Understanding The Customer Journey
If you listen to Grow With Soul you will have heard me mention The Customer Journey off hand in several coaching episodes, and I’m conscious that I haven’t really gone into the theory of it. As with most things marketing, there are lots of different approaches and ideas about the customer journey – in this post I’m going to talk through the simplified version that I use.
If you search ‘customer journey template’, you’ll see all sorts of different formats and templates with lots of different headings and meanings. Which really just goes to show that there isn’t one definitive way in which to approach the customer journey. At it’s root, this concept exists to help you better understand how your customer is feeling and what they’re thinking as they start to think about buying, and how you can therefore serve and speak to them to help them on their journey. Whichever template helps you to do that is the best one to use.
OK, so that being said, let’s look a little more at the theory. There are two parts to the Customer Journey – your customer’s journey to purchase generally, and, layered underneath, their journey through your business.
The Sales Funnel
Let’s look at the first one first. If you were a multinational software sales company, you would have a complex buying funnel that included words like ‘awareness’, ‘consideration’, ‘research’, ‘acquisition’ – when you have teams of people working towards closing a multiple figure deal, breaking down that process is helpful to ensure everyone knows their role. But for us with our teams of one, having a multi-stage customer journey muddies the water more than anything. That’s why I use the simple 3 step sales funnel – top, middle, and end.
Here’s what the funnel looks like:
TOP OF THE FUNNEL
Potential customers enter your world at the top of the funnel. This is the discovery and inspiration phase of their journey where they’re just being introduced to you, your brand and what you stand for.
They may have just discovered your account on Instagram, or found your content through a Pinterest or Google search. At the top of the funnel, people have either stumbled across you or found you because they were looking for a specific solution to a problem – however, in neither scenario are the ready to buy straight away. First they want to understand a little more about you and whether you’re a brand they want to support.
MIDDLE OF THE FUNNEL
Once you have hooked someone by inspiring them, they will start to move further down the funnel towards buying. Not everyone will progress further, and that’s fine; perhaps your brand isn’t what they were looking for, or they’re just not ready yet. The point of the funnel is that it narrows, with only the dream, ideal customers flowing towards the bottom.
The middle of the funnel is where you can start to be more specific with your content. This is the part where people are getting to know your brand, to decide whether they can trust you and if you’re as right for them as they thought you were in that first, top of the funnel, impression.
END OF THE FUNNEL
When a customer reaches the end of the funnel, they are more or less ready to buy and are just making the final decision. Content here needs to just tip them over the edge, and is better suited to being on your sales page, product descriptions and testimonials/reviews than on your blog.
Think about your own purchasing habits, perhaps the last time you bought a course, a book, a new piece of clothing. You started at the top of the funnel with a need for that item (whether you knew it or not) and started researching options or stumbled upon a product which led you to research options. You then narrowed down the list of possibilities, looking deeper into the specificities of that product/brand and comparing pros and cons before finally checking the small print and buying. That was you moving from the top, to the middle, to the end of the funnel.
Essentially what we’re thinking about here is how customers discover and interact with your business at each stage on their journey to purchasing. That journey might be 10 minutes or 10 weeks, but they still experience the same thoughts and feelings at each stage, and need to encounter content that helps them along to the next stage.
This is where your messaging comes in.
The Journey Through Your Business
You’ve thought about your customer, their goals and challenges and how they feel and what they think as they’re making the decision to buy a product like yours. Now you need to macro in on your own business and see how a customer’s experience moving through your business compares to they’re general buying journey.
First of all, map out what happens when people discover you and start to find out more about your brand. What might their first impression be, and is that different if they find you first on Instagram or on Pinterest? Where might they go next if they start moving towards the middle of the funnel, what content do you have to help them do that? Is it easy for them to find where to buy when they’re ready, and what’s their experience like after they press that button?
Draw a map of all these touch-points a customer has with your business from when they first find you, through purchasing and out the other side. Imagine that map is on tracing paper that you lay over the top of their general buying journey – how do the two compare? Do you have touch points that tell them what they need to hear and help them at each stage of their journey? An example might be if you have loads of blog posts that are mostly introductory to your brand, perhaps there is a content gap for customers who are in the middle of the funnel and wanting to go deeper.
Finally, take your map and jot down next to your existing touch points how your customer will be feeling at that point in their journey and how well that touch point supports them – a traffic light system is really useful here for seeing quickly where you need to work on. Add in any extra touch points you feel may be lacking, and now you have a clearer view of what you need to work on to really optimise your customer journey.
We’ve all experienced a customer journey that isn’t smooth – maybe when we’ve clicked over to a website from Instagram and it’s look completely different, or when a confirmation email didn’t arrive in a timely manner and sent us into a panic. A customer journey that doesn’t flow jars, and that jarring breaks down a customer’s trust in us and our business. And if they don’t trust you, they’re not going to buy from you.
So use thinking of the customer journey as a way to get a bird’s eye view on that process, to be a bit more objective over areas that might be jarring for a newcomer and make sure that everything you are putting out is a flowing consistent journey that helps your customer, ultimately, find the right solution to their problem in your product – and feel happy about it!
