Creating an effective customer journey online involves researching your customer, mapping out their journey and planning a strategy around that.

Ever wondered why your customers are leaving your website after spending a long time on a specific page? Or why you have a lot of leads that are not converting?

To understand your customers’ behaviour and relationship with your brand, you need to understand their online journey first. What are the steps they take between discovering you on social media and purchasing a product?

The buyer’s online journey

The buyer’s online journey is the process that a buyer goes through online before purchasing a product or service. There are many theories on how many stages a buyer goes through in a journey. But these are the three main ones:

1. Awareness: when a buyer has a demand to solve a problem or to fulfil a need.
2. Consideration: at this stage the buyer is thinking more about the pros and cons of various options a company is offering.
3. Decision: this is when buyers are ready to spend and purchase.

Creating content around the buyer’s journey will resonate with the reader a lot more, but don’t rush into content creation just yet. Understanding your customer’s concerns and needs at each stage is what really matters and this can be done using a visual customer journey map.

Read more: Easy Ways to Improve Your Customer’s Digital Journey

Customer journey map

Mapping out the buyer journey steps in a customer journey map is a great way to visualise the process the prospect is going through.

Start this map by breaking down the customer’s journey based on your main buyer personas. By identifying your customer’s behaviour, you will be able to know their questions, motivations, expectations and pain points. This will help you a create specific journey map for each persona.

Here are some various templates for customer journey maps by HubSpot

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Gathering Data

Creating a customer journey map from scratch can feel overwhelming, but don’t worry. The key thing to keep in mind when you start is: keep it simple. Start with a simple step-by-step of the touch points that one of your main buyer personas will have with your brand, then you can flesh out the journey over time.

It’s important not to fill the customer journey map with information that you pluck out of thin air because this visual map is not about what you think the customer journey is, but rather what the journey actually is.

This is where data comes in – without it you can’t truly know what the customer journey is and make changes to your business. To gather data for your journey mapping you can conduct qualitative research in the form of surveys, interviews or field studies.

It’s important to remember that the perfect customer journey roadmap is about knowing your potential customer. Therefore, researching, studying, analysing and mapping the customer behaviour is key.

As a result, you will be able to create a more seamless and intuitive experience. It will allow you to create content that speaks to them. Content that solves their problems.

If you’d like to create the perfect customer journey roadmap for your business, get in touch with our team today.

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