Customer Journey Mapping

Persona Profiling

Creating a persona profile is a critical part of online marketing, and the first step to creating a customer journey. But what is a this profile? Well, put simply, it’s a thorough sketch or description of your audience, with each persona having a different composition.

When it comes to content marketing, these personas need to help you develop and deliver content which is relevant, direct, and useful to that particular audience. When coupled with workshops, customer feedback and data analysis, this can shape your customer journey strategy with a true understanding of your customer, and their desired digital experience.

Appnovation’s customer journey mapping experts will guide your company through this process, identifying touch points, customers’ decision making factors, and removing potential barriers within your existing customer experiences. Our in-depth understanding of customers across many industries helps us consider everything from the emotional to the experiential, rather than focusing on one element of the customer thought process.

Appnovation goes in-depth to help create these personas, with thorough customer research about a wide range of factors including:

• Professional Role
• Specific job and role
• Industry and company in which they work

Personalised Information

• Age
• Gender
• Household income
• Location
• Education
• Family

Goals

• Primary and secondary goals/challenge
• Ideas of how to meet or assist with achieving those
• Problem solving for any challenges

Values

• Overall values
• Reasons for any issues arising during browse to buy cycle

It is this kind of in-depth knowledge that will help us devise and deliver personas, and ultimately help you with your journey mapping process. When it comes to marketing, knowing your target audience is key, and understanding them will guide your customer journey mapping in an informed way.

Our team leaves no stone unturned, and with personas and journey mapping varying from business to business, industry to industry, it is critical to know the best digital strategy for you, which is precisely what we will deliver. We even look into your existing site analytics, conduct social media research, and involve you and your team in developing both personas and customer journey mapping.

User Journey Mapping

So, what is a customer journey map? Put simply, it is a conceptual idea of the process that a person/customer goes through in order to accomplish a goal or achieve what they need on your website.

As our team knows well, understanding this process can help you address customer needs more directly, and identify the most critical pain points of the online process and customer experience.

Developing customer journey mapping involves research, understanding, and the ability to use information that shows your knowledge of your customers:

• Are your customer journey maps strategic or are they tactical?
• Do they show and depict cyclical and/or linear customer experiences?
• Are they applicable to all customers
• Is there more than one person being targeted?
• Do you include vivid visual depictions of your customer journey?

Viewpoint/Perspective

One of the most pivotal points of journey mapping is identifying precisely who the journey map about. Every journey must be bespoke and relevant, one for the manager, one for the executive, one for the decision maker, one for the buyer, and so it goes on.

Each of these is likely to align with a unique, or at least differing persona, so each journey mapping approach must include a narrative that speaks to that group, addressing that particular perspective.

Scenarios

Developing a journey map for your users means focusing on the specific experience you need to map. On occasion, your existing journeys may be a valuable source of information, as they can show both positive and negative feedback.

For other journeys, we can help you conceptualize scenarios, providing new mapping for different customer experiences, focusing on the goal of these customers to direct the route of the journey.

Actions and Emotions

Ultimately, any customer journey is based on a narrative shaped by what a user is thinking, what they do on your site, and how they respond to their unique customer experience.

Our team knows how to fully research and utilize these digital experience elements, using everything from general to granular data.

Based on this, we can create a modified journey based on existing actions and emotions, from customer feedback, or build new journeys altogether.

Touchpoints

Aligning all touchpoints within the overall journey map is key to your success. A flowing, logical narrative, across all your company’s communication channels, from websites to social media, with a focus on user actions and goals, that’s the strategy to use.

Appnovation has experience in unifying projects where user journeys have been inconsistent or disconnected.

Once our teams identify the reasons for this, they have been able to deliver a more seamless customer experience. With each unique company comes the need to develop a unique set of customer journeys, enhancing the digital experience customers enjoy on your platform.

Insights/Ownership

Journey mapping is all about identifying the gaps or shortfalls in user experiences. Working to optimize that experience, based on improving same shortfalls or issues, is a critical part of this digital delivery.

A secondary, but no less important part of this process comes from highlighting insights learned from customer data and feedback, and ensuring that someone takes ownership of each part of creating the customer journey.

Collaboration of this kind is one of the key components of Appnovation’s approach, with each member of our team both empowered to create innovative solutions, while remaining fully aware of what colleagues working on the journey mapping are doing.

Even when all this is in place, journey mapping must be viewed as multi-layered, with each being mapped out in a bespoke style.

Customer Experience Mapping Questions

Determining how to construct, develop and deploy each customer experience journey, it is useful to establish a number of questions, the answers to which can guide your progress:

• Who will be using the journey map?
• What is the ratio of internal to external actions? (internal company, external customer)
• Are you looking to identify problems with existing experiences, or just create new ones?
• Are you looking to both modify existing experiences, alongside creating new ones?
• What devices, channels, content is necessary to construct the narratives?
• How much detail is needed for each of your journey maps?
• What business goal does this journey map support?
• Who is it about and what experience does it address?
• How will it be shared?