Prepare for a journey your customer will make! If you won’t plan it, user will consider your website chaotic and irrelevant. Although he goes through 80% of the decision-making process on his own, you still are responsible for delivering him pleasant, convenient and intuitive experience.
Planning buyer’s journey might turn into a journey for yourself – you will discover the exotic land of customer’s needs, habits and motivation.
1. Leaf through guides and collect data
Buyers Journey is a model of a path your users follow to buy your product. It involves:
- Where do they come from?
- What are they looking for?
- Under what circumstances?
- How long does it take?
- Of what stages does it consist?
Hence before you start designing your Buyer’s Journey, focus on research. Collect the data from analytics, surveys, and interviews. Try to avoid projecting your own mindset on customer (read our Tata Nano case study to find out how).
If you have created the Buyer Persona, use it.
(If not, read our free ebook on the topic)
2. Take a map
Buyer’s Journey reminds a map of customer’s experience. The key is linearity: see how journey develops over sequential stages. What is customer’s starting point? What motivates him? In what context, under what circumstances does the journey take place (budget, customer’s age, and opinions)? When you know the overall direction in which customer is heading and recognize the background and conditions, you understand the whole process.
3. Set the route – regarding touch points
Journey planning involves above all marking the places of vital experience and interaction with the brand – so called touch points. But beware – such points are crossroads at the same time. Decisions are made here: either to engage or leave.
What can be a touch point?
- Landing page
- Contact form (e.g. after downloading an ebook)
- Banner
- Packaging
- Chat
- Dynamic e-mail
- Survey
4. Your luggage
What do you need to create wonderful customer journey?
– educational content: your customers have to know how the product will improve their lives, so create posts, micro-content, videos or podcast explaining that and providing valuable knowledge.
– images: visual presentation of the product plays crucial role in the shopping process. Even if you produce something not so photogenic or simply virtual, include print screens or videos, so user can quickly grasp the idea.
– Marketing Automation Platform: for advanced analytics and personalized communication in real time to ensure that your messages will be tailored precisely to individual user’s needs.
– customer service team: no matter how digital your product is, 78% of customer still says that the contact will representative defines quality of their experience.
5. Travel lightly
Some marketers tend to expand tools like Buyer Persona or Buyer’s Journey more than necessary. They serve specific aim and should become a burden, so avoid getting overwhelmed by trivia and irrelevant details. Also develop a habit of creating a simple, basic model for start and then gradually add more features.
Also keep your documents in order. If you have a reliable Buyer Persona, you have a lot of work considering Buyer’s Journey or Lead Nurturing already done.
6. Focus
According to Marketing Bridge report, marketers concentrate too much on wide-range outbound activities and not enough on direct communication. In other words, they put a lot of money into attracting a lead, and then, when he visits a website, they can’t engage him, make him stay, answer his needs. They use aggressive, intrusive marketing to make promises they can’t keep. The reason? Neglecting on-site experience.
- Use landing pages! Buyer’s Journey doesn’t have to start on the homepage.
7. Use social media
Don’t underestimate the role of social media. Many customers find you that way. Above all, personalize social media campaigns (Facebook Custom Audiences) to provide different offers to fans who made a purchase and ones who didn’t.
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Your customer’s independency isn’t an excuse to leave him by himself. If he can’t quickly find information needed on the website and navigate intuitively, you could as well throw all the money invest in outbound marketing away
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