Optimizing the customer journey is regularly at the top of the list when we ask marketers about their priorities.
A survey of brand marketers in our recent Digital Intelligence Briefing revealed that more marketers feel that ‘optimizing the customer journey across multiple touchpoints’ will be ‘very important’ (71%) than any other initiative on the list.
Some marketers find it relatively easy to connect with their customers. They have a well-researched customer base, established workflows and enough data to gauge success to a reasonable level.
Business-to-business (B2B) marketers often face a dilemma. They are aware that digital marketing can be more cost-effective than traditional marketing, but at the same time they need to deliver leads and so typically have little opportunity for experimenting with digital.
To help those in this situation, Econsultancy recently held a Digital Intelligence Briefing in Singapore featuring B2B marketing specialist Anol Bhattacharya. Bhattacharya related his vast experience in generating leads online for some of the world’s largest B2B enterprises.
What is a customer mental model?
Simply put, a mental model is what the user believes about a particular system. This system doesn’t have to be a digital product or service, it could be anything from a supermarket store to the entire end-to-end journey of buying a car.
‘Why?’ questions are always difficult to answer, but the current state of customer experience is puzzling.
Almost every survey of marketers indicates that improving the customer experience is at the top of the priorities list, yet marketers often lament at their inability to make the changes necessary to do so.
Econsultancy recently surveyed nearly 1,000 marketing professionals about the progress they have made in understanding the customer journey.
In the resulting report, we found that there are five main steps toward doing so and nearly half of the marketers are stuck at one key stage.
Nowadays, marketers need to know so many systems, platforms, formats, and channels that it can be tough to keep up.
As we can’t be researching everything all the time, it is important to ‘park’ some skills while training up on others. As an example, a marketing team may decide to hold steady with their AdWords strategy while spending time and effort on improving how they approach social media.
Mapping the customer journey is not exactly a science.
It can be, but more often that not it’s a collaborative exercise that draws on some data and some qualitative and anecdotal insight from customers and staff.
The objective is to encourage customer-led and design-led thinking in a group, using the results to prioritise challenges and opportunities.
Understanding the customer journey is becoming increasingly complex as the number of digital and offline touchpoints proliferate.
However it’s important to try and create an accurate map of how customers are interacting with a brand in order to optimise marketing channels and campaigns.
But to what extent are brands able to properly understand the customer journey?