How to Build your Customer Journey

If you can fully understand your customer journey, then you will know exactly what type of content to create, when to create it and where to put it to make the maximum impact for your business.

But first, what is a customer journey?

Your customer journey is the complete sum of experiences that customers go through when interacting with your company and brand. Consumers rarely take a linear path from point A to point B, but rather engage in a series of touch points that influence your audience to convert. These touch points can be a variety of things and will help a user form an opinion of your brand - like ads, error pages, organic posts, emails, walking into your front door - really, anything.

How to build a customer journey map

You have to reverse engineer your customer journey. To successfully start, you need to define a clear end goal. What do you want your audience members to do? Most often, this will be to purchase something (but not always). Once you’ve set that end goal, it’s time for market research. You can’t create a customer journey until you’ve researched who your customers actually are, what their buying habits are like, and what they need from you.

Start by building your buyer persona.

After you’ve CLEARLY (and we mean crystal clearly) defined your buyer personas, we want you to take out a pen and paper. Really. Do it. List out every single touch point your brand has with a customer that makes them aware of who you are and what you offer. What actions were taken at each of these touch points? What are the pain points? At each of these touch points, what was their level of awareness (how well did they know/understand you)?

Here are the four levels of awareness:

1. Not aware - users have no idea they have a problem, and they have no clue who you are as a business and what you offer. For unaware audiences, the first thing to do is show them they have a problem or pain point.

2. Problem aware - Your prospect has woken up to the fact they’ve got a problem. But this is only the beginning of their journey. These people have LOTS of questions. Think about what you typically do when you wake up with a really sore throat and a fever - you head to Google and start asking questions. When do I see a doctor? Why does my throat hurt? What can I do to fix it? You’ve become problem aware (in the simplest sense).

3. Solution aware - Your prospect now knows they have a problem or need, and they’re starting to get answers… including what they might need to fix it; however, they still know practically nothing about you or what you offer. At this stage, they’re looking for ways to sort things out. In other words, they’re becoming solution-aware, exploring potential fixes for their problem or desire. Case studies, success stories, testimonials, and influencer reviews are great forms of content for this phase.

4. Product aware - Customers now know the solution, and they have to determine which product is the best fit for them. (i.e. Tylenol or Ibuprofen). Now’s the time to show them why your product is the one to pay attention to.

5. Most aware - They know who you are, they know your product is perfect for them, but they just need a final nudge to pull out the credit card.

Go back to your list that you wrote on paper and refine your touch points now that you know more about the stages of awareness. Try not to overthink this. These touch points are what make up your customer journey. Now that you’ve defined your customer journey, you can directly align your content strategy to that customer journey.

Start to create content that matches the different stages of awareness and speaks directly to the prospects’ needs and problems at each stage, then actively move them towards a decision to buy your product.

Most importantly…

The KEY to a successful customer journey is to optimize and refine. It will change as your business evolves and as you continue to learn more about your target personas. A customer journey isn’t ever complete. It’s essential that you look at your data and optimize your journey as often as you can, so you can keep creating INTENTIONAL content and stop wasting your time.