How a customer journey helps you optimize marketing

Sometimes it happens in marketing that we plan and structure our activities, but we lose track of things a bit due to the many forms of advertising and the different ways to address customers. It can happen that you do not know exactly where the new prospects came from and how they were addressed. Online, it is often easier to understand whether a person is repeatedly clicking on the website or a landing page, for example. Cross-platform or even between digital and physical contacts, this tracking is often difficult to understand afterwards. It helps to understand which ideal journey and contact points customers and prospects usually have with the company and how many touchpoints they need to decide on a product or service. This journey is called a customer journey and can help to better structure and plan marketing holistically.

What is a customer journey?

Basically, the customer journey describes the journey that your customers travel in connection with the brand or the individual product or service. There are various touchpoints (contact points) where customers come into contact with the brand and the products and which in turn have an influence on the decision for and against a purchase. Marketing can use the journey and its phases to make the experiences as positive as possible. How long the customer journey takes for each customer varies greatly — anything from a few hours to several weeks or months is possible here.

Discover your own customer journey

In order to analyze the customer journey of your own target group and use it for marketing measures, it is important to know your own customers and user groups and to use this information as a basis for detailed customer journey mapping. In this mapping process, the touchpoints are systematically created on a map or a timeline. This also allows you to see what reasons potential customers might have for not continuing the journey or which arguments are preventing them from buying. These challenges can in turn be counteracted with targeted marketing and advertising measures. In order to create a suitable and meaningful customer journey, the following five phases must be completed:

1. Gather information about customer behavior
2. Create customer personas
3. Identify suitable touchpoints for each persona
4. Localize touchpoints in the customer journey
5. Select marketing measures based on the customer journey

Selection of marketing measures

The right marketing and advertising measures are then selected to suit the various phases of the customer journey. The Phases of Awareness, Consideration, Acquisition, Service and Loyalty describe the course of a customer who gets to know the brand and the product, gets informed, decides to buy and ultimately stays in the system as a customer. In particular, it is important to understand on which platforms and channels your own customers can be reached and how they are used for marketing. However, today's mediated world recommends in most cases using a more cross-media marketing strategy and generating as many different touchpoints as possible. Basically, a customer journey helps you to better understand your own customers and the target group and to plan marketing in a targeted manner. In this way, not only can marketing be optimized, but the customer experience can also be improved in the long term.

You can also find more detailed information about the customer journey and customer journey mapping in our new white paper. Download here now.