In order to Customer Journey from the perspective of your customers to properly fathom, you need some empathy. It's often extremely easy for companies to think of your customers' path to conversion as relatively straightforward - but, of course, that's not practical. Especially the supremacy of Social media in browsing has led to the fact that today in online marketing we are working from completely different distributed Touchpoints than was the case just a few years ago.
Whether you're primarily maintaining your own website, relying more and more on performance marketing, or working with influencers and brand ambassadors: Your goal must be to Support the customer journey technically and, of course, in terms of content across all touchpoints to be able to. We'll tell you how that works in this overview.
Understand and classify touchpoints of the customer journey
The customer journey is classically divided into five phases and does not necessarily end with conversion.
Awareness
In the first phase you create at all a Awareness for your brandwhat your company stands for and what problem you can solve. Especially here can your Social media posts make a valuable contribution. For many customers, they represent the first touchpoint the first stage of the Customer Journey dar.
Consideration
In the second phase customers consider buying a productbut not necessarily from you. At this stage Opinions and advisors obtained as well as Prices and offers compared. Often customers are also still waiting for the one Incentivewhich is the final deciding factor for the purchase decision.
Purchase
The Conversion is of course the destination of the customer journey, but not the final station. Good feedback and positive reactions without final conversions are indeed a start. But at the end of the day, a marketing team can only achieve its goals if the company also benefits economically from the Social Media Marketing can profit.
Loyalty
It is precisely through social media that it can be better understood that loyal customerswho like to buy from you again, a decisive success factor are. Via Instagram, Facebook and Co. you can continue to offer your page's subscribers relevant content communicate without having to explicitly advertise. Tailored ads also place relevant offersthat really match the preferences of your target group.
Advocacy
The ultimate goal of the customer journey is to Brand Advocacy. In this final phase, customers become Ambassador of your brand. This does not always have to be done explicitly, already the Interaction with your brand on social media improves your organic reach. Commenting, entering sweepstakes, or sharing posts show a connection to content - it gets even better when customers share your Recommend products on their own or share the fun of your brand with an @ tag.
Successfully classify the touchpoints in the customer journey
It is already easy to understand that the customer journey can become infinitely complex. After all, not every phase can be equated with a single touchpoint.
Let's take as an example the AwarenessAt the beginning of this phase, potential customers may hear about your company for the first time. Awareness is then built through posts shared from the customers' network and your ads.
On social media, too, it pays off accordingly to distinguish between Paid (Advertisements), Owned (own website or channel) and Earned (reviews, tests, recommendations from users).
Social media offer companies the advantage that the Touchpoint quality can be visually prepared as a statistical analysis very easily. This gives you the decisive Insights into user behavior and get the data they need to track ads and generate more touchpoints.
Successful campaigns often succeed in this respect. Accompany users from touchpoint to touchpoint. Thus, after already existing contact on social media, a post can be linked on the own page. In addition, thresholds can be integrated into the campaigns via which Trigger such as calling up an info page or leaving a full shopping cart trigger very specific reactions.
In this context, not only purely quantitative triggers that can be classified in binary terms should be set, especially due to the diverse analyses on social media different scores can be assigned to the touchpoints. Because how decisive a touchpoint actually is in the customer journey can be determined by means of the Moment of Truths can be read off.
This moment is the decisive touchpoint for the initial purchase decision and now it is possible to classify very clearly which touchpoints customers have previously gone through.
This allows you to streamline your customer journey and identify touchpoints that are performing better or worse. Especially after the purchase, your behavior plays a crucial role for the Long-term success of your brand. Touchpoints that build loyalty and call on existing customers to engage more are an important sign that you, as a brand, still care about your clientele even after you've had their money in your account for a long time.
And while newsletters remain an important part of a tailored feedback loop for your customers, social media has the advantage of making every interaction with you your organic reach grows. Good marketing with brand ambassadors and loyal customers therefore automatically generates new touchpoints for people who may never have heard of your brand.
Optimizing touchpoints - that's what matters
Of course, the most important factor for users remains the Content qualitythat you offer at the touchpoints. This can refer to linked articles, the information content of your posts, or the quality of your images, videos, or stories alone.
However, this quality is not a purely measurable factor, but is also in relation to the phase of the customer journey, that the target audience is currently in. While you create stories and posts for all followers, with ads you have more freedom to talk about Marketing Automation, triggers and lead scores the perfect content to offer.
