How a customer journey helps you to optimize marketing

Sometimes it happens in marketing that we plan and structure our activities, but because of the many forms of advertising and the different ways of addressing customers, we lose track of things. It can happen that you don't know exactly where the new prospects came from and how they were approached. Online it is often easier to understand whether a person clicks repeatedly on the website or a landing page, for example. This tracking is often difficult to understand afterwards across platforms or even between digital and physical contacts. It helps to understand which ideal travel and contact points customers and prospects usually have with the company and how many touch points they need to decide on a product or service. This journey is called a customer journey and can help to structure marketing better and to plan it holistically.

What is a customer journey?

Basically, the customer journey describes the journey that your customers take in connection with the brand or the individual product or service. There are various touchpoints at which customers come into contact with the brand and the products and which in turn influence the decision for and against a purchase. Marketing can use the trip and its phases to make the experience as positive as possible. How long the customer journey lasts for the respective customer varies greatly - from a few hours to several weeks or months, everything 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 a detailed customer journey mapping. In this mapping process, the touchpoints are systematically laid out on a map or a chronological sequence. In this way, you can also see what reasons potential customers might have for not continuing the journey or what 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 followed:

1. Collect information about customer behavior
2. Form customer personas
3. Identify suitable touchpoints for the respective persona
4. Locate 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 match the various phases of the customer journey. The phases Awareness, Consideration, Acquisition, Service and Loyalty describe the course of a customer who gets to know the brand and the product, gets information, decides to buy and ultimately remains in the system as a customer. Above all, it is important to understand the platforms and channels on which your own customers can be reached and how these are used for marketing. However, today's media-based world recommends in most cases to rely on a more cross-media marketing strategy and to generate as many different touchpoints as possible. Basically, a customer journey helps to better understand one's own customers and 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 on the customer journey and customer journey mapping in our new whitepaper:

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