Why is a customer journey important?

In a nutshell, you can divide a customer journey into five different phases: awareness, consideration, purchase, service and loyalty. Each phase has a different goal and different touchpoints that best suit it. Perhaps your customer needs personal contact or confirmation that the purchase was the best choice. If you know what you can adjust and improve about your customer journey, you can adjust the touchpoints accordingly. Redesigning the touchpoints is then an essential step in getting maximum results from the potential customer. It can help you and your customer achieve long-term success with your service or product.

1. Discovering gaps and filling them in

Using the customer journey, you can find out where the gaps are in terms of content and fill them in. To do this, it is important to map each piece of content to a customer journey phase. You can do this using a so-called content audit. Include not only the content on the website, but all available content within the organisation such as white papers, brochures, etc. Possibly the sales department and customer service can help you with this. By mapping, you can see how much content you have for each phase of the customer journey. This will also help you discover where the gaps are and what content still needs to be created. Include this content in your content planning.

2. Targeted content creation

Within each phase of the customer journey, a customer has different needs. At the beginning of the customer journey, it is mainly about inspiring through articles applicable to the 'awareness' and 'consider' stages. In the 'consider' and 'service' stages, the customer may need to ask questions about the service or product your organisation offers. The content you create is tailored to the stage the customer is in in the customer journey. By doing research, you know what your customers need and you can fulfil this need through content or other touchpoints. The image below shows example touchpoints at each stage.

3. Service (chatbot) (engaging customers with brand)

The service that comes with a product or service is often an extra reason to come back again or recommend your organisation to those around you. For instance, going to the hairdresser is not so special, but everything that comes with it: taking and hanging up a coat, washing hair, styling hair with hair products, a drink (maybe a wine or a beer), a hand massage, extra trimming your beard or having your make-up done.

These are little things that a business may or may not offer and make some difference in the service compared to competitors. These are physical examples, but you can also offer the service on your website with, for instance, a chatbot. This encourages the customer to be able to ask questions when the customer has them. A piece of extra service. This also creates another piece of loyalty from the existing customer towards your brand.

4. Combine online and offline marketing approaches

Using social media is a great way to reach your customers, but combining it with other channels works even better to engage with your customers. For instance, use social media with other online and offline media such as a video, newsletter, customer service, in-store customer contact, e-mail, chat, etc. Using online and offline media is also known as cross-media.

People enjoy interacting with people, even when it comes to a business. Make sure you use tone-of-voice that makes your customers feel like an employee of the company is talking to them, especially if it is digital contact. The tone-of-voice is the voice of your company, also align it with your company's identity. This is important across all channels from blogs to ads to phone call to physical customer contact. So it is good to think about which touchpoints you put where in the customer journey.

5. Personalising content

It is very important to address your target group personally, which also gives the customer the feeling that they are seen as an individual. After all, it is no longer the time to communicate a message to the masses and assume that they have all received the message and are going to do something with it. Therefore, knowing your target audience is important, then you know what you are addressing them with and you can build a lasting relationship.

Examples of personalised content are "welcome back Willem" or "nice to have you back Willem", "is this maybe something for you?". Addressing with the customer's name when they are logged in and offering personalised deals and discounts. These touchpoints/contact moments are possible based on the customer's collected data through marketing automation. These are little things that appeal to your customer and make them feel special. Bol.com and Booking.com are very good at this. Below you can see examples of personalised content from Booking.com.

One way you can do this is by using a marketing automation tool, which uses the inbound marketing method. This focuses on providing the right information at the right time. This way, you can keep customers coming to your business. Characteristic of inbound marketing is the creation of buyer personas, so you know what kind of content to offer to your target audience. This way, you target a specific audience.