3 steps to navigating the complex customer journey

1 year ago 56

Why is the lawsuit travel truthful complex? How tin we amended the lawsuit travel to present amended results?

Marketers recognize the conception and value of the lawsuit journey. You indispensable cognize however customers find you and bash concern with you if you privation to succeed. 

The much you tin improve the lawsuit journey, the better lawsuit experience you tin present and the much effectual your selling volition be.

But there’s 1 large occupation — the lawsuit travel is incredibly complex.

Today we person much channels, creatives, messages and touchpoints than ever. How tin we perchance understand, measurement and optimize the lawsuit travel erstwhile it has outgrown our limitations?

The reply is simpler than you mightiness think, but it’s thing that astir marketers wholly overlook.

The lawsuit travel cornerstone

The Pareto principle (a.k.a., the 80/20 rule) states that 80% of the outcomes travel from 20% of the efforts. Whenever I measure a selling team, I find this rule successful afloat effect.

Most of the gross and results of your selling are the merchandise of 20% of your efforts. And the aforesaid is existent for your lawsuit journey. You whitethorn person galore antithetic paths and touchpoints, but not each of them are contributing equally.

The cardinal to selling occurrence and standard is to refine your lawsuit travel down to the essentials — the captious path. Then you tin optimize and grow it to maximize your impact.

Too often, marketers go complacent and springiness each transmission and each touchpoint the aforesaid resources and priority. In practice, precise fewer are really contributing to the bulk of your selling performance.

Here are 3 steps to instrumentality power of your lawsuit travel and accelerate your growth:

  • Analyze and recognize the 20% of your lawsuit travel that drives 80% of your show (your captious path).
  • Optimize your captious way to boost results with leverage.
  • Maximize your results by connecting the different paths of the lawsuit travel to your captious path.

Let’s research each of these steps.

Finding your captious path

There’s ever a captious path. The archetypal measurement is to find it.

The easiest mode to find the captious way of your lawsuit travel is to ideate turning disconnected each of your marketing, 1 by one. Which pieces, erstwhile turned off, would origin the biggest interaction connected your business?

This volition alteration greatly from 1 concern to the next, but here’s an example.

One of my clients sells canine fences that are seasonal (people don’t instal a obstruction successful the winter) and, for the astir part, a transactional purchase. People hunt connected Google erstwhile they are acceptable to put successful installing a obstruction for their dog.

As a result, Google Ads are portion of their captious path. If they turned disconnected their Google Ads, the concern would travel to a screeching halt. 

Conversely, they besides bash email marketing, but the interaction from that is minimal and would beryllium hardly noticed if it was stopped.

However, a azygous transmission isn’t the entirety of their captious path. When radical click their Google Ads, they are taken to a landing leafage and past pushed done an assignment funnel, wherever they are routed to the close distributor. 

All of these parts — the Google Ads, the landing leafage and the assignment funnel — marque up their captious path.

Are they investing successful different selling efforts and channels? Absolutely. But they admit that this is the “heartbeat” of their marketing, their captious path.

And arsenic such, it indispensable beryllium finely tuned and maintained to thrust gross and results consistently.

Paying disconnected debt

Before reasoning astir scaling and growth, we person immoderate cleanup to do. When you fto your lawsuit travel tally amuck without pruning, it tin easy get retired of hand. It becomes confusing, analyzable and convoluted.

Once you cognize your captious path, you indispensable chopped distant everything that’s either a bottleneck oregon not contributing. Cut ruthlessly and without regret.

The extremity astatine this signifier is to trim friction, optimize the captious way and amended performance. To bash so:

  • Consider each interaction constituent and enactment and analyse however it tin beryllium made much seamless and direct.
  • Ask however the clarity of the connection tin beryllium improved.
  • Identify thing nonessential that tin beryllium removed.

If you’re struggling with this step, I urge bringing successful immoderate existent users for a usability trial and asking them to implicit definite goals, similar uncovering your merchandise online and attempting to acquisition based connected circumstantial criteria. 

By watching however they behave and what they do, you’ll instantly recognize however galore assumptions marketers marque versus however radical really deliberation and act.

Dig deeper: How to warrant your selling wins each time

All roads pb to Rome

Congratulations! At this point, you’ve recovered your captious way and refined it to the constituent of highest performance. Many marketers ne'er marque it this far, but there’s inactive much enactment to beryllium done.

“All roads pb to Rome” is an aged proverb that illustrates how, nary substance what way you take, you ever extremity up astatine the aforesaid destination. This is precisely however you should deliberation astir your lawsuit travel and the captious path. 

Don’t physique aggregate lawsuit journeys oregon effort to grow the captious path. Instead, link each different paths to the captious path.

This way, the captious way is present consciously and strategically identified arsenic paramount and of utmost priority. All different efforts volition payment from the optimizations you’ve made to the captious path.

In immoderate cases, this happens naturally. For example, for ecommerce companies, each idiosyncratic whitethorn yet extremity up successful the checkout acquisition of your website. 

But your captious way isn’t ever your checkout experience. It whitethorn beryllium the astir profitable way earlier that step.

Splitting up the lawsuit travel into small pieces, oregon micro-journeys, is simply a bully mode to representation them retired and visualize however each of them connects and leads to the captious path.

Dig deeper: 3 ways to present amended selling experiences

Fixing your lawsuit travel is critical

The lawsuit travel has go overly complicated. Marketers emotion talking astir the lawsuit travel successful abstract terms, but fewer put the clip and effort to recognize it, fto unsocial amended it.

If you don’t cognize your captious path, it’s paramount that you find it. Understand what it is and walk clip refining and improving it. That unsocial volition present a amended lawsuit acquisition and boost your performance.

After dissecting your lawsuit journey, reconfigure it and reconnect the pieces to signifier a strategic, thoughtful and high-performing travel that delights your customers and your stakeholders.


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Opinions expressed successful this nonfiction are those of the impermanent writer and not needfully MarTech. Staff authors are listed here.

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