An Introduction to Journey Marketing

You might ask: “how do I even start to think about Marketing for my business?” You might already have vague ideas, might have seen, read or heard about marketing-stuff that can be done. Or you don’t, but you feel you need to do something, anything to push your business. But it’s hard to decide what makes sense and what doesn’t and even harder to know where to start.

Some comforting news: you are not alone. In fact, most if not all managers and even marketing professionals ask themselves these questions to some extent. Big companies are no different, believe me.

“How do I even start to think about Marketing for my business?”

The Customer Journey

I propose the Customer Journey as simple and universal approach to answer such questions. For me it is the starting point and the structure to answer any Marketing question a business might ask. You don’t think about what YOU could do, you think about what is most important for your CUSTOMERS.

Now, Customer Journey models are quite established and nothing new at all. You will probably have heard this term before yourself. I myself have studied, worked with or consulted on Customer Journeys for more than a decade. I must have seen a hundred variations and approaches over the years in different projects and companies. But as intuitive as the idea is, it can also easily be applied without the right focus, much too complicated or just not effectively. Unfortunately, I have seen this too often. So in my work and also in this blog, I provide simple and pragmatic ways to apply the Customer Journey to the most important Marketing questions. It’s been wonderful to see it work in an eye-opening and really effective way, over and over again

You can find hundreds of different variations of the Customer Journey, but in the end it always comes down to these principle journey phases your customers go through:

1. Awareness Phase

2. Search Phase

3. Purchase Phase

4. Usage Phase

The two most fundamental Marketing questions can nicely be plotted along the Customer Journey:

1. What is our offer to customers and how can we make it as attractive as possible? (Primarily Usage Phase via your product or service)

2. How do we bring this offer to customers successfully? (Awareness, Search & Purchase Phases)

In this article, I describe the basic principles of working with the Customer Journey. I apply these in all of my future articles for specific Marketing questions and concrete example situations.

Working with the Customer Journey always follows three steps:

1. Customer needs: Understand what your (potential) customers need or struggle with most in each phase. Once you understand the most critical needs along your customers’ journey, you also know what to tackle first and foremost. It means to always start by putting yourself in the customers’ shoes.

2. Touchpoints: Then you figure out where your customers mostly “go” to solve those needs. These touchpoints are what you should also focus your attention on. It is where you need to be visible and stand out or provide relevant information, help, or any kind of valuable experience for the customer.

3. Activities: Lastly, and only after the two previous steps, you can decide on what to do. Then you know what your customers need and where. Now you can make decisions on what is most important in your specific situation and how to best go about it.

Target Customers

A very important pre-condition for going through these three steps is defining your target customer group.

“WHO’s journey are we looking at?”

There will be some very general, universal customer needs and touchpoints, no matter who your customers are. But there are also specific needs and pains of specific customer segments or specific touchpoints for them, and these might make all the difference for your offering and the Customer Journey you design for them. Just think of older people vs. young kids, city folks vs. country people, higher vs. lower income groups, people in specific life situation, locations, or with any specific preferences or attitudes. I will do another article on the importance of customer segmentation and give you guidance and tools to identify promising target groups for you.

A solid target group understanding will not only help you to identify critical (unmet) needs along their journey. It will also help you to become creative with your touchpoints and activities – and that you must! What do your customers experience with you and where? What is special and different or even delightfully surprising about it? What is your unique proposition to them, that makes them chose you over others? And this does not only refer to your product or service that they use. It also counts for experiences at various touchpoints in their Awareness, Search and Purchase Phases, to get them to buy you in the first place.

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