An Introduction to Mapping User Behavior
What is a customer journey?
A customer journey is your user’s experience with your company. A customer journey map is a visual diagram of all of your customers’ touch points and interactions—both positive and negative—emotions, and desired behaviors plotted in chronological order. Think if it as mapping all of your target audience’s touch points, behavior, and sentiment with your brand’s products and services over time. The goal of a customer journey is to provide empathy for those using your site. You’ll want to ensure a straightforward, easy path from brand awareness to purchasing your product or service, and all the way to sharing the experience with others.
How do you build a journey map?
Customer journey mapping, often directly associated with user flows, starts with understanding who your customer segments are. That includes understanding their desires and pain points, aligning your products and services to their needs, and guiding them through your site as efficiently as possible toward their goals. These maps rely on input from the marketing team, client goals and insights, and in-depth user research, and they are typically built by UX teams before any UX/UI and content strategies are constructed. There are 5 primary milestones in a customer journey:
- Awareness
- Consideration
- Acquisition
- Service
- Advocacy
What is the purpose of a journey map?
The goal of almost every organization is to grow your business while providing better value for your customers. Identifying your user segments and plotting their interaction with your website and supporting channels is the blueprint for success that your customer journey can provide.
Why is a customer journey important to marketing?
Customer journeys are holistic—they illustrate the entirety of your customers’ experiences through your site, various digital marketing and social outreach channels, as well as traditional marketing techniques. They represent the desired path to turn your various leads into customers, and on to advocates, through a series of carefully plotted strategies and lead nurturing initiatives.
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Learn more about related tools, methods, and best practices in the Marketing Toolkit: