Key takeaways:
- Employees are valuable assets, but accessing relevant marketing information can be challenging.
- Complex marketing operations in larger companies make it difficult for marketers to comprehend the entire strategy.
- Without a systematic way to access information, proactive marketers may struggle to evaluate the viability of their ideas.
- Creating a customer journey map can provide a comprehensive overview of marketing touchpoints and operations.
- With a CJM in place, marketers can confidently propose ideas and contribute to improvements in the marketing strategy.
Employees are the company’s No. 1 asset, or at least that’s how the saying goes. Not all companies are fortunate enough or able to attract the best marketing talent, but some are – and if you happen to be such a company, it’d be a shame not to take full advantage of your most valuable asset. The larger the company (and its marketing team), the more likely it is that marketers who want to come up with something new simply don’t have enough information to do so.
Marketing operations in larger companies are quite complex in every area – even more so if the company has a strong technical foundation and can use all of its customer data for marketing and CX purposes. The whole marketing apparatus then becomes impossible to keep in one’s head and without a way to easily navigate it, almost inaccessible to fully comprehend.
It’s not uncommon for marketers to have no idea about the marketing areas they’re not working on, the customer experience, the buying process, and everything that encompasses it. There’s no single place to get this information and data – if it’s available (i.e. if an employee has physical access to them), they’re scattered throughout many different apps and analytics tools. Even put together, they don’t paint a clear picture at all because the context behind them is as important as the data itself.
If a marketing employee wants to get ahead and come up with new ideas outside his designated role, there’s a huge problem: he can’t properly evaluate their viability. There’s no way to tell whether they weren’t tried before, whether they aren’t already applied to some extent, or whether they’re not colliding with other marketing activities. Especially if other coworkers are very protective about their work and don’t want to share much out of fear of being outshined and the superiors aren’t very enthusiastic either, any idea a proactive employee comes up with can be simply met with “that was already tried”, “that will not work well with [insert some other marketing activity here]”, or “you’d need to understand X to do this”, and so on. If the proactive employee has no way to access the information he needs himself and can’t rely on coworkers briefing him, he’s blindsighted.
To put it plainly, you can’t connect the dots if you don’t know what exactly the dots look like and where they are.
If you want to create and foster an environment where every marketing employee has access to all relevant marketing and customer experience-related information without relying on potentially tight-lipped or busy coworkers, there has to be a systematic way of adding, storing, and updating this information. Many methods and tools have been tried, but they have proven to be very difficult to use long-term: when something doesn’t work properly and takes more time than it saves, people lose patience with it.
But there’s a proper way to do it, too: creating a customer journey map. It will contain every single customer touchpoint which is exactly what any marketing employee needs to evaluate and understand the marketing strategy. It’s detailed enough to provide him with context about each touchpoint but broad enough to be easy to navigate.
In practice, an enthusiastic and proactive employee can sink in the whole marketing and customer-related operations in a couple of hours and use it as a reference whenever he needs to freshen up his memory or look at some touchpoint or phase in more detail. He will be finally able to check whether his ideas fit into what’s already in place, and if not, where exactly is the problem, and what has to be done to make them fit. When the time comes to propose an idea to the boss and coworkers, he can confidently outline how his ideas fit into the big picture and there will not be anything to surprise him.
With a CJM in place, every marketing employee will have a chance to show what he can do and there will be nothing to stop him. Maybe you’ll be shocked how many people are suddenly coming up with improvements when they have a framework to brainstorm and present their ideas in.
