Walk A Mile In Your Customer’s Shoes. Add Experience and Empathy To Get The Most Out Of Your Customer Journey Map [Template].

Customer Experience Journey Map Template

May 20, 2021December 3, 2022 ~ K. Quesenberry ~ Leave a comment

At its most basic level a customer journey map is a tool that helps marketers understand how a customer goes from awareness of a need to purchase of their product or service. People don’t see a single ad, click and purchase. The path to purchase includes many touchpoints that influence their decisions to proceed toward your product, a competitor, or substitute product.

People look for different information in each stage of the buyer’s journey starting with awareness, consideration and purchase. Yet, the journey doesn’t end there. With the increased value and influence of loyal consumers retention and advocacy are important post-purchase stages. An InMoment survey found 61% of loyal customers will go out of their way to buy from a preferred brand, 60% buy more frequently, and 75% recommend the brand to friends and family.

Yet simply identifying the stepping stones or touchpoints on the path to purchase and on to advocacy is just the beginning of what a customer journey map can accomplish. A customer journey analysis can also map out customer’s experience and feelings at each stage to truly understand your customer’s perspective. When creating your next customer journey map include experience and empathy mapping to walk the journey in your customer’s shoes.

The customer journey map template below takes the traditional marketing funnel and adds post purchase stages. It also includes a customer-centric approach considering customer experience from an empathy context for better understanding of each touchpoint and stage.

Are you ready to take a walk with your customer? To complete your customer journey map follow these steps.

Establish what you’re trying to accomplish. Start in the middle of the journey by understanding what a purchase or conversion is and where it happens. Are you looking to increase eCommerce sales, drive traffic to a store, or generate leads for salespeople? Are you promoting virtual or physical event attendance? Or are you helping a nonprofit gain donations or volunteers? This may be about the journey, but you still need to know where you are headed.

Identify who you’re trying to reach. Define your target market for the product or service and the primary and secondary target audiences. Then create or reference your personas for each audience. Having personas will give you a good head start on the customer journey map. Personas are audience profiles of ideal customers that include demographics, interests, behavior, media use, needs, pain points and goals. Persona goals should make a connection to your purchase phase conversion. If there is a mismatch you may be targeting the wrong audience.

Research your customers. Conduct interviews, focus groups and surveys with customers. Verify findings with internal and external stakeholders including sales and customer service personnel, communications partners and social media managers. Combine these first hand insights with data collected from your CRM, website, email and social media analytics. Look for low engagement touchpoints that aren’t resonating and were you may be losing potential customers. In this research you may discover the need for separate customer journey maps for each persona.

Categorize touchpoints. Identify the main touchpoints customers are experiencing the brand in each stage of the customer journey. Note that a touchpoint can appear in multiple stages and multiple touchpoints can appear in one stage. Social media like Twitter may be used in awareness and advocacy. Include all forms of media. The customer journey contains paid, owned and earned media. Place touchpoints in the where and what row of the template under each appropriate stage.

Add the customer experience. Now answer the questions in the first two rows of the customer journey template. This will help you understand the actual experience of the customer and provide an empathetic perspective. Many mistakes in marketing communication happen when we don’t understand what it is truly like to be in our customer’s shoes. What do they think, feel, see, say and do in each stage? Look for pain points or frustrations and how you can turn them into gains.

Conduct a content audit. With a better understanding of the customer perspective and path conduct a content audit of all brand touchpoints on the customer journey. Go beyond a content inventory to include the customer experience. Are their gaps in what the customer is thinking, feeling, saying and doing with what the brand is publishing? There may be a mismatch in message or a missing touchpoint in paid and owned media. Poor post-purchase customer experience may be causing low or negative customer advocacy through earned media in the pre- and purchase stages.

Develop a digital strategy. From the insights of the journey map and content audit develop a plan for what digital marketing tactics and channels need to be updated and developed. If there are missing or mismatched messages and content work on customer acquisition. If significant customer experience issues have been revealed concentrate on customer retention. Then identify the person and persons for action. Multiple in house departments and external partners are responsible. Marketing, advertising, public relations and customer service all contribute to the customer journey. It is important to take a cross-discipline approach to move the customer forward in each stage.

Even if you felt like you had a good grasp of your customer journey 62% of marketers indicate that Covid-19 has caused significant changes exposing new gaps. Many of which will not return to pre-Covid days or continue to evolve as consumers get used to new digital journeys. Be sure you know what it is like to walk in your customer’s shoes. Evaluate your customer journey on a regular basis.

Segment Your Target Audience For More Effective Digital And Social Media Marketing.

How to segment your social media and digital media target audiences

February 13, 2021December 3, 2022 ~ K. Quesenberry ~ Leave a comment

A recent Adobe survey of business leaders indicates “better use of data for more effective audience segmentation and targeting” as a top priority for marketing. What is it and how do you do it?

Qualtrics defines market segmentation as “the practice of dividing your market into approachable groups … subsets of a market based on demographics, needs, priorities, common interests, and other psychographic or behavioral criteria used to better understand the target audience.”

Segmentation provides real benefits as 81% of executives say it is crucial to growing their profits. Segmentation can increase response rates and lower acquisition costs with:

More specific messages that resonate with customer’s wants and needs.
More personal messages that help brands stand out from the competition.
More targeted advertising to those most likely to convert to customers.

Once a business defines their target market or the specific group of people they will focus their products and services on they establish various target audiences to focus their marketing messages. There are further benefits in segmenting the target audience.

How do you segment your audience?

Consider an amusement park promoting tickets sales for the upcoming season. Their core target market is most likely adults 25-45 will children living at home. They would be the group most likely to plan and purchase tickets for immediate and extended family trips to the park.

First determine your general message.

Most businesses need to create general awareness before consideration by customers. Brand ads do this well.

An amusement park builds overall brand awareness through traditional TV, radio, print and billboard ads. These ads have a general theme showing kids, adults, grandparents and teens having fun at the park. This would appeal to their core target audience of adults with children planning family trips and looking to make sure the park has something for everyone.

Mass media must have broad appeal in messaging and imagery. In digital and social media there is opportunity to customize messages, imagery and offers.

Brainstorm audience segments.

Based on your knowledge of the target audience consider possible differences in wants and needs within the group. The amusement park may want to look at stage of life and location.

People in different stages of life may want different experiences at the park:

Adults with young children (age 25-34)
Adults with pre-teens/tweens (age 35-45)
High school/college students (age 13-24)
Grandparents (age 55+)

People who live different distances from the park may plan different types of trips:

Multi-visit locals (Within 40 miles)
Day trippers (40 to 100 miles)
Over nighters (Over 100 miles)

Consider content for each segment.

Now see if your segments make a difference in content. Determine how the messages, imagery and offers could differ for each of the segment’s needs.

Parents with young children would probably respond to content focused on smaller rides. Parents with elementary and middle school kids would look for more exciting attractions. High school and college students hang out with friends and take on the big roller coasters. Grandparents want see their grandchildren on rides while being able to sit and rest enjoying shows and restaurants.

With the geographic segments messaging and offers could get more focused. People within 40 miles would be most interested in season passes whether talking to families, teens or grandparents. People 40 to 100 miles away are most likely interested in day trips. Those over 100 miles away may want to know about other area attractions and park plus hotel packages for a multi-day trip.

Plan out content combinations.

Now plan out a content segment grid. Link various segments together to determine how many content variations you need.

Based on the amusement park brainstorming we have identified 12 market segments (4 X 3 = 12). Four are based on age and family demographics and three are based geographic variables. In a social media or display advertising campaign each of these 12 segments could be targeted with a unique message, image and promotional offer.

Consider your CRM data.

Most companies have customer relationship management (CRM) databases that could add another layer of segmentation. Look at that data for meaningful segments. This could help you rule out segments or find additional ones.

The amusement park could use their CRM to discover that the market for grandparents purchasing tickets is fairly small and decide not to target them. Their adult children tend to plan and purchase tickets for trips where the parents, younger children and grandparents come together. The data reveals parents purchase tickets for the high school and college students yet they often go to the park with friends. Thus, that audience may still be a worthwhile target as they influence the decision.

From these narrowed down segments the amusement park could send emails out to past customers with the segmented communications we’ve identified. Then from their email data they could create a remarketing campaign through custom audiences in social media and display advertising.

Unique remarketing messages could target email subscribers who:

Did not open the email
Opened the email but did not click
Clicked to the website but didn’t purchase

From the CRM database they also know how often people visit per year. They could target previous season ticket holders and people who visited three times on individual tickets with different season ticket messages.

They also know who has gone to concerts at the park amphitheater. They could target people who have been to concerts but not to the amusement park with a concert and park ticket package message, image and offer.

Additional possible segments from CRM data:

Previous season ticket holders
People who purchased 3 individual trips
People who purchased concert tickets

Look at your customer journey.

In any business their is a unique customer journey where customers move through various pre-purchase, purchase and post-purchase stages. People in these different stages tend to seek different information.

Consider additional segments to target people in each of these stages with different content. This could include brand awareness, product, sales promotion, customer service, loyalty and advocacy messages.

When creating online social, video and display ads services such as YouTube and Google Advertising allow intent targeting for more relevant messages. Tara Walpert-Levy of Brand Solutions at Google explains it this way:

Let’s take the example of someone interested in buying a winter coat. To date, if you wanted to target video ads for winter coats, you could guess a demographic that might be more likely to buy winter coats (say, women 18 to 34) or use psychographics to target people who might be particularly into preparing for winter (say, ski enthusiasts). Intent signals eliminate that guesswork. You can serve ads to people who searched for winter coat deals, spent a lot of time scouting nearby ski resorts, or scrolled through coats in a shopping app.

Mobile campaigns that used intent-based targeting were found to have 20% higher ad recall and 50% higher brand awareness lift versus demographic targeting alone.

Create your content for each segment.

Once you have your audience segments you are ready to create your unique content. As seen in the chart above some will require only one customization while other contact may require customizing message, image and offer. Cristina Caligiuri and Ben Jones of Google’s Unskippable Labs have run experiments in testing how much you should customize in video ads. Across all forms of content be sure to follow best practices for content writing and design. Then run with it!

Measure results and optimize.

Going through this process you will most likely end up with many possibilities. Keep in mind that it is probably not worth segmenting messages to them all. Not every additional segment you create will produce significant improvements.

That is why you must measure results and optimize along the way. If the segment doesn’t increase conversions, stop using it and try something else. But the fact is segmentation works. A recent brand loyalty study found 75% of emails opened most frequently contain segmentation.

The amusement park may discover conversion on targeting multi-day trips to high school/college students over 100 miles away is too low. Instead they might try targeting adults 25-34 without kids for overnight park and concert trips.

How can you segment your target audience for improved results?

Artificial Intelligence And Social Media. How AI Can Improve Your Job Not Steal It.

August 3, 2019December 3, 2022 ~ K. Quesenberry ~ 1 Comment

Artificial intelligence (AI) is a buzz word that can be confusing and even scary. Some predict AI robots will replace humans, but in this article I will focus on what AI exists now and how it is helping or could be helping your social media strategy. AI empowered social media can assist in many areas such as content generation and optimization, 24/7 engagement, automated bidding and placement of social ads, enhanced audience targeting, automated analytics, personalization, and social listening.

AI and Big Data

Artificial intelligence is simply computer systems performing tasks that normally require human intelligence. In the world of big data AI comes in handy. Big data is the massive amounts of data so large and complex it can’t be processed with traditional data applications. This consists of structured data organized in databases and spreadsheets and unstructured data in free-form text, images and video in documents, articles and social media. IBM reports 2.5 quintillion bytes of data are created per day and over 80% is unstructured with much of that from social media.

Algorithms

An algorithm is a series of steps performed by a set of rules to perform a function. We’re most familiar with algorithms as the rules that decide what appears in social media feeds. We try to determine social network algorithm signals to increase our organic reach. Alternatives include paying for social ad placement or influencer marketing. AI can improve social ad campaigns and improve influencer marketing. AI in influencer marketing can aid in finding and vetting ideal micro-influencers for brands.

Automation

Automation is software that does things without human intervention. Examples include Amazon tracking shopping history to suggest similar items to automate cross selling. Automated testing pulls data to generate scheduled reports. Automated reminders help employees and customers through alerts and notifications. Drip marketing automates sending a series of communications on a schedule or by consumer trigger actions. Drip marketing has used email for years but also now uses chatbots in Facebook messenger.

Machine Learning

Machine Learning is when computers learn from experience by modifying processes from new input. Machine learning can use algorithms to try random variables learning which work best to achieve a goal such as lowest cost per impression or acquisition. Programmatic advertising uses machine learning and automated bidding and placement for media buying. Deep Learning goes further with data processing on a neural network for faster more complex learning. Pattern recognition is a form of machine learning where a computer can be trained to detect patterns in text or visual data.

Natural Language Processing And Generation

Natural language processing (NLP) finds linguistic patterns to analyze and synthesize speech. This is how Hootsuite Insights determines sentiment of brand social media conversations. It can also help with crisis management. Dataminr uses NLP to monitor real time social conversations for crisis communication and real time marketing. Natural language generation (NLG) takes non-language inputs and generates spoken language. Phrasee uses NLG for AI-powered copywriting creating data-driven, human-sounding brand copy for Facebook and Instagram.

Image Recognition

Image recognition or computer vision is software that can recognize people, animals and other objects. Brandwatch has an image detection and analysis tool that finds images containing a brand to report how, when, and where consumers are seeing it. CrowdRiff uses image recognition to discover user generated images (UGC). They combine this with brand owned images and performance data for content optimization. Pinterest has AI powered visual search called Pinterest Lens. Marketers can purchase search ads to appear in that search and use Shop the Look pins.

Predictive and Prescriptive Analytics

Predictive Analytics helps understand future performance based on current and historical data. Prescriptive analytics helps determine the best solution among various choices. Salesforce’s Einstein uses AI for customer and lead predictions and recommendations. Einstein analyzes sentiment and intent to route social conversations to the right person streamlining workflow. IBM’s Watson uses AI for campaign automation and marketing personalization. Virtual Assistants add human interface to software. Watson Assistant replaces tedious queries and spreadsheets with simple questions such as, “How did social media perform this month?”

Chatbots

Chatbots use AI to simulate human conversation through voice commands or text chats. Chatbots can be used for drip marketing automation, lead nurturing, onboarding, renewals, confirmations, and engagement. AI-empowered chatbots can also help lead customers through the sales funnel (AIDA). For awareness bots can initiate conversation at scale communicating one-to-one with 5 or 500 people. At the interest stage bots provide 24/7 engagement at the moment of interest. In the decision stage bots supply information, answer questions and send content. For the action stage smaller purchases can be completed by the bot or hand off more complex ones to a human.

Social Care

AI-powered support can improve customer service via social media. ManyChat’s Facebook Messenger chatbots give customers convenience and speed. Simple chatbots spot keywords and respond with predetermined answers. AI-powered chatbots use NLP to create conversations like human agents. When problems get too complex chatbots can recognize this and hand off the conversation to a real agent. Some report chatbots could save businesses $11 billion in support costs by 2025.

Social Ad Optimization

Pattern89 uses AI to analyze billions of data points daily to discover what social ad dimensions drive customer behavior. Their AI analyzes every combination of placement, device, interests, age ranges, behaviors, demographics for custom optimization insights. Clinch provides personalized programmatic social media content across the customer journey. AI enables them to generate unlimited personalized ad versions with real-time optimization for text, image and video. Motiva AI works with Oracle’s Elogua marketing platform to scan campaigns and make performance recommendations, optimize time and frequency suggestions, run auto multivariate messaging experiments, and automatically discover new audience segments.

Privacy And Ethics

With the General Data Privacy Regulations (GDPR) in Europe and new U.S. regulations like the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) marketers are concerned about compliance. Charles Taylor argues that AI could help with consumer privacy protection. For example, Anyclip AI identifies video events and actions for contextualized social media ad placement. Using this AI could allow custom targeted messages without accessing third party consumer data. AI could also improve targeting to insure ads don’t appear with objectionable content. AI can also help with issues like cyberbullying. Instagram is using AI to identify negative comments before they’re published asking users, “Are you sure you want to post this?”

For the social media professional AI can help improve your job.

Gartner describes AI as a way to automate manual time-consuming processes to free up time, so marketers can be more strategic and creative. Pattern89 sums up the advantages of AI saying “AI algorithms work quickly and thoroughly, and they understand more data than a human can analyze within a single lifetime.” According to Adobe, the top marketing uses of AI include analysis of data, personalization, optimization and testing, image recognition, automated campaigns, content creation, programmatic advertising, digital asset management, video recognition, creative work, and automated offers.

How are you using AI to improve your social media performance?

No matter how you use AI ensure you Ask The Right Questions To Ensure You Have The Right Strategy, follow Best Practices For Social Media Content To Improve Your Writing And Design, and have a good Social Media Measurement Plan.

Why You Need A Social Media Measurement Plan And How To Create One.

June 17, 2019December 3, 2022 ~ K. Quesenberry ~ 6 Comments

After years of increases, social media spending declined in 2019.

The CMO Survey saw a drop in social media spending to 11% of marketing budgets from a high of 14% in 2018. Why? The authors suggest, “… despite massive financial investments, social media is rated as contributing only moderate value to company performance (3.3 on a scale where 7=very highly and 1=not at all).”

If you’re not confident in social media’s return on investment (ROI), it will only get harder to secure funding for social media budgets. How can you improve this confidence? Ensure you have a strong measurement plan in place to better prove social media’s impact on the bottom line.Start with business objectives not social tactics.

In creating a social media strategy it is easy to start with social media tactics. You ask questions like, “How can we improve our Facebook page?” So you develop strategies to improve engagement on Facebook and you increase likes, shares and comments. Yet having a better Facebook page is not a business objective. That is why it gets hard when management asks how Facebook Likes contribute to the bottom line.

Having a measurement plan ensures you start with your business objectives (what impacts the bottom line) first. From there you create strategies and tactics (current and new) to help get to those objectives. Then you determine how those outcomes will be measured through KPIs (metrics) tied to micro- and macro- conversions. Goals are long term changes you would like to see. Objectives make goals measurable on a shorter time frame. Strategies are the ways you will meet objectives. Tactics are what you will use to implement the strategies. Click To Tweet

How to define business objectives.

The objective of most business’s is to increase sales, but each organization’s situation is unique and requires a much more nuanced definition. Insight can come from a situation analysis or the reason you are creating a new strategy. There is often a problem or opportunity that has become the focus of marketing efforts creating the story of your plan. The CMO Survey reports marketer’s see social media as a tool to help accomplish the following business objectives:

Brand awareness/brand building
Introducing new products/services
Acquiring new customers (conversion/sale)
Brand promotions (contest/coupons)
Retaining current customers
Improving customer service
Improving employee engagement
Marketing research
Identifying new customer groups
Identifying new product/service opportunities
Improving current products/services

Identify strategies to meet business objectives.

Most social media plans have multiple strategies or ways to improve brand efforts and help to meet business objectives. List all your strategies such as an influencer marketing campaign, a special promotion, an employee advocacy effort or branding social media ads.

Identify tactics used to support key strategies.

List the main tactics that support each strategy. For example, a business objective to increase sales to a new market may have a brand awareness strategy supported by a tactic of targeted Facebook ads, a tactic of influencer marketing on Instagram, and a tactic of employee advocacy on LinkedIn.

List measurable conversions by tactic and strategy.

List measurable actions users take to fulfill your business objectives. They can take the form of macro-conversions and micro-conversions. Macro-conversions are the key actions closest to business objectives such as an online sale through website data or an offline sale through CRM or POS data. Micro-conversions are the smaller actions that move a prospect closer such as visiting webpages, signing up for a newsletter, down loading an app, or following a social media page. They can be tracked using various tools such as Google Analytics Tracking ID and Facebook Pixel for ads or organic posts.

Connect macro-conversions to business objectives.

Link social media metric KPIs by tactic and strategy to macro- and micro-conversions. Creating a dashboard of the KPIs for macro-conversions by tactic and strategy can be a top line report of social media’s contribution to company performance. Creating this in your digital measurement platform such as Google Analytics, Hootsuite, HubSpot, Salesforce, or Facebook Ads Manager gives you real time access or the ability to schedule regular reports to share with management.

Measure micro-conversions to map the customer journey.

Identifying and measuring micro-conversions on the way to macro-conversion can map out customer journeys. Micro-conversions help you understand human behavior giving insight to optimize strategies and tactics. Analyze metrics by tactic KPI to determine how many people are completing the customer journey and where you are losing or retaining people. This does not mean you will map one journey for all or even most customers. Google click stream data of thousands of customers found no two journeys were alike – varying from 1-176 days and 65-600 touchpoints across categories, brands and products. The marketing funnel still applies, but consumers have more control and options in moving themselves from awareness and consideration to conversion, loyalty and advocacy. Today it is more like a marketing scatter plot. The best you can do is optimize the touchpoint clusters around funnel stages and use CRM data for personalized content.

Conduct experiments to optimize strategies and tactics.

Having a good measurement plan that includes both micro- and macro-conversions enables you to know which tactics and strategies are contributing the most to company performance. From there you can experiment with different tactics and strategies replacing low performing ones to optimize social media. The results of a social media audit can help identify which strategies and tactics to experiment with first. While no two customer journeys are alike your micro-conversion and macro-conversion data can identify clusters of touchpoints versus outliers. Focus optimization efforts where many of your customers engage in the funnel stages on their unique journey. Also deliver custom messages through unique customer tracking such as Google Analytics User-ID. Ultimately you want lower your cost per result or conversion.

The benefits of social media measurement plan.

Going through this process can take considerable time and effort. But once you have the plan in place the benefits are numerous. A social media measurement plan:

Collects the right data to answer company performance questions.
Creates reports or dashboards to share with decision makers.
Allows analysis of segments of your social media plan.
Enables testing different solutions to improve social efforts.
Helps lower your costs per result or conversion.

Do you have a social media measurement plan? What else could help improve marketer confidence in social media’s contribution to company performance? A good first step is to Perform A Social Media Audit and as social spending increases Ask These Questions To Ensure You Have The Right Strategy.