The customer’s journey seems simple enough right? Your product is marketed to potential customers and bought by the ones who liked it the most.
If only it was that easy!
Think of customer journeys less like a gentle stroll along a seaside boulevard and more like trekking the Himalayas. It encapsulates the entire experience that potential consumers have with your brand, whether it be through marketing, customer service communications, sales or the onboarding process.
80% of customers now consider their experience with a company to be as important as the overall quality of their products, so to say that the customer’s journey to purchase and beyond is important is most definitely an understatement.
‘How do I know if my customer’s journey is productive?’ I hear you cry. You’ll be glad to know that this bit actually is quite simple. In this article I will discuss how to use customer journey mapping to not only understand the journey your customers undertake but also realise where it can be enriched, specifically with video marketing.
Differentiating your customer journeys and sales funnel
Customer journey maps and your sales funnel are each useful frameworks that enable you to gain insights into your marketing strategies. This enables you to understand where to focus your time, energy and resources in order to achieve the highest possible ROI.
This being said, they are two completely different, mutually inclusive frameworks. Confusion between the two is common, so before we get to grips with how to enrich our customer journey – let’s briefly discuss the intricacies of each.
Sales funnel
The sales funnel is a visual tool and strategic model used to dissect the phases of marketing from the moment a consumer becomes aware of your brand to the point of sale and beyond.
The most complete sales funnels consist of the following stages:
- Awareness (very top of funnel)
- Consideration
- Conversion
- Loyalty
- Advocacy (very bottom of funnel)
The funnel shape of the tool demonstrates visually the marketing tactic whereby businesses intend to catch more interest than convert. Marketers know that many who have been drawn into the funnel are likely to drop off somewhere along the process. To ensure a high level of conversions, and target-reaching bottom line sales, a high level of resources should be assigned to the top level of the funnel.
Like customer journey mapping, the biggest benefit of the framework is its measurability. The funnel exhibits where you are losing customers, allowing for amendments of your marketing strategy.
Customer Journey map
Customer journey maps, whilst they utilise sales funnel stages, are designed to highlight the customer experience rather than the aims of the marketer.
They pinpoint the movements made by customers both inside and outside of the sales funnel through specific ‘touchpoints’. They help marketers spot the barriers, worries, pain points, goals, questions and motivations of their target audiences.
The journey of a customer, whether they complete their purchase, or drop off in the consideration stage never really ends. Businesses are pulled to, pushed away from, forgotten about, remembered, spread through video marketing, or whispered in conversation. Marketing is a journey of ups and downs, the best way to visualise this is through customer journey maps.
What is a touchpoint?
Touchpoints are the marked points in a customer journey where prospective consumers touch base with your business. These can be in the form of content interactions directly controlled by your marketing team or through third party sources.
It can be difficult as a marketer to realise that there are certain touchpoints in a customer journey that you may not be in control of. When someone reads a bad review or receives a broken product and decides to drop out of the funnel it can be hard to come to terms with, but it is essential to involve these in your customer journey map to fully assess the success of your marketing efforts.
Why break it down?
Creating your own customer experience map allows your business to understand the moments that really matter to prospective customers. It can also provide your team with:
Insights:
- Understand what your customers are responsive to and unresponsive to.
- Understand the thoughts and actions of your audience persona.
- Visualise drop off points.
- Note where most potential customers have their first interaction with your brand.
Issues:
- If some sections have high drop off rates, find out why this is, perhaps you need more innovative content?
- Allows you to deal with forms of content that are not developing
Opportunities:
It is difficult to build on customer experience and marketing efforts if you do not grasp what makes up a customer’s journey. By understanding the customer journey, markers can put themselves in the position of customers allowing them to develop a wider, more reflective and revisionist view of their marketing strategies by:
- Pinpointing areas to develop.
- Freshly assessing where to allocate extra resources.
- Taking the chance to modernise, overhaul, develop or supplement your brand’s marketing strategy. (Like using video content)
Innovation:
- A simple framework to discuss with team members provides opportunities for exciting innovation.
Remember in business marketing there is never a one size fits all approach. Using the funnel alongside customer journey maps gives you the ability to tailor your specific approach to suit the wants and needs of your audience persona.
Creating your own customer journey map
- Developing your own map is a worthwhile process
- It is possible to use an existing template to plug in data, or if you are feeling particularly creative, feel free to develop your own!
Just remember to address these three key areas:
Customer behaviour – gaining awareness and thinking about seeking general product or service.
Customer attitudes, beliefs- What they want to ideally get out of their customer experience within your marketing strategy.
Customer touchpoints and decisions- Where they interact with your business and how this impacts their decision making process.
Transforming your customer’s journey with video
Now you have grasped the concepts behind customer journey mapping, and perhaps even already developed your own, it is now possible for you to see the weaker areas in your sales plan.
I am willing to bet that video content could greatly supplement, if not revolutionise your marketing strategy.
Overly confident? Take a look at these stats:
- 86% of businesses use video marketing.
- 79% of businesses that do not currently use video content marketing expect to start in the coming year. (This is 10% higher than last year’s figure of 69% and 20% higher than the year before that.)
This is why:
- In 2021 87% of video marketers reported that video gives them a positive ROI — a world away from the lowly 33% who felt that way in 2015.
- 94% of marketers say video has helped them increase understanding of product or service.
- 82% of marketers say video has helped them increase dwell time.
- 81% of marketers say video has helped them directly increase sales.
- 93% of marketers say video has helped them increase brand awareness.
- 88% of people say that they’ve been convinced to buy a product or service by watching a brand’s video.
Grammarly Case Study
Stage 1: Awareness
- A potential customers first encounters of a brand
- Most often not looking to buy immediately, just solve a problem
- Stumbling across or being introduced to brand through marketing
Touchpoints:
- Social media adverts
- SERP results
- Word of mouth discussions
- Billboard
Picture this…
Emily is a new university student, she is finding it difficult to keep up with the high level of writing expected by her tutors. This is her pain point.
Emily is a visual learner and turns to Youtube for some extra help, she types in ‘How do I improve my writing?’.
Lots of informative videos pop up, she clicks on one but an advert shows before. Before Emily has the chance to skip she is engaged, the advert is for Grammarly and it sounds just like what she needs!
Let’s take a look at the advert…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H53JSXPXPxI
Emily is now well and truly aware of Grammarly and the service it provides.
Low commitment video content is best for the awareness stage. It should be informative, simple and engaging enough to encourage information retention.
Video content for the awareness stage:
- Brand videos
- Product promos
- Educational videos
- Snackable content
- Infographic videos
Stage 2: Consideration
- Prospective customers are aware that brand, product or service exist
- They are actively attempting to understand brand, product or service better.
- Formulating an opinion and deciding whether they should subscribe to a free trial etc
Touchpoints:
- Lead generation
- Social media following
- Deeper search engine research
- Looking at reviews and testimonials
- Watching videos on their website or Youtube channel
Now Emily is aware of Grammarly, she decides to do some research to consider if she should invest.
She first explores other options online, typing in ‘writing assistant’ on Google. She is lead to a SERP with many writing assistance and she checks them out. Some do look as good as Grammarly and are much cheaper, so why should she pick Grammarly?
She finds herself on Grammarly’s website, she explores it and then checks out their Youtube channel and other social media. There are a few videos which really pique her interest.
Including this info-filled explainer:
Video content for the consideration stage:
- Social media video
- Meet the team
- Explainer videos
- Simple tutorials
- FAQ videos
Consideration stage videos should focus on differentiating your product from others in the market. Social proofing is essential! Proactively demonstrate how your product or service can fit in someone’s life. Most importantly include a call to action.
Stage 3: Conversions
- A customer bouncing at the last hurdle is the last thing you want.
- Make sure to keep them engaged by guiding them through the final hurdles to conversion.
- Remind them of the rewards after conversion
Touchpoints:
- Reviews
- Checking pricing
- Customer service
- Finance and purchasing FAQs
Emily is very satisfied with the free version of Grammarly and feels she would reap the rewards of the paid monthly subscription, especially after watching a few customer testimonials. Testimonial videos give potential consumers the confidence to consider your product or service.
She decides to invest in the monthly paid subscription of Grammarly. WooHoo sale made!
Video content for the conversion stage:
- Case studies
- Testimonials
- Review videos
- Demo videos
Aside from making purchases as simple and easy as possible, videos can be used to encourage the benefits of purchase.
Stage 4: Promoting loyalty
- Once your customer’s purchase is complete it may feel like the time to sit back and relax, but in fact you should be doing the opposite!
- Happy customers tend to remain loyal to your brand, product or service.
- Customer onboarding is one of the most crucial steps in your customer’s journey. A pleasant customer experience from the start establishes the groundwork for a long-term relationship and assures your consumer that they made the right decision.
Touchpoints:
- Instillation help
- Leaving a review
- Collecting rewards
- Personalised content
- Welcome packages
- Customer service and support
Emily has subscribed to the paid Grammarly plan, their challenge now is to keep her a loyal customer by encouraging the long term use of her subscription.
A new feature has been added to Grammarly, they send her a personalised email with the below video attached. Emily loves the new feature and it makes her even more excited for her future B2C relationship with Grammarly.
Video content for the loyalty stage:
- Welcome videos
- Product tutorials
- Follow ups
- Webinars
- Updated features introductions
Acquiring a new customer is anywhere from five to 25 times more expensive than retaining an existing one! This stage is an essential part of the customer journey.
Lets recap…
Customer journeys can be a perilous path for both the potential consumer and marketer to embark on. Stick to our guide and provide your target audience with an informative and worthwhile experience from stage one all the way through to stage four.
Videos long proven ability to increase conversion rates and foster brand loyalty makes it a thoroughly masterful way to supplement your customer’s journey experience whether you are marketing directly to consumers or B2B.
Ready to get started on creating your own video content? With over 2000 varied creations under our belt, both animated and live-action, we can sort all of the logistics, meaning no hassle or stress on your part. Still interested? Contact us to get our creative partnership started.
