Transforming Your Customer Journey: Simplicity is Key
In a new Fractional CMO role or during a Marketing Program Audit consulting engagement, I begin by examining four key foundations of the client's marketing strategy. I do this by asking the following questions:
Who is your target customer? What do you know about their demographics, needs, motivations, and buying habits?
What is your brand narrative? What unique story do you want to tell about your mission, future vision, core values, and positioning?
What is your ideal customer journey? What paths do your target customers take to discover you, engage with you, research your offerings, and make a purchase?
How does everything come together in your marketing plan? Do you have clearly defined business objectives, marketing goals, budget allocations, and channel plans that effectively articulate your brand narrative to your target customers along the journey paths you identified?
In most cases, clients have a strong understanding of their target customers since their products or services were specifically developed to meet those customers' needs. However, there is often a significant opportunity to further develop or optimize the brand narrative, customer journey, and overall marketing approach.
Today, I want to focus on the customer journey. I use this term frequently in my discussions with clients because it effectively summarizes the marketing funnel, although I recognize it can be somewhat of a marketing buzzword.
What is the customer journey?
We marketers used to talk a lot about the marketing funnel. We still do, although many have declared the marketing funnel to be dead due to the decline of traditional media and the overwhelming amount of digital advertising tactics that consumers face today.
I still appreciate the concept of the marketing funnel, as I have never viewed it as a perfectly linear process. The marketing funnel remains an effective illustration within a strategic marketing plan, showcasing the various tactics and messages needed to create brand awareness, encourage interaction with a brand's products or services, entice purchases, and provide reasons for customers to remain loyal and make repeat purchases. As I’ve written about before, throughout my 15-year career in corporate marketing, I often had to request and justify budget for branding and educational content. Walking my business and finance colleagues through the marketing funnel has proven to be a helpful way to facilitate those discussions.
Now, I have evolved those conversations to focus on the customer journey, which consists of the steps a customer takes when interacting with a brand. Similar to the marketing funnel, this journey consists of multiple stages: awareness, consideration, purchase decision, retention, and advocacy. However, a customer may not experience all these stages or encounter them in a linear sequence.
Why is the customer journey important?
Customers will find your brand organically, even outside of the paths you’ve planned for them, and that’s great! While we all aspire to achieve organic brand relevance and viral success, it's not guaranteed. Therefore, brands must create and develop customer journeys that facilitate easy discovery.
In many instances, customers engage with different aspects of your company, such as sales, customer service, or in-store retail. Clearly defining the customer journey is essential to establishing coherent processes and messaging, ensuring that your customers enjoy a seamless and consistent experience with your brand.
Companies that are launching a new product or service have the greatest control over the development of the customer journey. When I work with clients to create a go-to-market plan as part of my Strategic Marketing Blueprint service, I outline how the campaign's creative and messaging strategy, along with owned, organic, and paid channels, will facilitate customer discovery, engagement, and purchase. However, it’s important to note that the customer journey should evolve over time. After launching the journey, it’s important to regularly analyze its effectiveness and create an optimization plan.
An argument for simplicity in the customer journey
There are a myriad of marketing channels and tools available to us today, and it’s tempting to want to leverage as many as possible when building the customer journey.
Perhaps you are launching a product in an established space, and you see that a key competitor’s journey spans hundreds of touchpoints. Do you have to match what they’ve built? You can try to employ a throw all the spaghetti at the wall and see what sticks strategy, but I don’t recommend it as you’ll spend a ton of money, and it will be challenging to parse out what is truly driving impact.
While customers are constantly bombarded by brand messages and may have short attention spans, I believe it's crucial to design the customer journey with simplicity at its core. Achieving simplicity requires a deliberate approach, focusing on the messages and channels that will most effectively reach and convert customers, as opposed to having a brand presence on every available platform.
Here are a few reasons why simplicity in the customer journey is important:
Marketing resources are not endless. Even if you have a larger budget to work with, your marketing resources, such as your in-house team, have limits. Focus on delivering quality over quantity in your marketing action plan.
A more complicated journey runs the risk for breakage. With more touchpoints in the customer journey, you’re presenting your customer with more barriers and potential drop-off points. Keep your customers focused on the key actions that you want them to take.
A simple journey is easier to optimize. It’s easier to optimize or overhaul a more focused set of marketing tactics. I often find that creating a complex, sophisticated journey can inspire a “set it and forget it” mentality. I think it’s far better to start with a simple journey, and then increase the level of sophistication as your business grows.
You can stay true to your brand purpose and value proposition. Your brand's purpose and value proposition should be unique, targeting a specific audience within a particular category. As your business grows, it might be tempting to expand and offer new products and services to reach a larger audience. While I won't dive into the broader business implications of this approach, it's important to note that expansion will increase the complexity of your customer journey. To maintain clarity, examine the customer journey with your core brand narrative in mind. This exercise will help ensure that your value proposition remains strong and clear as you grow. In order to be viable, your value proposition must be upheld (i.e. proven to customers) at every stage in the journey.
How to achieve simplicity in the customer journey
I noted earlier that companies launching a new product or service have significant control over shaping the customer journey. Designing something from the ground up is often easier than trying to untangle and optimize a complicated existing process. Therefore, it’s important to take the time necessary to intentionally design a focused customer journey. However, there is still plenty of opportunity to evaluate your current journey and transform it towards a simpler, more streamlined approach.
When designing a journey with simplicity in mind, consider the following questions:
Are my awareness-driving tactics targeting the right audience, or am I casting too wide a net?
Is my brand message clear and compelling enough to capture the interest of potential customers?
Once customers become aware of my brand and engage with my channels, am I providing focused, high-quality resources to assist them in their consideration? Or am I overwhelming them with too much information? For example, are the FAQs and testimonials on my site relevant to my customers' key questions and needs?
Are all of my marketing channels and content pieces driving good engagement?
When customers are ready to convert, is the purchase or sign-up process seamless?
After a customer makes a purchase, do I make it easy for them to provide feedback and refer others? If a customer gives negative feedback, am I prepared to respond and take action based on that feedback?
Do I maintain regular contact with my customers, but not so frequently that it is potentially overwhelming?
Across all my customer touchpoints, does my messaging convey a cohesive brand story? Is it easy to understand? Does it clearly address customer pain points, highlight the unique value my brand offers at each stage of the journey, and include clear calls to action that guide customers toward the next logical step?
This examination may reveal touchpoints in your customer journey that are superfluous, confusing, frustrating, or simply not impactful. If so, you will need to decide whether you can optimize them or if it's better to remove them based on your objectives, resources, and value proposition. With an eye for quality over quantity, it’s ok to let things go!
If you are looking for help auditing and optimizing your customer journey, I invite you to check out our Marketing Program Audit service. It’s designed for business and marketing leaders who already have a journey architecture in place and are looking for quick-turn, targeted recommendations to increase effectiveness.
