The evolution of the customer journey

People don’t want facts and figures, features and functions, they want stories and experiences. That’s where we, as marketers, step in. However, the path to providing a memorable, impactful and desirable experience has become more complex than ever, a lot of it thanks to that aforementioned information.

Consumerism and buying habits have undergone a radical facelift in the past 50 years. No longer do customers dutifully transition through the stages of the traditional funnel – awareness, engagement, consideration, purchase and retention – it is now far less linear.

Dennis Wakabayashi, VP Digital Marketing and Commerce Integration at The Integer Group says: “Shoppers today actively expand their consideration set using the internet. This inverts what we traditionally understood using models like a funnel, and for that reason we have to supply brands with seamless content across a wide number of channels to maintain a customer experience that leads to purchase.”

Firstly, consumers are much more informed. Word of mouth, social influences, family and friends referrals – there are hundreds of influences that frame a brand or product in our minds without us even knowing.

Further to that, research methods have become entirely democratized. It is easier to conduct some quick research online than call up a sales rep, but this means that brands have to relinquish some control and have little awareness of which stage these customers may be at. This is when tools like Brandwatch come into play. Conducting research on your target audience and customers and watching their progression along the customer journey has become easier with social intelligence.

Following extensive research, McKinsey has put forward a revised model of the customer-decision journey that looks at the cyclical nature of consumer behavior. The premise is simple:

Despite a change in how people interact with your brand and eventually become loyal customers, a marketer’s job still has one overarching objective – get to know your customers and serve their needs.

The sooner marketers begin to understand their customers’ journey, the easier it will be to reach them in the right place, at the right time. While this process is not a straightforward one, there are many tools and practices in place that will aid this process, and one underlying factor that the success of your marketing strategy may hinge on – data.

In this guide we are going to take McKinsey’s customer-decision journey into consideration, while also going beyond it to explore the role of data and the right tools in this process.

1. The Brand

Without customers a brand is nothing. But before even getting to a point of having a solid customer base, a company must understand where it stands in a sea of reinvention and changing organizational models.

The products or services we create will affect how we market them, this goes without saying. But when there are so many disruptors – from Netflix to Dollar Shave Cube – identifying your niche and unique selling point is becoming harder. However, some forward-looking brands are paving the way by focusing on core competencies and leveraging them to their advantage.

Are you differentiating your brand on UX and design? Take Everlane for example, the sustainable online clothing store. Not only does the brand have a fantastic mission that has lead to an almost cult-following, but even if you’ve never heard of the brand, your first visit to the site is a memorable experience. A clean and intuitive user interface clearly showcases the product, but more importantly, doesn’t require the user to think. These may seem like small factors, but the overall experience has a positive effect on the visitor.

Bonus points for subtlety working the referral program into the page design.

Is customer success the way forward? One example of a brand cultivating a customer base through excellent service is Zappos. The shoe company has been delighting customers since 1999 with its impeccable customer service. Stories of free shoes and expedited delivery emerge regularly, while countless studies have been written on its customer service model and how other brands can apply these.

Changes in consumer behavior and preferences means that disruption is rampant across all industries and no one is safe – think Airbnb and Uber. In order to succeed, brands must be clear on what they’re offering and how. Confidence at this stage will have a positive effect on all other stages of the process and business.

“What’s more, especially with millennials being our core customer base today, we need to focus on creating a brand that’s truly ‘on purpose’,” says Chieu Cao, Co-founder and CMO of Perkbox.

“This idealistic view of what you want to become, which goes beyond the mission, vision and values, defines the soul of the company and engages consumers emotionally.

“For me one of the most exceptional examples of a brand moving towards its true purpose is in fact Airbnb. When it began it was a coach-surfing, low-cost lodging company. It hit upon its purpose around 2014: ‘to make people around the world feel like they could belong anywhere’. At this point, the brand made its customers believe they were going on a journey to become a more complete version of themselves, the company used the power of humanity to drive that.

The Airbnb case also shows that success doesn’t always happen immediately, you often need to refine the whole mix to get it right.”

2. Personas

What is a company without customers? Companies create products, services and technologies designed to attract, serve and retain customers. Sounds easy,right? Not exactly.

Understanding who your target customers are is a pretty essential step in building a solid customer base. However, it’s not as straightforward as ‘women between 18 and 35’. Targeting has long been routed in demographics, and while useful, they only represent a small portion of the big picture. The internet and the democratization of supply chains means that your customers may not be restricted to a single geography or age group. Yet, they may share similar behaviors. This is where the potential lies. Identifying shared behaviors and values within your customer base means that you target them accordingly.

Enter the persona – well, between three and seven personas, ideally. As nice as it would be, not everyone is going to buy your product – but there are key groups of people that share attributes and can be categorized for more targeted and directed marketing.

Creating personas requires a balance of data and subjective knowledge. From marketing to account management, your customer-facing teams know your customers best: talk to them.

Then look to the data. Tools like Brandwatch allow you to conduct powerful research and segmentation. Look at behaviors, preferences and motivations.

Building personas is not a one off event, they should evolve over time as you learn more about the people you ultimately want to become customers.

The more information you have, the stronger your targeting becomes. Take Disney for instance, who have identified four key personas with comprehensive profiling and details on each.

3. Initial consideration

Imagine you are waiting at the bus stop. Half of the time you’re looking at the street, the other half you’re on your phone. How many marketing messages do you think you’re exposed to? On average we see 4,000-10,000 marketing messages a day so in the five minutes you’re sitting at the bus stop, on average, that’s 24 disperate messages. You’ll remember one, maybe two.

This is just five minutes of your day. The important point to note here is that brands are competing not only against each other, but also for attention spans.

Once the need or want has been established, from all of the thousands of impressions that customers have about different brands and different product categories, they form an initial consideration set.

How can brands get the golden ticket into this consideration set? A large combination of factors and some luck. Qualifiers range from previous exposure, brand awareness, price to service considerations.

Some of these factors are within the control of the company and brand. If you have a really strong brand, and know where to reach your customers with a highly targeted and effective message, your chances of entering the consideration set are greatly increased.

However, other factors are completely out of a brand’s control and can oftentimes be detrimental.

AOL conducted some research on the effect of patriotism on Ford. The car manufacturer has always been classified as a true American brand and a patriotic one at that. However when Ford made the announcement to move its small-car production to Mexico, Trump made his views known saying, “To think that Ford is moving its small car division is a disgrace. It’s disgraceful. It’s disgraceful that our politicians allow them to get away with it. It really is.”

This lead to a significant increase in negative sentiment around the brand while many joined Trump in voicing their outrage. In addition, the sales figures show a drop in unit sales the month following the event.

Not only did this have a negative effect on actual revenue, one must think of the residual effect and how hard it will be for Ford to change opinions and win back prospective customers.

Situations like this are often unavoidable but brands should make a concerted effort to consistently monitor their brand reputation and visibility online.

An underlying factor remains that the stronger your brand and the closer you are to your prospects, the easier it will be to reserve a place in the initial consideration set.

4. Active consideration

Congratulations! You progressed through to the next stage. Your prospects are now ready to buy your brand, as long as you meet the requirements and you are better than the other brands in the set. No pressure.

As your prospects move along the decision journey, your power of influence increases. This isn’t to say you can bank on a 100% conversion rate, however you can control with more precision the messages being received.

With this said, McKinsey suggests that there’s been a shift in the traditional push and pull of marketing. Through the research they found that two-thirds of marketing touch points were customer driven. This is everything from conducting online research, to review sites, to your own website.

While this may sound like something that’s out of a brand’s control, you can make concerted efforts to ensure these touchpoints are in tip top shape.

One way of identifying the people in this set is by conducting your own online research.

The final step once you’ve done this research is ensuring that you can monitor changes in these behaviors and preferences, and see how if this affecting other parts of your marketing and brand activities.

Brandwatch’s data visualization platform, Vizia, allows you to stay in control of all of your integral marketing data. With Vizia, you’re able to visualize data sets side by side and quickly discern if your social media campaign is having an effect on website visits, and look beyond social to understand what’s driving an increase in information requests. All in real-time.

Next, look at your website. No matter who is visiting the site, they should be able to find what they’re looking for almost immediately. The worst thing you can make a visitor to your site do is think too hard. Once you have the UX and navigation under control, think about the most important aspects of your site that will deliver the information needed, and more.

Invest in your blog, make sure the USPs of your products are evident and that it’s easy to find out more information. In most cases the website is the front page of your brand, so make sure it does what it’s supposed to.

A hot topic for the past couple of years, there is still a lot of value to be gleaned from influencer marketing. If you already have brand influencers and advocates, then continue to develop these relationships. If not there are steps you can take right now to develop a beneficial influencer strategy. Get started with our guide.

As we established in our case study with Jack In The Box, influencer marketing is much more than a fashionable phrase. By identifying and building relationships with influencers, companies can harness their reach to broadcast far more meaningful messaging, with much greater impact than they might be able to generate through their own channels.

Trust for brands is on the decline so having a personal touch can drive real results. You can get as targeted and specific as needed from lifestyle bloggers to make up artists. In fact, brands are finding greater returns on investment with micro-influencers compared to large-scale celebs.

5. Post-Purchase

Once your hard work has paid off and you’ve won another customer the trick is to foster the relationship and turn them into loyal customers. This is when customer experience marketing comes into play.

In order for customer facing strategies to be successful, there needs to be organizational alignment, not just in marketing. The easiest way to ensure on this is by making it a top-down objective. The sooner there is buy-in from senior management, the easier it will be to achieve company-wide mindset.

One of the ways that this can be achieved is by bringing the customer voice into the organization. Creating a central narrative of who your customers are and how important their loyalty is to all aspects of the business. Starting with customer-facing teams will create momentum and drive the strategy organically.

Vizia is helping hundreds of brands execute this objective by creating a platform for the voice of the customer. It allows teams across the business to achieve their goals – from customer service to the C-suite.

As Allison Herzog from Dell says, “Our vision at Dell is to really understand our customers and as a result, how our business is aligned to needs and impact. Vizia leverages the power of visual content to deliver insight to our business from all sides of the house. We recognize the ability to mentally process images 60k faster than text and this helps our people to quickly assess and take action.

The customer journey is complex and that is not likely to change anytime soon. It’s our jobs as marketers to ensure that we’re as well-informed and well-prepared for each stage as possible.

One of the most important things to note is that this a cyclical and ever-evolving process. A customer lost is not a customer lost forever, and likewise for a customer won.

Vizia allows you to maintain a hold on each stage of the journey and make informed decisions based on the ability to take an overarching and objective look at the data and activities at each turn.