Buyer Journey Mapping

By mapping the individual steps of the Buyer Journey and the content required for each step of the journey, you can understand how many customers you have at each step of the journey. This is done by tagging your content for each step.

Two things to note:

Firstly, these are your customer’s buying steps not simply the steps they take with your company. By looking at the Buyer’s Journey from the customer perspective, including the psychological aspects of the journey, you will be able to support their journey with your content and therefore increase your share of journey. For this reason, the simplistic Awareness / Consideration / Decision / Purchase steps are usually an inadequate way of mapping the Buyer’s Journey. They reflect only their journey with your business rather than the wider steps the customer will almost certainly be going through such as research and building a business case.

Secondly, there is little point mapping the journey if the content is not connected. Without the connections, you cannot take your prospective customer on a journey and therefore will not be able to increase your share of journey at all steps of the journey. Journey progression involves serving up the next best piece of content in the buyer’s journey based on their step, their needs and their personas.

At Seen&Read, we use the Live Journey Management tool, Odyssiant, for the mapping and progression of customers through the Buyer’s Journey.

Live Journey Management

Sadly, it’s not a case of ‘build it and they will come’ for Buyer’s Journeys. If you want to increase your share of journey then you are going to need to put in place live management of the journey. This involves working with your marketing activation team to feed prospects into the journey, targeting the content in the right steps and designed for the right needs and personas.

Similarly, many journeys take time. While it would be wonderful if prospects completed their journeys in a single sitting, that is often not the case. Therefore, you will need a ‘nudge’ programme that engages paused prospects to nudge them forward. And you will need a ‘sustain’ programme that will engage all prospects over time so that you are there for them when they are ready to progress and to buy.

Journey Analysis

Of course, to effectively manage your journeys, you will need to understand how your journeys are performing. Where are your prospects on their journeys, how is the content performing, where are the opportunities and room for improvement? With effective content mapping, tagging and progression, this can be achieved – again, at Seen&Read we use the power of Odyssiant to provide these analytics.

It is the journey analytics which ultimately allows you to understand your share of journey and how to increase this over time.

Journey Improvement Planning

To increase your share of journey, you need to embark on a programme of constant refinement and improvement. This comes down to planning new content to engage prospects at each step and for all of their needs. At the same time, the marketing activation programmes can be continuously informed about what is working within the journeys so that there can be ever-sharper focus on driving in new prospects.