A customer journey includes the ongoing experiences a consumer has with a brand.
It is a roadmap for understanding and influencing purchase behaviours so you can turn potential customers into loyal advocates.
Customer interactions with a brand are often represented as a funnel, or sequential steps.
You can approach the customer journey from the perspective of your business or the perspective of your consumer target, but essentially the key steps within it are the same.
1 – What are the steps of a customer journey?
A customer journey consists essentially of 5 key stages: Awareness, Consideration, Purchase, Retention and Advocacy.
You will find many online illustrations of the customer journey, some more detailed than others, some using different terminology but essentially, they cover the same 5 key stages.
• Awareness:
The customer journey starts with the Awareness stage. This is where potential customers first encounter your brand.
Whether through advertising, social media, word-of-mouth or wide distribution channels, the goal is to make your brand known to a broad audience.
People have different needs at different points in time and have more choice than ever to satisfy those needs. So, to capture your consumer target, in high numbers to make your business sustainable, you need to build your brand awareness at scale.
Awareness is ultimately about visibility. Your consumer target needs to know you exist.
If you are not visible in the right places, at the right times, people cannot consider your product / service as a potential solution to satisfy their needs.
For any business – no matter how big or small, old or new – driving brand awareness in the physical and digital world, is the first essential step to recruiting consumers and moving them down the purchase funnel.
• Consideration:
In this stage, consumers seek more information about your brand, products, or services and actively evaluate your proposition alongside your competition.
Pending on the industry, the consideration stage can be very short or take several weeks. Think buying a chocolate bar versus buying a car – not quite the same consideration process.
Unlocking the consideration stage is key to move down the buying funnel. A deep understanding of your consumer target needs, motivations, potential barriers and triggers to purchase, as well as having a clear brand proposition, is crucial here.
You need to make it easy for your target audience to say ‘yes’ to your product / service.
Engaging brand narratives, in-depth product information, customer reviews & testimonials are tactics you can use to increase interest and consideration for your brand and move your consumer target onto the next stage of the customer journey.
• Purchase:
The Purchase stage is the ultimate goal of the funnel. It’s the moment of truth when a consumer decides to buy your product or service.
Remember that many of your competitors will be after your consumers, so there is always the risk that your target audience buys another brand, despite considering yours for a while.
In the world of Retail, you will hear the term ‘winning in the last 3 feet’. Most consumers have product categories in mind when doing their weekly and monthly shops but don’t have specific brands / products in their consideration set (unless they are a creature of habit).
Price promotions, limited offers, exciting product innovation can persuade consumers to buy new brands or switch from their usual brands, so be aware of your competitors’ tactics to capture shoppers at the point of purchase.
• Retention (also called Loyalty)
The customer journey doesn’t end with a purchase; it evolves into the post-purchase experience.
Providing quality products that deliver on their brand promise, exceptional customer service, post-purchase communication and incentives for future purchases contribute to customer retention and brand advocacy.
• Advocacy:
This is the Holy Grail of the customer journey. Having your consumers talking about your brand and recommending it to other.
Consumer Word Of Mouth (WOM) can significantly impact the growth of a business as it can impact all stages of the customer journey, from driving awareness, consideration, purchase, retention to creating new brand advocates.
Brands cannot fully control consumer WOM but ensuring a positive purchase and usage experience, delivering on their promise and providing added value can lead to organic WOM.
Although brand advocacy is the last stage of the customer journey, it helps building the top of the purchase funnel as consumer WOW is a powerful way to reach additional consumers and build further awareness for your brand.
2 – How to influence your customer journey?
Now you understand the 5 stages, you need to plan how to influence each one.
• Map out your customer journey: Put yourself in the shoes of your consumer target. Look at the world through their eyes. How, when, where and why would they interact with your brand? Create a customer journey map and identify all the Touch Points (physical and digital) between your brand and your target audience across the 5 stages of the customer journey.
• Resource allocation: Plan your resources effectively (time, budget, people) to address the specific needs and behaviours of your target audience across the purchase funnel. Having mapped out your customer journey, select the Touch Points you want to influence and invest in the most.
• Consumer understanding: Gain insights into consumer behaviours, preferences and pain points at each stage of the customer journey. This will help you tailor your brand Marketing Mix to recruit and move more of your consumer target through the buying funnel.
• Optimize conversion: Identify the potential bottle necks in your purchase funnel. Pinpoint the barriers that may hinder your consumer target from progressing from one stage to the next, all the way down the funnel. Equally, identify the triggers you can leverage to increase conversion at each stage.
As you work on your customer journey, continue to learn how to tailor your Marketing strategies to each stage. Observe how successful brands across various industries recruit and move their consumer target through their purchase funnel. Identify how your competitors leverage and optimise their brand Marketing Mix to build strong customer journeys.
