When you think of your target audience, what comes to mind?
I’ll tell you what…potential customers. A target audience is a group of people who are most likely going to be interested in a product or service you are marketing to sell. Your target audience are the people you want to connect with your product, buy into your brand, or care about what is being sold. If/when they buy, they become your customers. But how do you get them to pull that trigger and make that purchase or schedule that appointment? Drawing their attention is one thing, but in order to GET customers, you have to understand their intentions, motivations, and selling points. Better yet, you need to know why they are choosing YOUR business amongst the competitors.
Defining your customer needs, problems, and interactions with your business may seem overwhelming and even unnecessary at times. However, understanding each customer’s experience at each stage through customer journey mapping is crucial for turning business insights into long-term improvement strategies.
Creating and understanding customer journey mapping can help you and your business visualize how customers view your brand.
Do you know what your customers see and do before they purchase from you?
Customer journey mapping is a visual representation of a customer’s interactions with a brand, product, or service. It helps businesses understand their customer’s needs, processes, and perceptions. The initial social media marketing in only just the beginning of bringing awareness to your brand. You need to understand what forms of marketing are drawing the most attention from your customers. Customer journey mapping can also help business owners provide better solutions, increase customer retention, and discover key information to make the best decisions for their business.
A journey map lays out all touchpoints that your customer may have with your brand. From how they first heard of you through social media or brand advertising, to their direct interactions with your products, service or website, to exactly how they are feeling about their experience with your brand and business. The customer journey map also includes all of the actions your customer takes to complete an objective across a period of time. These valuable insights into the thoughts of your customers can lay the groundwork for essential changes to your product or service. They can also help the overall customer experience, marketing, and business strategy.
It’s no surprise that in order for your business to grow, you need to have customers.
An integrated marketing approach is important because it helps you connect with your audience, offer value, and make sales. In many ways, this makes you more LIKE your customers. The goal of integrated marketing is to create a consistent and personalized experience across different platforms and touchpoints, which can help increase customer satisfaction and loyalty. When you understand the needs of your audience and customers better than anyone else does, you can serve them better and give them what they want. This, in turn, benefits your business strategy to help your overall business growth. This is also why it’s important to integrate customer journey mapping into your marketing strategy.
Customer journey mapping has become an indispensable part of social media marketing. In today’s world, where the competition in every industry is very strong, it has become crucial to know exactly why and how customers come into contact with your brand. Because if they come into contact with your brand, they become a prospect, and if they become a prospect, they ultimately become a customer. And as we mentioned before…businesses can’t grow without customers
So, let’s talk about how exactly you can incorporate customer journey mapping into your marketing strategy.
Social Media is for Brand Awareness
Brand awareness on social media is a vital component of any successful marketing strategy. It helps businesses to establish recognition, credibility, and trust among their target audience. Social media can be a cost-effective way to increase brand awareness by helping people recognize and become familiar with your brand’s name, logo, products, and services. When people are aware of a brand, they’re more likely to engage with its content, share it, and consider it when making their purchase decisions. By consistently posting engaging content and actively interacting with their followers, businesses can increase brand visibility and stay at the top of their customers minds. Effective brand awareness on social media can also lead to high customer loyalty and advocacy. The organic spread of brand awareness can result in increased reach and potential customer acquisition as well as a better understanding of their customer journey mapping.
The Use of Touchpoints to Nurture Your Audience
Marketing touchpoints go beyond community engagement and customer service. They are different for every business. A marketing touchpoint is any time a consumer interacts with your brand. These interactions between a brand and a consumer can happen at any point in the customer journey; before, during, or after the purchase. They can be both physical and virtual. A physical touchpoint would be when a customer visits your business in person. A virtual touchpoint could be e-mail marketing that directs your target audience or customers through a sales funnel to a potential purchase, an advertisement about a specific product or service being offered, or text marketing with direct links to your website, just to name a few. The experiences consumers have with those touchpoints can shape how they view your business. Marketing touchpoints should unite a brand’s communications and help to promote brand awareness, brand consistency, and credibility. No matter what your touchpoints are, they should always include the option for customers to provide feedback. Let’s talk about that next…
Follow Up Sales with Advocacy Marketing
Advocacy marketing is a marketing strategy that invites and equips customers to generate buzz around your brand through social mentions, reviews, and word-of-mouth marketing. Advocacy marketing focuses on getting your current customers to advocate for your business, products, and/or services because of their own personal experiences with your brand. Ultimately, it’s providing top notch experiences, products, and customer service so that your customers can’t help but share positive feedback in person and online. By doing so, customers can express their support for your business which in turn will draw more attention and ultimately more customers. Advocacy marketing is every marketer’s dream. It’s cost effective and high yielding. You may be surprised at how many customers are willing to share positive feedback about your brand if they have the forum to do so. So, give them that opportunity!
When you’re able to see every step of your customer’s journey, you develop an empathy for who they are, what they want, and how they make decisions. Customer journey mapping allows you to establish empathy for your customers and identify how they’re feeling at every turn. It’s what makes it such a powerful exercise. Utilizing this approach allows you to take your customer’s perspective and use it as an opportunity to find solutions to any problem they may face when interacting with your business. Remember, every business greatest asset are their customers, because without customers there is no business.
