A customer journey, or a buyer journey as it is sometimes called, are the steps consumers take on their path to purchase your product or service. Think about it: before you buy something, you have your specialized reasons for wanting it; you research it online, you ask around, maybe you drive around, and you perform a myriad of other "circling" behaviors before committing to the brand that best fits your need. As the seller, wouldn't it be great if you could reach that consumer faster, anticipate their need earlier, and engage them before they stumble upon your competitor?
Mapping the customer’s journey helps you make your brand as relevant as possible–overall, and at each stage of the customer’s journey. It also helps you understand the barriers the customer faces along the way and take out the friction in the decision process, making it easier for your brand to earn the sale. The result is creating the right content and putting the right content in the right place.
Animaré excels in mapping your customer journey, enabling your business to refine the marketing touchpoints so you can engage the consumer before they potentially diverge on a path away from your product or service. Our customer journey mapping process involves in-depth one-on-one interviews with recent category buyers, mapping the steps of their shopping processes, adding the emotions (motivations, fears, barriers, etc.), and identifying the resources they used at each stage of their journey. Animaré also leverages a variety of other qualitative and quantitative research methodologies, including data mining, to reveal what touchpoints the consumer uses to find the products that matter most to them, what needs specific consumers have, and where they're going to find it.
Six Basic Stages of The Customer Journey:
Be confident in knowing what triggers certain consumers to set out on their buyer journey. Plan to intercept consumers who have been "circling" the product for a while, or those who may be more impulse buyers.
While there is no such thing as a single path-to-purchase journey, we found that in every industry, there are six basic stages the customer goes through that are reasonably consistent:
1. Awareness
2. Consideration
3. Purchase
4. Experience sharing*
5. Retention
6. Advocacy
* Your customer's experience doesn't end in a credit card swipe. The best (and worst) of experiences is extended by word of mouth, a review posted online, and customers coming back (or not coming back) time and time again. Post-purchase behavior speaks volumes; let Animaré ensure that volume rings out beautifully to the ears of your past, present, and future customers.
How to Map Your Customer Journey:
1. Identify buyer personas, tribes, and affinities
2. Clarify buyer goals
3. Analyze behavioral patterns
4. Map the journey and touchpoints
5. Identify and prioritize barriers and opportunities
6. Measure ROI at each stage in the customer journey
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Animaré is a Dallas-based marketing agency specializing in brand transformation. For the last 28 years, we’ve helped transform more than 100 brands in just about every business category using innovative brand strategies and compelling advertising campaigns for a proven marketing ROI. We’ve honed our marketing expertise to help build stronger brands using consumer insight, product and marketing innovation, and sheer imagination.
If your marketing efforts aren’t getting you noticed, exciting your target audience, forming an immediate bond with your loyal customers, or meeting your aggressive growth goals, let’s talk.
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