For marketing professionals, knowing your customer is as essential as breathing. Identifying who your customers are is a great place to start when planning for more effective marketing strategies. But it is not enough. As you delve deeper into your campaigns, you’ll find some benefits of understanding the customer journey that can make a difference in helping you reach your objectives.
How do you understand the customer journey better? You conduct market research and create a customer journey map.
Before we get into the benefits of understanding the customer journey, allow us to quickly define one important tool: the customer journey map. This is a visual representation of the different points of interaction between a customer and a brand before, during, and after a purchase is made.
However, we have to emphasize that the customer journey map is not limited to identifying the stages towards purchase. It takes a customer’s feelings and motivations into account as well. This makes the process of customer journey mapping a great exercise in empathizing with your customers.
Once you figure out how to make a customer journey map for your brand, you’ll be on your way to experiencing the following benefits of understanding the customer journey.
Creating a customer journey map gives you insights into the mind of your target audience. Apart from knowing who they are, you’ll also get a better understanding of more important questions such as: What are their goals? What are their pain points? How will they be feeling when they reach certain touchpoints in your campaign?
Keep the answers to these questions in mind and tweak your marketing strategy accordingly. Every positive experience your customer gets from these touchpoints will ultimately be beneficial to your brand.
No product or process is perfect. Even things that have been efficient in the past can be affected by changes in your market. This is why constantly looking for ways to improve is a great mindset to have.
One of the benefits of understanding the customer journey is being able to tackle any shortcomings your brand might currently have. This is where customer insight becomes crucial. When you view your brand from the perspective of your customers, you are able to identify and act on any points for improvement.
Speaking of points for improvement, being able to create a better customer experience is also one of the benefits of understanding the customer journey. When you have a clear idea of where your customers are coming from, you can start tweaking your strategies to create optimal experiences for them.
These changes can be minor, like selecting a more compelling CTA for your ad. Or they could be complex, like setting up new processes to ensure that your customers’ needs are being met.
Ultimately, having a genuine understanding of your customer will let you communicate with more empathy in order to build trust in your brand.
Are there any gaps in the market that neither you nor your competitors are responding to? Discovering unexplored opportunities is fourth on our list of benefits of understanding the customer journey. Most of the time, these are unique nuances in a customer’s experience with your brand that can set it apart from the rest.
Every campaign has an objective — or set of objectives — it aims to meet. Building your marketing strategy around the customer journey can help you increase the effectiveness of your campaign since it will empower you to create meaningful brand experiences for every touchpoint.
To better understand how this can help you make the most out of your budget, think of how bidding works in ads for Facebook. While a bigger budget can help you reach more people, relevance also plays a significant factor in the ad's overall performance.