How To Create a Customer Journey Map
One of most startups’ biggest struggles is knowing how to market their business effectively. A customer journey map can help you empathize with your clients, spot opportunities to help make their experience better, and carry out effective marketing steps to acquire and retain clients.
What Is A Customer Journey Map
A customer journey map is a visual representation of the customer’s experience with a business, from when they become aware of the business to when they become a customer and beyond. It can be intimidating because it is created and used by hard-core marketers. However, having a customer journey map in your toolbox can help you create a path from client awareness to delight!
Benefits of a Customer Journey Map for Your Life Coach Business
A customer journey map can give you the flow you are looking for to connect the pieces of your business. Best of all, it supports customer-focused business modeling.
Helps You Get and Keep Customers
Understanding your client’s clients’ thoughts, emotions, and inspiration helps you devise campaign assets that speak not only their language but also to their hearts. A customer journey map allows you to visualize opportunities to remove hiccups from your process, which will enable you to attract, convert, and delight your consumers
Identify Opportunities to Improve Your Client’s Experience
A customer journey map is not a “one-and-done” activity. It is a continual learning process. Having a feedback mechanism throughout your buying cycle allows you to get early feedback that you can share with your team.
Even if you don’t have employees, it allows you to visualize and articulate any issue to any outside vendor or consultant you may hire to help implement a solution.
It Gives You Have an Empathetic Perspective
Creating a customer journey map is walking in your client’s shoes. You find out information like their:
- Motivation
- Pain Points
- Experience
- Thoughts and Feelings
Grow Your Business
Growing your business requires retention and new customers. Your customer journey map allows you to attract customers and have existing customers acting as ambassadors to your company and referring people to you.
It Can Spark Creativity
Your customer journey map will show opportunities and gaps. It will generate creative marketing campaigns and solutions that draw clients—and that’s no surprise since it’s based on their wants and needs.
Continually Stay in Touch With Your Clients
Your journey map is based on continual communication with your client base. People want to know that you care and as you experience the benefits of an empathetic approach to marketing your business, you’ll look forward to those genuine engagements with clients.
Challenges of Creating a Customer Journey Map
Customer journey maps are usually built with big (expensive) teams, using gnarly marketing terms. So yes, it has its challenges for a solopreneur with a limited budget. It’s easy to get tangled in a weave of information, losing the reason why you engaged in building one in the first place.
You’re Just Starting Your Life Coach Business
When you first start your life coach business, you may not have the insight to know your marketing model or have the model to run expensive studies. However, you can conduct research or get insights from the ideal people interested in similar services.
The Data Can Be Overwhelming
A full-blown customer journey map can be overwhelming, especially if you put multiple products or services and personas on it. You can minimize confusion by only journeying one client and service at a time.
It is Time Consuming
Your map is a visual representation of data gathering, analysis, and conclusion. It requires a series of steps that begins with a goal and ends with the map. Each step includes its own set of activities. If you have no research or customer data, this process can take two weeks or more.
How to Make a Customer Journey Map
Making a map in itself is straightforward. The work is in the process. Luckily some professionals can either walk you through the process or create the journey map for you. Here is a list of the steps to familiarize you with the mapping process.
#1 Determine Scope
You can get lost in a sea of information. Have a SMART objective and keep the scope to one service or product at a time.
#2 Define your persona
You more than likely have more than one type of buyer that behaves differently and have diverse reasons to purchase. Using one customer journey map per persona will keep you focused and minimize confusion.
#3 Step into Your Client’s Shoes
Walking in your persona’s shoes means you will explore their experience with a beginner’s mind. Make no assumption and uncover the endless possibilities. There are various tools you can use to complete research. You want to collect information for each step of the journey. This include:
- Customer goal and activity
- The touchpoints (the different times in the process that your brand interacts with the customer)
- Their experience with your brand
#4 Create Your Map
Your journey phases go across the top (for example, awareness, consideration, and conversion), and the data such as customer pains, touchpoints, and activity, are listed vertically).
The visualization allows you to spot opportunities. Add the identified business opportunities, goals, and activities to your map.
Use the Map to Devise Your Marketing Goals
The map can help you develop a concise and effective marketing plan. There are business coaches and consultants that can help you devise this plan. Contact me @startupcoachjowanna on Facebook if you have any questions
