Customer journey mapping allows digital businesses to understand the full picture.
Learn about goals, personas, triggers, traffic channels, landing pages, funnels and more in this video.
Customer Journey Map
Video Transcription
Hi there,
I’m John Lincoln with ignite visibility and today I’m talking about customer journey mapping for your website. This is something that so many marketing departments don’t do or they don’t do effectively. They don’t know the exact goals, personas, triggers, traffic channels, and then how those traffic channels specifically relate to their website, and what sets the customer off on a successful journey that leads to a purchase. So that’s what I’m going to be covering today. It’s a really cool topic, and I’m excited to talk you about it.
Okay so when it comes to customer journey mapping or really any of these overall arching ideas with online marketing, first thing that you have to do is determine what’s your overall goal, right, and what do your projections look like. Once you have that, then you can start working backwards and all this is going to make a lot more sense as I get further on into some of these specific strategies.
So now you’ve determined a goal and you want to determine how do you accomplish that goal, right, so say that you want to, you know, generate a $100 million in revenue by the end of the year or you want to generate 100,000 leads by the end of the year. In order to do that, the next step is you need to know, what are the specific personas that you’re targeting? And if you haven’t seen the other video that I’ve done on personas, check it out. I’ll put a link in the bottom of this video so you can check it out on the same YouTube channel that you’re on right now.
Personas are incredibly important. They’re going to help you realize specifically who you want to target and who you don’t want to target inside of this customer journey. Okay, so the next step from personas is triggers. So, any product or service and any customer that’s looking for a product or service has specific triggers that send them off on that customer journey. Now, it’s really important that you understand what the top 10 triggers are for your customer, because if you know those, you can use that in your website messaging, you can use that in your marketing, and it can help you better understand what are these exact moments of time that send the customer off on a journey and then what are the moments within that journey that also are part of that individual trigger.
Let me give you an example. Say you’re a bike shop, and you are trying to sell 1000 more bikes by the end of the month. You’ve determined your personas. As the next step, you want to know what are the triggers, what are the things that cause people to come looking for a bike shop inside of your area? Could be a flat tire, right? Could be a broken bike. Could be an outdated model. It could be a really big bike enthusiast who’s always kind of combing the news and they see a new bike that they’re really interested in. So, it’s very important that you understand these top 10 triggers and then you take those, you kind of rank them, you use them in your marketing your split testing.
Okay, so now that we’ve covered all that, the next step is to really understand where the customer journey begins. So, we know that the goal, we know the personas, we know the triggers. What do they do next after they find that trigger? And this is really, really important for any individual business because it allows you to understand the traffic channel that they’re jumping into online. So, let me give you some examples. They might do a search on an Instagram filter and start looking through bike hashtags, for an example. They might go onto Facebook and ask their friends or start doing a search on Facebook and combing through Facebook, or they might go to a Facebook group or look at a specific Facebook page.
They might go on Twitter, look at Twitter hashtags, join a conversation there, start tweeting out to people, or click on a Twitter ad. They could go on YouTube and start doing YouTube research, searching for things like what are the top bikes out there. They might get hit by a YouTube commercial or they might just start seeing things organically. They could do a search on Google. They could talk into their phone, right, and use a personal assistant. They could go to their favorite trade publication. Using that bike example again, maybe a competitor, you know, magazine or you know, the cycling magazine. So that’s the next step, right?
So we understand what those triggers are. Now, where do each of these individual triggers lead? And that is just such a cool thing to think about, right, so we know that this trigger will lead you to these specific traffic channels, and if we know that, then we can do a much better job with our marketing and advertising to ensure that we are in each of these specific areas when the customer starts going on their journey. One thing I’ll add just to this part is, you know, in many cases, a person doesn’t just go to one place and then convert, okay?
In many cases, they’re going to multiple touchpoints, so that’s also very, very important and there’s some really cool new tools out there that will allow you to see the multiple touch points, like multi-channel funnel, multi-channel funnels report in Google Analytics and things like that. But what we can find out is after the trigger, these are the traffic channels that result specifically to the trigger and then how do we make sure that we’re there and that we’re effective in our messaging.
Okay, so this next part is a really big one for me and I can’t tell you how many people in online businesses don’t think about it this way, but we’ve defined the persona, we’ve defined the trigger, right? We know what traffic channel they’re going to and now we’re looking at where they convert on your website. Now, when we look at traffic channels, we’re looking at direct traffic, referring site traffic. We’re looking at organic traffic, paid traffic, social traffic, email, and those are kind of the main traffic channels that are the defaults inside of Google Analytics.
You can of course break out more channels and set up individual specific channels around campaigns that you’re running. I highly recommend you do that because if you’re running an integrated marketing campaign, it’s nice to be able to bucket that into a specific channel inside of Google Analytics. So, if you’re running, you know, email, Instagram ads, Facebook ads and so on and so forth all around a specific theme, you can pool that into one channel in Google Analytics. But what’s really important is, now that you know what traffic channels you’re looking at, where do they convert on your website?
Now, a visitor from Facebook might be much different than a visitor from Google. A visitor from a referring site, like a trade publication where potentially you did a sponsored post or you got a big brand mention, when they come into your website, is coming from a completely different traffic channel than a YouTube ad. So, what we can do now with our sophisticated third-party tools on our website is we can look at each of the individual traffic channels. We can map that traffic channel to a specific landing page on your website and we can ensure a much more seamless customer journey.
How cool is that? Because, you know, think about this. Somebody comes in from Facebook and they land on the home page of Ignite Visibility, my website, for example. That’s not going to be as effective as if I detect that Facebook traffic and I serve a specific landing page to them that I’ve created just for Facebook visitors that that’s adhered to them, that’s going to make it much more seamless. So, in the customer journey, it’s very important that you understand the trigger, the traffic, and then how that converts specifically on your website.
In some cases, it won’t be on your website. If, for example, you’re using LinkedIn lead forms or you’re using Facebook leads or you’re using, you know, if you’re advertising an application. Applications, of course, they convert in an entirely different area, right? They would convert in an app store. That’s going to be a different journey. So, any goal that you have, you really need to map these things all together correctly and very clearly so you understand what you’re trying to do online.
Okay, so what I love about this customer journey stuff is now that you’ve kind of mapped all these things together, right, you’ve got the trigger, you’ve got, you know, the traffic channels, you’ve got how they end on your website, what you can do next is you can look at the size of the audience and you can look at the revenue potential for each of these particular traffic channels, potential conversion rates, and then based off of that, you can build a good business model to scale for each of the traffic channels, and you can give them a grade.
So, for example, you might think that Google AdWords has a grade of, you know, 8 out of 10. You might feel that YouTube has a grade of, you know, 2 out of 10, and then based off of that, you can better allocate your marketing dollars so that you know that these are going to be the best for direct conversions, this is going to be a secondary thing, and you know, we’re going to put “X” amount a month into this and “Y” amount a month into this and that’s going to allow you to be the most effective.
Okay, so that’s about it for the customer journey. You know, based off of all this information, you’re going to be able to find out exactly who you’re looking to target. You know, you’re going to be able to find out, am I going to be able to accomplish these goals? You’re going to be able to figure out, you know, who are these people? What are the click triggers? What are the traffic channels? How do they land on the website? How much is all of this going to cost me, and how am I going to wrap it all together around the specific goals that I’m looking to achieve?
I recommend that after watching this video, every single person, you map out, what are your goals and what is your exact customer journey and how do they go through a process of looking to convert with you online? It might be, you know, through Google my business page. It might be through a specific landing page. It might be through an unbalanced page. It might be through a pop-up. There’s so many different options, but if you’re not clear on that, then there’s no way for you to test that, to modify that, and to improve that.
So, something that’s very important for every organization, something that I think is kind of the future of where online marketing is heading, it’s not just let’s get ranked number one for a keyword anymore, right? Let’s think about things a little bit more intelligently now that we’ve got all these cool digital marketing assets at our disposal.
Have a great day.
Hope you enjoy the video and see you next time
