How To Build Out Your Customer Journey For Growth

Did you know that every time someone purchases from your business, they’ve been on a journey?

That journey begins the first time a potential customer becomes aware of (or ‘discovers’) your brand. It may be short, it may be long, it may be straightforward or complex – but whether you’ve purposefully planned it or not, the customer journey exists.

Understanding, honing, and building out the pathway your customers follow in their decision making journey is important for the long-term stability and growth of your business.

If you’ve got some work to do in this area, you’re in the right place.

In this article, you’ll learn what a customer journey is and why zooming in on each of those ‘decision making’ stages is so vital. I’ll also share with you the golden rule for developing your own effective customer journey.

Let’s hit the road!

How To Build Out Your Customer Journey For Growth

What Is A Customer Journey?

Some refer to it as the customer pathway and others like to picture it as a funnel that “flushes” customers through the buying process. But whatever you call it, the customer journey describes the experiences that your customers have when interacting with your brand – from that very first contact through to a time when they are no longer involved with your business.

The journey begins with awareness, where a potential customer first discovers that your business exists. The next stage is when someone moves from simply being aware of your brand to knowing more about it. Then comes the consideration phase, where an individual is thinking about purchasing from you. Next (hopefully), comes the sale or buy step, and following on from that, your customer can move through to the final stage of being an advocate for your business.

Zooming In On The Stages In Your Customer Journey Map

Throughout the customer journey, there are any number of touchpoints (on average its between 9-15 these days for most consumers to take an action with a brand!) A touchpoint is any occasion where a customer comes into contact with your business, whether that’s seeing a billboard, hearing about you on the radio, your post on social media, receiving an email, reading your blog, browsing your shop, making the purchase… you get the idea.

Because of the multitude of potential touchpoints,  the customer journey can look quite different for each customer.

Too often, I see business owners jumping to blame their advertising for a lack of sales, when instead, they should be looking at the big pictureger picture of the customer journey.

Paid advertising is really powerful and helps to amplify what’s working well, but they can’t do all the heavy lifting. You can have the best advertising campaign in the world, but if you have a poorly designed website or shoddy products, the customer journey isn’t going to be a positive one.

Your job as you hone your customer pathway is to zoom in on each touchpoint to make sure it’s effective. But you also need to zoom back out and analyse how well all these touchpoints come together to move a customer through the pathway efficiently.

Why Is The Customer Journey So Important?

Once you understand the way customers move along the pathway, you have access to a wealth of information and options to grow your business.

The data available to you from each touchpoint – and the customer journey as a whole – can be utilised to provide valuable insight into which parts of the pathway are working well and which might need to be relooked at.

You’ll be able to identify where your customers tend to ‘leave’ the pathway before purchasing, and come up with ways to improve the journey to prevent this from happening.

At any stage of the journey, you can analyse, tweak and adjust your marketing efforts at each touchpoint to attract and retain more customers.

Not only will your business grow more rapidly and sustainably, but you’ll be investing your money and energy into precisely the right areas needed for growth.

Ultimately, focusing on building a positive customer experience along each of these touchpoints will result in increased conversions, improved brand loyalty, and more effective marketing.

 

The Golden Rule For Building An Effective Pathway

It can feel overwhelming to get stuck into building and analysing your customer pathway, but if there’s one thing you should remember, it’s this:

You must put yourself in your customers shoes.

You’ll never really come to grips with the journey if you are looking at it from the inside out. You need to flip the script and look at the entire pathway through the lens of your customer.

What is the experience like for them as they progress through the customer pathway? Why are they making the decisions they are at each touchpoint?

The only way to know what your customers really want is to embark on the customer journey yourself.

Beyond the analytics and metrics – which are all vital – there lies a human element that can’t be measured. This is what you need to try to capture in your customer journey.

How To Capture The Human Element

Take a step back from the data at some point and think about what is motivating your customer to make a purchase.

I love the simplicity in Clay Christensen’s “Job to be done theory.”

Every time we make a purchase, we are essentially “hiring” a product or service to do a “job” for us. be aware though this ‘job’ isn’t always what it appears to be!

For example, someone buying a cleaning product isn’t just looking to clean: they may be looking to save time, feel better about their homes, take care of a beloved belonging, or improve their health.

Once you understand the specific job that people are looking to hire for, you are better equipped to design products and journeys that suit that need for your customers.

It’s Not Linear

Many people see the Customer Journey as a ‘linear process’ where a customer movies down buyer decision making journey in on logical step to the next.  In reality, that very rarely happens.

Customers tend to circle through the different stages of the journey. Looping in and out depending on the interactions with your business and the stages they are at in their own journey of growth.

So, don’t forget that nurturing existing clients and customers is a vital part of your customer journey  (it costs 5x as much to acquire a new customer as it does to retain an existing one) It is WAY easier to see to someone that has bought from you before as they know what to expect and the results you can achieve.

But, like anyone, they can forget about who you are and what you do in the busy digital space. Don’t let these valuable customers slide off your radar by constantly going out and chasing new ones!

So, what does your customer journey look like? Does it take all of these things into account? If not, now is the time to develop it and look for areas of opportunity for growth in your business! 

We also develop these as part of our media strategy work for our clients – if you are interested in working with us feel free to reach out and chat to see if we might be a good fit for your business