Offering the best experience to your user is the key to fostering customer relationships or optimizing your lead generation. And to improve it, there’s no secret: you need to think about all the elements that make it up, and that obviously involves the customer journey. But actually, what is a good customer journey? Find out in this article! Let’s go!
Definitions of the user journey
The customer journey, or user journey in French, is a set of stages that a prospect goes through throughout their relationship with your brand. It is often represented by a map or diagram with all the touchpoints that your prospect is likely to encounter. More than a map, it is a tool, a guide to understanding all of your customer’s needs and thus streamlining the customer relationship.
In other words, it means understanding what information your prospect needs to solve their problem and continue through the buying journey. Implementing a content strategy is often necessary and complementary to the customer journey.
This representation is very often divided into 3 major phases: awareness, consideration, and decision. Some marketing specialists consider that the 3-phase matrix is incomplete because it does not take retention and recommendation stages into account. In some cases, it is made up of 8 stages.
Here is an example of customer journey mapping
What we can observe is the power that a well-designed matrix can have in creating a virtuous circle in the lead generation or upselling process.
The benefits of mapping your customer journey
Mapping your customer journey is essential. It will allow you to reduce your sources of friction and disagreement between you and your prospect. Indeed, since each stage of your user journey is detailed, you will be able to define which message should address the issue raised by your prospect.
Let’s imagine that your ideal customer is a sales director who wants a new tool to boost their sales force. You have identified in your user journey that they will hesitate between several solutions. Mapping this action highlights the need for content that enables you to compare yourself with your competitors and showcase your advantages.
In fact, mapping your customer journey means understanding which content is effective and which content is missing from your content strategy.
Deploy your premium content in your customer journey
In your content strategy, you have created many resources that will allow you to build loyalty, reassure, and turn your lead into a customer.
During the awareness stage, it is your articles, white papers, and guides that will make you known and make your leads think of your solution.
In the consideration phase, your business cases and references will take over and reassure your leads about the relevance of your solution and your level of knowledge as an expert.
Finally, during the decision phase, your webinars and your product demonstrations will take care of convincing your lead about the solution.
Of course, the marketing and sales teams must work together to streamline the flow of information.
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How to optimize your user journey?
To optimize your customer journey, there is a whole range of tools and practices that you can put in place to help you generate qualified leads.
Creating your own customer journey map
It’s simple advice, but every user journey is unique depending on your company, your business sector, and your strategy. That is why adapting your own customer journey map is necessary and much more relevant than simply copying an existing mapping. For example, some user journeys can stretch over several weeks, or even several months. That is why it is important to create your own customer journey, on the one hand so that it is suited to your business and on the other hand to think about every detail, such as reassurance elements.
Use your communication channels
Your communication channels play an essential role in the smooth running of your customer journey. Indeed, each channel will intervene to help your prospect feel reassured that your solution is the best one for them, throughout the entire process.
For example, to distribute your content to a wide audience, you can use your social networks, your email database or even use traditional communication methods such as display advertising or advertising in your store.
In fact, using your communication channels wisely means implementing an effective multichannel strategy that pushes every piece of content you offer across your different communication channels.
The multichannel strategy, support for your user journey
Implementing a multichannel strategy means giving additional support to your user journey. Indeed, integrating your content into your communication strategy will help your prospects find your content and start a relationship with you.
More than a multichannel strategy, it is the implementation of a cross-channel and omnichannel strategy that will boost your content
Read also: Cross-channel and multichannel, what’s the difference?
Depending on the stage your prospect is in, you will change the way you communicate as well as the channels you use in your strategy.
Create useful content using the BCG matrix
This matrix, designed to analyze the relevance of a product, can already give you an indication of whether or not it is important to create content for the products & services you market. If you notice that your product is only slightly profitable or not profitable at all, it may be wise to focus those content creation efforts on another product.
Your marketing personas
Knowing your customers means knowing their needs. And to know your customers, rely on your marketing personas. A persona is above all the definition of your ideal customer, that is to say, defining everything that can help you characterize them: desires, family situation, fears, means of communication, etc. There are many tools on the internet that can help you create one. We suggest Xtensio, which is a complete and intuitive tool.
Personalize your message
Do you send newsletters or download emails? Personalize them! The first and last name, of course, but not only that. Communicate based on their interests or on the resources your leads have downloaded from your website. There are many ways to personalize your message; it’s up to you to find the most effective ones for your target audience.
Use A/B testing
To improve your user journey, nothing is better than testing, testing, and testing again what works best for your prospects. This is called A/B testing and it consists of offering several versions of an action and seeing which one generates the most leads, clicks, which ones attract the most attention, etc. It is a very simple way to understand the needs and desires of your leads.
Each communication channel can have its own A/B testing. A specific page on your website, for example, or even a welcome email. Implementing this process can help you optimize your cross-channel strategy.
Use the marketing automation tool to drive your user journey
Marketing automation is the set of techniques used to send the right message, at the right time, to the right person. The objective is to devote working time to high value-added tasks, namely content creation. Thanks to this tool, you will be able to deliver the most relevant content to your prospect in order to establish your position as an expert.
But then, what is the role of marketing automation in this process? In fact, marketing automation is support for your communication and an excellent tool for capitalizing on your content. It allows you to go further in the customer journey and to include the notion of loyalty and recommendations in order to boost your lead generation.
Read also: The best digital tools to make your digital strategy successful
Marketing automation will play a crucial role throughout the entire user journey, from awareness to loyalty and recommendation. Indeed, thanks to a strategy developed upstream and the implementation of scenarios, you will put the appropriate content in place according to your prospects’ needs, in an automated way, in order to send the right message, at the right time and to the right person.
Each stage can be the subject of a marketing automation scenario. Thanks to this tool, you will be able to collect data from your users (and especially the email address, the most important data in marketing automation) and thus grow your business.
To collect data from your users, you can of course put in place the traditional “newsletter sign-up” but you can also use a form system that invites the prospect to enter their data in order to access your resources.
Example of marketing automation during the user journey
During the awareness stage, you will offer your prospects resources such as white papers, webinars, and vouchers. It may be wise to set up a marketing automation campaign just after they react to the offer by sending them a series of carefully designed communications.
During the consideration phase, it is common for your prospects to hesitate between several choices depending on their needs. That is why you can offer your prospects tailored content that will help them in their selection. We advise you to use lead scoring, specific to marketing automation, to help you qualify your contact. This involves assigning a score to your prospect in order to differentiate hot leads from cold leads and thus adjust the marketing communication pressure.
Regarding the decision phase, it is time for your company to offer your contact an action to secure your sale. That is why you can encourage your contact to act through calls to action with offers, discounts, a sense of urgency… These actions are triggered when a contact performs a certain type of action on your site or when they reach the number of points defined during your lead scoring.
Finally, for the loyalty and retention phase, you can offer your most loyal customers the opportunity to join your ambassador program so that they too can contribute to your lead generation. To do this, you can use marketing automation to identify your most loyal customers through satisfaction surveys. The circle is complete.
Successfully managing your user journey requires knowing your customer well, but an optimized user journey improves the customer experience you have with your customer. You now have all the cards in hand to succeed, it’s your move!
