Blog

Before you launch a new marketing strategy or review and revise an older strategy, you should invest some time in journey mapping for your customers. This map helps you understand your target customer’s challenges as they search for a solution to some problem that your business can solve. Different marketing experts outline the customer journey in different ways, but they all tend to include these five steps.

Step 1 – Select a Goal

Review your goals and select one to focus on. Make sure this is a concrete goal that can be quantified. Don’t try to grow your presence in the online tutoring space. Instead, think of an X% increase in Y months. If you intend to grow your client base by 20% in a year, you can work backward to select marketing tactics and construct a realistic budget.

Step 2 – Create a Buyer Persona

Study your target customer to create a buyer persona. This is a fictional individual that represents a customer segment. Perhaps a buyer persona for that tutoring business is a mother who homeschools and wants extra math help for her child. People like her tend to have specific motivations and needs you can speak to in advertising. She may be relatively sensitive to price, while another buyer persona may not be.

Step 3 – Consider Different Parts of the Journey

This might be the most important step in journey mapping. Map your customer’s journey from awareness, through consideration, to a decision. At the awareness stage, your prospect may not be aware of how much one-on-one math tutoring can help their child. At the consideration stage, she may be weighing a couple of tutoring options against purchasing some study guides. At the decision stage, she is ready to hire an online math tutor. Know that your customer could find your company at any of those stages, so you need to have marketing messages that suit each stage.

Step 4 – Consider Pain Points

What problem motivates them to seek a product or service? Talk to customers and sales reps. Find out what potential customers are talking about online. Know how to position your product or service as the way to deal with each of those pain points. Any company has the potential to discover new customer pain points and use them.

Step 5 – Take Action and Evaluate

Once you have a customer journey mapped out, you need to take the insights you gained and convert them into marketing tactics. Those tactics could include anything from paid ads to blogging to running radio ads. The point is to take action and track your results using numbers. Tracking things like click-through rates and email inquiries will help you to adjust your tactics.

Partner with Online Marketing and Technology Experts

From designing a new site to search engine optimization and site updates, DevDigital offers a full range of strategy, design, and digital marketing services to help ensure you get the best results from your customer journey mapping. Feel free to contact us to learn more about our website development and marketing services.