According to the ancient Chinese proverb, “A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.” When transported to the modern world of human engagement marketing, businesses seeking to create great customer experiences first need to understand the journey their prospects will take. The client journey map goes through awareness, interest, contact, engagement, and initial experimentation before it blossoms into a long-term relationship.

The challenge is that the consumer journey definition has changed. Marketers were once in charge of the entire experience. But the digital world now allows consumers to use a self-initiated process to research information and control how they interact with companies when making buying decisions. Consumers may read online reviews, browse competitive websites, or seek recommendations through social media before having any actual contact with the potential business partner. Marketers need to utilize consumer journey mapping to follow, join and engage in conversation at various touchpoints along the way.

Customer experience journey mapping software can help define that journey, but actual experiences must still be created for humans, and not bits of data. The company needs to follow a customer journey map where it reaches out and creates one-to-one, multi-channel conversations that speak to an individual. Here are some tips to remember when creating a content journey map:

  • Create a unified customer view: Understand who your primary customer is, find out what they value, determine how your product or service integrates into their life, appreciate what motivates them to take action, and learn how they intend to interact with your brand.
  • Mine customer data to determine meaningful segments: Gather insights about who your current customer is, so you can determine who your future customers might be. Create buying personas or customer profiles that will inform your marketing activities.
  • Create multistep, multichannel workflows: To enable 1:1 customer journeys, your marketing must be present in every point of possible contact at the exact moment a potential buying need is realized.
  • Optimize multichannel customer experiences: Determine traditional and digital touchpoints, and rank them by importance to your target base.
  • Make sure messaging is consistent throughout: Because the journey may not be taken in a linear fashion, your message must be consistent among all channels so there is no confusion or consumer frustration.

As a marketer, you already have much of the customer information you need to create compelling one-to-one experiences using customer journeys. Now you need to access that data and consistently market to prospective customers in a way that tells them you know who they are, across multiple communication channels.

Take the first step, and leverage your data to create compelling customer experiences that mindfully bring prospects along on the journey to becoming a life-long customer. Experiture offers an all-in-one customer engagement marketing platform that helps both B2C and B2B marketers develop personalization programs that generate more leads and interact more effectively with target audiences. This platform provides a unified customer view, all-in-one analytics, and buyer persona marketing opportunities. Visit the Experiture website and Facebook page or call 888-950-0700 today to learn more about using data to create an effective customer journey.