Journey Mapping: The Crucial Key to Successful Marketing

Gone are the days of blind marketing campaigns meant to cast a wide net. With the increasing industry disruption, businesses are learning that personalization is strategy of choice to draw in consumers. While the buzz floods the media, the truth is that some are learning and adapting, others are just becoming aware that marketing transition is necessary and most of them seem to have no idea what to do about it.

A recent study by CMO Council and Pegasystems, "Predicting Routes to Revenue," an unbelievable 5% of marketers studied said that they had mastered the ability to predict the customer journey and understand what adaptations on their part would maximize value. In a flooded marketplace, consumers are opting in to purchasing experiences that are increasingly based on their emotional connection with a given brand. Your product or service may be superior, but if the consumer has a negative association with your business, they'll opt out and go elsewhere.

So what can your company do to create positive connections and improve personalization strategies? Customer Journey Maps are key to understanding your target audience, their needs, and how to convince them that you are the provider to choose. There are many ways to structure this visual representation of your customer's experiences and their thoughts on how you met their expectations during each touchpoint of their exposure and interaction with your business. The key points are to gather your research about your various customer personas to identify each persona's journey in their relationship with you from discovery, to research, conversion, and post sale engagement. Perhaps, the most important point for marketers to remember about their Journey Maps is that they should never be static. Fluidity in the market, the psychology of your customer's purchasing process, and your targeted areas for improving their experience should be regularly assessed