Getting Real about Customer Journey Maps: Mapping Content to the Journeys

I am authoring a new blog series on customer journey maps and content. In my first blog in this series, I write about specific task-based customer journeys, derived from customer journey maps as essential tools to establish the value of journey maps. These are particularly useful for identifying content for the customer context experience. Here is an excerpt from a longer and more detailed blog post that speaks to how you can use task-based journeys to improve your content experience.

Making your Journeys Customer Journeys More Robust and Differentiating

People often ask me if there is any advice above and beyond the essential (and basic steps for crafting a journey) I can offer. Here are some tips that I have learned over the years, and which can make journeys even stronger and more competitively differentiating. These can also help you build a better journey overall and ensure that less iteration is necessary after roll-out:

1. Collect the most important data to review. As you are looking at data to collect for users and their behaviors, always seek for quality analytics over sheer volume. Involve a data scientist or marketing scientist who can interpret the data and its integrity, and customer insights for each customer touchpoint. Keep in mind that qualitative is as important as quantitative, and quite often more important for customer experience efforts, such as customer journey project work.
2. Do a competitive audit for each step. See what primary competition or third-party sites offer in terms of content at each step in each touchpoint.

• This means you go through each step of your customer journey on your primary competitors’ experiences, and you see which content they offer / do not offer.
• Do a SWOT analysis of this content, meaning you take look at the Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats. Capture content that you should offer within your journey, based on this analysis and map it to the appropriate steps.

3. After your journey and channels are defined, associate an exit rationale for each step (why does the user leave the touchpoint?) What causes her to step away from the completion of her journey within your brand experience? For example: Why did she leave the website? Does she need to go do research about the industry from an independent source or industry expert or find a competitor’s price, etc.? Ask yourself: is there content the user can find elsewhere he is not finding in my experience? What could I be offering to those leaving my experience prematurely? Generate a list of content from the exit rationale list. And remember, if the user must leave, such as to conduct third-party research, then you should incorporate any required activities into your journey steps.

4. Account for why the customer does not arrive at your destination or touchpoint to begin with:

• Does your customer not find you in a search online when she tries to accomplish the initial search? E.g., Does your website not appear in the top search results with the most frequently used search terms? (This question accounts for the top terms or keywords your targeted user would use to conduct the search.)
• Is she not finding your content because it is not in the channels she uses?
• Is there something within your experience preventing her from initiating this journey with your brand?

5. Include marketing folks and technical documentation folks in the mix of fleshing out the journeys. Remember, journeys often are not purely marketing or technical in nature. Journeys require content from both areas to support the customer experience. A well-baked journey does not communicate internal silos to the customer experience through fragmented content experiences.

6. One size will not fit all for how you leverage a persona/profile/customer identity in a journey. If you are doing a customer journey, do not forget to keep it customer focused. For task-based customer journeys with detailed steps, you may have to use personas for some, profiles for others and segments for others. And this may mean disassociation from your customer journey map archetypes, which may be too broad in some cases.

Following these six steps can help you differentiate and empower your journeys for even more success.

You can read this as well as guidance on the creation of the journeys in my latest blog.