How Customer Journey Planning Can Improve Media Planning

How Customer Journey Planning Can Improve Media Planning

By William A. Lederer, Chairman and CEO, iSOCRATES®

What is the Customer Journey?

The Customer Journey is how a customer experiences your brand. The journey starts with a person’s first exposure to your brand and moves through each brand interaction leading to the viewer becoming a customer then builds brand loyalty. New brands should spend time outlining the steps they would like potential customers to take to ensure the best user experience for the customer and the highest potential for a positive experience with the brand. Current brands should periodically review their customer journey to find ways to optimize user expense and improve brand sentiment.

Why is the Customer Journey important to media planning?

A well thought out customer journey will guide marketers by setting expectations of target audience, aligning on maximizing customer engagement, and providing a seamless user experience.

Creating a defied customer persona will help your brand identify the media outlets that will resonate most with your customers, helping to optimize media performance by reaching an engaged audience with a need for your product or service. It will help your team to avoid wasting money on media outlets that are unlikely to convert. Be sure to think through multiple ways your brand or service could be utilized so that the target audience is not too limited at the start. As you evaluate media performance, you will be able to enhance your personas based customer data and create optimized targets for your media buys.

The customer journey continues beyond the media click, so an engaging and informative website is key to customer acquisition. You will need to ensure that the steps to conversion are clear and easy to follow to limit fall off in the conversion funnel. Once conversion occurs, customer touchpoints should be on a cadence that will keep your target audience engaged without deterring them from the brand by over communication. This balance will need to be tested over time.

Mapping Your Customer Journey

A visualization of your customer’s experience with your brand will allow you to evaluate gaps in communication, bottlenecks in flow, and redundancies in process that might deter them from brand loyalty. A Customer Journey Map outlines each step in the process of acquiring and engaging with potential and loyal customers.

Creating this map prior to launching a media campaign will help you to understand what needs to be completed before media is launched. Missing pieces in the customer journey might negatively impact the customer experience. Mapping fall-off within your Customer Journey Map once media is live will help to identify where improvements to your website, media plan, and customer personas should be made.

Customer Journey Checklist

Use this checklist to make a plan or review your current customer journey. These items can also be integrated into your customer journey map.

Targets

• Define customer persona.
• Define primary and secondary targeting/media segmentation groups.

Brand consideration/Customer value-add

• Define what differentiates your product/service from competitors
• What is your value proposition?
• What incentives are being offered for adopting use of your product/service?

Advertising touchpoints

• Identify media types that will resonate with the target demographic
• Plan for retargeting campaigns that will reengage customers in the consideration phase of purchase/sign up
• Plan media spend allocation based on touchpoints within the purchase funnel

Site Information/Brand evaluation

• Follow Landing Page Best Practices to ensure the user is educated about the product/service

Sign up/Purchase process

• Streamline steps in the process so users are not deterred by complicated forms.
• Include security confirmation to eliminate bot traffic
• Provide a confirmation email detailing information about the purchase OR details of the service signed up for (include FAQ about service, process, link to Help files for the site)

Site Usability

• Optimize site for best user experience
• Ensure fast load times

Post sign up /purchase touchpoints

• Shipment status email OR follow up emails/SMS messages based on site interactions (# of days without login or “Rate your visit” email)

Continued engagement

• Create plan for alerting customers to new deals, products or services on regular intervals through email, SMS, social or other media outreach aligned with the target market.

Need help evaluating your Customer Journey or have questions about best practices? Contact Us.