind of service for your brand and your audience to do necessary improvements.

Start Making the Change

Now you have created your customer journey maps! But you’re far from being done. Analyze the maps and try to empathize with your customers to solve the problems in your marketing campaigns. With every update create new maps to make the improvement continuous so you can offer flawless service and experience to your customers.