One of the essential tasks for marketers and digital PR professionals is to be able to both predict as well as influence customer behavior. With every single buyer persona, ad, post, landing page, and email, the marketers have a single goal of persuading the target audience to act, while also predicting and preparing for whatever action the consumer is going to take next. 

Knowing the potential customers’ needs and motivations is not easy to predict or to learn, but it can become a lot easier when marketers take a bit of time and create customer journey maps. 

Customer Journey Maps And How They’re Helpful 

Customer Journey Maps are a visual aid that can help the marketers outline the precise story of a customer’s experience with the company, starting from the very first interaction that the customer has with the business, all the way to forming a long-term strong relationship and it’s all from the point of view of the client. 

With these customer journey maps, marketers can get an insight into the expectations that the customers have from the business, at each step of their buying journey, which helps businesses create customer experiences that are going to motivate those customers to reach the very last point of each journey – making a purchase. Maps are also helpful in understanding the channels and touchpoints that the consumers are using to be able to reach them through those channels, and are a great way to predict and influence consumer behavior. 

Components of Customer Journey Maps 

The first thing that digital PR pros have to create is the buyer persona, which is the representation of the target customer, according to all of the relevant market research. After that, marketers need to find out all of the stages that a customer goes through before coming in contact with the business. Next, they need to understand the customer’s goals throughout all of those stages and create a schedule for them, to know how long each touchpoint takes for the customer to be convinced to move on to the next stage. 

Finally, because the client’s journey is presented from the customer’s perspective, marketers also have to take into account the emotions that the customer is most likely to feel during each stage of the journey. 

Customer Journey Map Stages 

Awareness

This is the first stage in the journey when the customer becomes aware that they might have a problem and start to look for solutions to that problem. 

Considering and deciding

At this stage, the customer knows about the company and its solutions, but they’re still thinking whether that company is the right choice. 

Conversion and retention

In this stage, the consumer is almost ready to sign up for the company’s offers and convert; all they need is to be nudged in the right direction with a good incentive. 

Once the customer is on board with the company’s products or services, it’s time to work hard at retaining them because acquiring new customers costs a lot more than retaining the existing ones.

About the Author: Ronn Torossian is CEO of 5WPR, a leading PR firm.