Key takeaways:
- Marketing activities often become chaotic and challenging to manage due to the variety of tools and specialists involved.
- Collaboration among internal teams and external consultants can further complicate the marketing environment.
- A customer journey map organizes all potential and current customer touchpoints into milestones, providing a clear visualization of the marketing strategy.
- Implementing a customer journey map helps stakeholders understand the overall marketing efforts and facilitates communication among team members.
- While it may require initial time investment for team members to understand and maintain, the benefits of a customer journey map outweigh the effort, resulting in organized and streamlined marketing activities.
Many critics of modern art point out its chaotic nature – and to be honest, they’re right. We are programmed to find patterns and figure out how they fit together so we can identify the objects they represent and utilize their existence. Otherwise, we are left with a disorderly arrangement that may be interesting to look at for a few seconds if it’s found in modern art (I’ll grant you that), but the word “interesting” suddenly gets a different connotation when we use it in relation to a disorderly marketing strategy. That’s actually kind of a form of modern art, too practiced by many marketers: to be so active on the marketing front that it’s difficult to even keep track of everything, let alone understand how it all fits together.
This chaotic marketing phenomenon is further exacerbated when the marketing team includes a number of internal marketing specialists along with an agency or external consultants. The obvious rule of collaboration in the marketing field is to communicate with each other about everything, but if you spend a day or two in this environment, you realize that it’s much easier said than done. Every team uses plenty of marketing tools, each with its own set of nifty features that are not exactly trivial, and their simultaneous application creates a very complex system that is difficult to navigate and keep track of even if the communication among the team members is impeccable (which is rarely the case).
After using a combination of very decorative words to establish the fact that marketing activities have a tendency to become confusing (unless you’re a bakery in a town in the middle of nowhere) and make you really worried about it, let’s propose a solution so we don’t let you in a state of deep despair for too long.
The invention that will set you free is called a customer journey map. It’s a map (the more graphical you can make it the better, but be careful with the amount of graphic elements to keep it easy to maintain) of all marketing activities your both potential and current customers can encounter when dealing with your company.
These activities are organized into touchpoints (also called milestones) – each marketing activity should have its own touchpoint. Do you post on your Twitter? Great – that’s your first touchpoint. These touchpoints are organized in a chronological order that simulates a journey your customer takes – from reaching the first milestone (usually it’s hearing about you for the first time), through the most important one (making a purchase) to the last (specific effort to keep the customer coming back). The customer journey is rarely this simple, so there can be many milestones in between the most pivotal ones we just mentioned.
When you put all these milestones your customers can encounter on a map and connect those that follow or are connected with each other, you will gain (we dare to say) a never-before-seen perspective of your overall marketing strategy. When you have it clearly outlined, a whole set of things becomes much easier.
There will be no doubt anymore about how exactly your marketing works and functions as a unit. If you’re a marketing specialist, your boss may be really happy to see for the first time a united report of all the things you’re doing. As we’ve mentioned before, it can get so complex that no amount of describing it can do it justice – only a visual, step-by-step representation can give your boss (or anyone else) a full and true picture of the scale of your marketing strategy.
The customer journey map will also help you and your team members to keep track of each other’s work and ideas and how they all fit together – there’s no way for you not to be on the same page. All new marketing contributions can be easily explained and demonstrated because you finally have a framework that you can fit them into.
So if you’re thinking about how to make all your marketing activities organized and easy to understand and evaluate, a customer journey map is your answer. Sure, it will take a little time for everyone in your team to understand how it should be maintained and updated, but it’s nothing compared to the benefits it will bring to your company.
