How do you know what your customers truly want? And how do you get them to shop with you when your competitors are offering products that are so similar? These are just some of the questions many businesses should be asking themselves when considering their future strategic approaches.

The foundation of building an effective customer journey is to analyse how your users and customers behave, and create a carefully crafted pathway for them to conversion.

Building journeys through content

It’s no secret today that businesses, whether they are big or small, B2B or B2C, need great content and strong SEO capabilities to attract high volumes of customers . However, this is only half of the story as content needs to fit into an overall customer journey.

For example, what is the use of high-budget and extremely visual social media content that brings users to a non-relevant services page when they click through to the site. All that time and effort put into crafting the right message may have worked, but the victory is lost if your users don’t continue their journey into your brand, either learning new information through your site, or moving closer to conversion with relevant product description pages.

What does the customer journey include?

The customer journey can be imagined as a kind of roadmap detailing how a customer interacts with your brand and becomes aware of the services it offers. It is essentially the sum of experiences that users go through when interacting with you. This also includes the customer service experience and follow-up interactions with the brand.

Instead of looking at just one moment in their experience, such as their interaction with your online blog posts, lead magnets or social media content, the customer journey records the full experience a customer has with you – as if you are a person that they are getting to know, with a unique character and personality.

Every journey needs a map

To build a great customer journey, you’ll need to create a map to visualise the different steps that each users can take towards discovering you as a business. This includes any external media or landing pages you create as well as the direction they will take once they are actually on your website.

Benefits of a customer journey map

Allows decision-makers and digital strategists to visualise the paths that customers take, helping them to optimise the user experience and improve conversion rates

Helps make each step of the buying experience easier for the actual users, reducing the time it takes to complete a sale and the hassle involved in finding what they want

Contributes to amazing user experiences that can be consistent with your brand identity and style

Creates cohesion between your marketing team, your sales team, your UX developers and anyone else involved in the customer journey

Makes it easier to adapt and modify aspects of the online marketing process and sales funnels

Use research to create your customer journey map

1. Analytical research

Don’t just guess. Look closely at your digital analytics to inform you exactly how your customers behave. This includes where they come from (blogs, referral, links, google search) what they like, how much time they spend on each page and when they leave. Everything good and bad should be taken into account so you can create a more dynamic and effective route to conversion.

2. Anecdotal research

Sometimes the numbers are not enough. Often, you’ll need a little qualitative research to help you truly understand the truth of things. To understand what a customer is really thinking, things like social media are incredibly useful for gauging how customers feel or think.

It’s no surprise that when someone is satisfied or upset about his or her experience with a company, they are likely to feel compelled to notify you on Facebook or Twitter. Or, consider commissioning a survey to collect anecdotal research.