Understanding the Digital Marketing Customer Journey Map
Whenever you purchase a product or service, you go on a journey. It might be short — you need an afternoon pick-me-up, so you decide to get coffee, visit a cafe, buy a drink, and consume it — or it may be longer, like buying a new car, and require more research.
Regardless of the purchase, you always take the same path. Your customers also go on this journey, and as a digital marketer, it’s your job to guide them along the way. A digital marketing customer journey map helps with that.
What Is the Customer Journey? The Basics of Mapping the Customer Experience
A customer journey is a detailed outline of a customer’s path to integrating products into their lives. Every customer goes through five stages when deciding on purchases: awareness, engagement, evaluation, purchase, and post-purchase.
Understanding the customer journey supports better alignment of marketing strategies and tactics with customer needs. The map helps you set clear objectives, address customer pain points at the right time, set priorities, and improve the customer experience by giving them what they need when they need it.
The foundation of the digital marketing customer journey map is asking questions about the target audience’s needs at each stage.
Digital Marketing Customer Journey Map for Business | A Key Tool for Success
The digital marketing customer journey map is particularly important for online marketing as it helps guide and refine content creation efforts. It allows you to strategically develop content that gets results by being relevant and useful to your audience. By tailoring your digital marketing efforts to a specific point along the journey, you help guide them to the next steps.
The key to successfully using a digital marketing customer journey map is developing resources to address every stage a customer pass through. Some stages require more planning and resources to spur a conversion, but every stage matters. By thinking about your audience’s needs at every phase of their experience, you can find new ways to engage them with your company and convert them into loyal customers.
Free Customer Journey Map Template Download | Kickstart Your Mapping Process
Arcminute Marketing makes getting started with customer journey mapping easy with a free customer journey map template you can download. The easy-to-use template outlines the critical questions to ask about each phase of the customer journey. The questions cover the actions (what spurs the customer to consider your product), their questions and thoughts at that stage, where they will look for information, the opportunities for your business in that phase, and the content you need at that point.
By using the template, you can refine your marketing approach. You might focus on improving the customer experience after a sale with blogs or website FAQs that address common customer service concerns, for example, to address customer needs post-purchase.
How to Use the Customer Journey Map Template | A Step-by-Step Guide
Successful digital marketing surrounds buyers with information about your product or service at every stage of their journey. By exploring the customer journey and refining your marketing at different stages, you’ll create top-of-mind awareness of your company at every stage.
To use the template, consider your target customer and ask a series of questions for each stage. These include:
- Action: At this stage of the process, action refers to the physical actions they are taking, which can include asking a friend, searching online, or requesting an estimate.
- Questions and thoughts: What do they want to know about their situation and potential solutions?
- Opportunities: What do they need to know about your product or service?
- Channels: How are they looking for information?
- Content needed: How can you get information to customers?
Your answers to these questions will provide insights that you can use to understand customer needs and tailor your marketing.
Arcminute Marketing | Start Your Digital Marketing Customer Journey
A comprehensive digital marketing customer journey map is the foundation of a successful plan for converting customers, and Arcminute Marketing is here to help. Download your free customer journey map template today and get started on a more focused and measurable marketing plan.
You can also reach out to schedule a discovery call with one of our digital marketing strategies today to learn more about value-driven digital marketing. Our experts use cutting-edge SEO, paid search, and local search techniques to help businesses like yours reach their goals.
