Key takeaways:
- CEOs often struggle to keep tabs on marketing due to time constraints and the dynamic nature of marketing activities.
- Weekly or monthly reports provide only a rough idea of marketing activities, leaving CEOs out of the loop.
- A solution to this problem is to implement a customer journey map, which visualizes all marketing campaigns and activities in the context of the overall marketing strategy.
- A customer journey map helps CEOs understand how customers interact with the company or brand and evaluate the effectiveness of marketing communication.
- While creating and maintaining a customer journey map requires time and effort, it serves as a valuable tool for CEOs to stay informed and engaged in marketing efforts.
Being responsible for keeping every department in your company functioning and effective is no easy task. If you’re like most CEOs, there’s probably more to do than you can ever possibly handle, even if the day had more than 24 hours and you were working non-stop.
Some departments and parts of your business are more important than others, and time dedicated to each of them follows a certain priority hierarchy. The marketing department is usually one CEOs wish to be involved in closely, but it’s also often the first one to be sacrificed if some time management sacrifices are required.
Marketing in overall is very dynamic and unless you’re keeping tabs on new campaigns, their results, new opportunities and perspectives every day, it’s very easy to get out of the loop. Not completely, but enough to not understand what exactly is going on.
The weekly or monthly reports your CMO or marketing manager does (and hates doing) give you only a very rough idea of your company’s marketing activities.
The ideal solution to this problem would be a tool that enables you to see the big picture of your marketing strategy where everything your marketing team does is visualized and put into context of how it falls into your overall marketing strategy, while sparing you the unnecessary details. A tool that would enable you to evaluate the effectiveness of your marketing communication and enable you to spot opportunities only a CEO can (we want to keep you engaged and reading, so we had to feed your ego a little).
So how can you turn this into reality? Ask your CMO to create a customer journey map.
A customer journey map is a representation of all your marketing campaigns and activities that form customer experience. It outlines how a customer interacts with your company or brand from the beginning to the end, and how you are trying to create, improve, and foster these interactions. All your marketing channels are included – social media, paid ads, website, newsletter, promotional articles, influencer sponsorships, print ads, billboards, etc.
The word “map” indicates that all these interactions (also called activities, milestones or checkpoints) are sequenced one after another so they provide you with a picture of a journey a customer takes when interacting with your company. Depending on how your customer journey map is structured and how complex it is, it can also include multiple variations – not every customer takes the same journey, and different customer groups are targeted by different marketing campaigns.
Should your marketing strategy include any pain points, a customer journey map will be a big help in spotting them – when everything is put into context, the things that don’t add up become apparent very quickly. If they are not visually represented, they can stay buried forever. Our CJM tool also includes KPI overview dashboard that aggregates the most important metrics from your activities to give you a quick idea of how your company is doing at the moment.
If you need to bring along a member of your marketing team to any of the meetings with other departments, a customer journey map will help to get everyone on the same page and the collaboration will be much more fruitful. Instead of long descriptions that are difficult to remember anyway, you will be all looking at a visual representation of your marketing that is much easier to grasp and navigate.
One of the disadvantages of classic customer journey maps is that they take some time and effort to create, and take even more effort to keep them organized. It’s crucial that everyone involved in working with (and especially editing) the customer journey map has clear instructions on how to do it. If you’re not careful, it will become very chaotic and will be pronounced impossible to work with and therefore useless. But if you (or rather, your marketing team) can keep it clean and organized, it can be a huge help and time saver, and often the only way for a CEO to stay in the loop.
