What happens after a potential customer encounters your website for the first time?
How about existing clients? Where do they stop for information? Do they end up where you want them to? More importantly, do they get what they came for?
You can plot their course to find the answers to those questions. It’s called “customer journey mapping” and if you’re marketing products or services online, it is worth your while to do it.
The Case for Mapping Your Customer’s Journey
“Mapping” is simply identifying all of the places (“touchpoints”) where you have an opportunity to communicate with your customer and showing how they connect together.
When you do that, you can see if customers are veering away from the destination you want them to go at certain points—indicating there’s a problem—or proceeding along the path that achieves both of your respective goals.
Those trouble spots may need minor content fixes or refined messaging to make sure you are reaching your core audiences.
They can also be opportunities to communicate with the user directly. For example, leaving a page abruptly or an unfinished task could trigger an email or pop-up, saying, “We noticed you’ve encountered a problem. How can we help?” In other words, you can intervene before you lose him or her for good.
Let’s say an animal rescue nonprofit relies heavily on volunteer workers to achieve its mission. It uses an online application to screen potential volunteers. By tracking users’ movements on the site, the rescue group realizes a third of its visitors are giving up on the form before completing the application.
It could mean the form is too complicated or not compatible with certain browsers. Regardless of the cause, the organization can now troubleshoot and fix the issue.
Mapping isn’t just for drawing in new clients; it’s equally important for keeping the ones you have. It’s about understanding how your customer is using the site and if it’s working.
And if it is working perfectly, you can still optimize those touchpoints with content that nudges users toward those all-important conversions.
In short, mapping protects the investment you’ve made in understanding your customer persona, writing an editorial mission statement, and developing a winning content strategy.
How Do You Go About Mapping the Journey?
Like nearly all things in digital marketing, mapping the journey is a mix of quantitative and qualitative analysis. The former provides the “what” and the latter gives you the “why” so you can take action.
Electric Lemonade offers mapping as part of our monthly content marketing services. While no two maps will be exactly alike, we’ve summarized the basic steps here:
- Define the behavioral stages based on your customer persona (e.g., awareness/discovery, research/comparison, and selection/purchase).
- Identify client goals for each stage using tools such as user testing, surveys, or customer service emails to understand what customers need as they move through the journey. During mapping, reference these goals to make sure the site supports them.
- Use Google Analytics to find the touchpoints.
- Capture data in a spreadsheet or infographic to provide visual representation of the customer’s journey.
- Analyze the quantitative and qualitative data to see if goals are being met.
- Use the data to adjust content delivery to correct or improve user experience and increase conversions, driving action toward your mutual goals.
We Don’t Stop There
Your customers or clients will undoubtedly change course over time and so should you. As a monthly client, Electric Lemonade will periodically update your map to ensure your customers’ critical needs are met.
Please fill out our secure online form below to learn more about content mapping for your business.
