Customer Journey Maps - Are You Using Them Correctly?

Customer Journey Maps are often vilified as a marketing buzzword that organizations love to hate. I understand where the sentiment comes from, I truly do. Too many of us have been held hostage by bad ones where a too expensive, overly-complex, multi-month mapping initiative with sticky notes on the walls ended up being shelved, forgotten and never used.

But bad apples shouldn’t spoil the bunch. A previous poor execution isn’t a good enough reason to lambast such an important tool. There are too many benefits to an organization having a common view into how a buyer buys and how a user (if different from the buyer as in many B2B SaaS sales) adopts.

Is the name part of the problem?

I’ve often thought that part of the CJM’s image problem may be in its name.

“Customer” doesn’t wholly reflect the complexities of many B2B sales where the person making the buying decision is often removed from the day-to-day users adopting the solution.

Then the word “journey” implies a level of conscious awareness or forethought on behalf of the buyer that they are on their way somewhere and heading toward a particular destination. We know this just isn’t the case, buyers gain awareness of solutions and head down buying paths in unintentional ways.

Finally, the term “map” implies a level of concreteness in a step by step progression and a level permanence in the landscape. Neither fits what we understand as the circuitous route a buyer may take toward a solution, nor does it take into account the ever growing ways buyers will choose interact with your brand. There are, literally, an infinite number of paths.

If I stipulate that we know the buyer or user won’t ever take a perfectly linear path down our funnel; and if I further stipulate that we won’t ever be able to accurately predict each and every potential path - does this mean any CJM is worthless?

Customer Journey Maps Are Useful As Constructs

Of course not. Despite its stipulated weaknesses, CJMs can be very useful tools in organizations. Its power comes from it being a construct.

The human brain loves to organize things -- we’re evolutionarily wired to categorize. This ability to categorize has helped us humans to quickly make sense of new, complex things in order to keep us alive and safe.

We’ve already established that a buyer’s actual path to purchase and adoption is circuitous, complex with an infinite array of alternatives. Add to that the complexity that in most organizations, there are different teams involved with sales and adoption including marketing, sales, product, and customer success to name just a few. Organizations need everyone rowing in the same direction and aligning their efforts for maximum benefit. And that alignment is near impossible if every different person has a unique point of view around how a buyer comes to buy and how a user adopts.

Given the innate complexity of both a buyer’s path and the organization -- and given our brain’s proclivity to categorize -- it’s useful to employ constructs like a CJM as a tool to align your organization’s people and resources around a common strategy.

And when the business goal is team alignment, a jointly created consensus hypothesis of the top segment’s journey may not necessarily reflect “truth” of the marketplace out the gate, the act of creating a view of the journey among all the stakeholders will generate the needed alignment for short term action and provide the forum for its future refinement.

3 Top Uses For Your Customer Journey Map

Your Customer Journey Map is a tool to drive strategy development and initiative prioritization. A Journey, as a construct, can be a powerful tool to align different teams in your organization around a common goal.

Get clear on what do we ‘know’ vs what ‘we think we know’. The journey construct is a way for an organization to put their “pink elephants” on the table and understand what is “known” about their buyers or users and what is still a hypothesis. I’ve seen organizations hold onto an old or unproven notions as fact for far too long because there hasn’t been a forum to review and reset.

It doesn’t mean all questions have to be answered before using the journey to set strategy. It just means it’s important to be clear on what is “known” and what is believed. This understanding drives identification of testing opportunities and identifies the best places to revisit if targets aren’t being achieved.

Align Sales and Marketing teams on lead scoring. There is always a (healthy) tension around the relative quality of leads generated by Marketing for Sales follow-up. Often this tension lies with each team having a different point of view of where a lead ought to be their “journey” before it’s appropriate for a Sales touch. Having both Marketing and Sales share a common view of the buyer’s journey helps to align lead scoring and appropriate budgeting and staffing within each department.

Identify both the micro and macro opportunities. Journey constructs are a great way to identify both micro and macro optimization opportunities. Micro opportunities include things like testing new messaging in email nurturing or different conversion page designs or even new content for specific segments. These are the kind of opportunities that every team can find and participate in.

Macro opportunities tend to broader in scope and may include brand new business models, new partnerships or changes in pricing/packaging. These are important outcomes of an organization truly understanding the needs and pain points of their market’s buyers and users.

I admit that in conversations with my sales and product colleagues, I sometimes choose not to even call it a “journey” because it’s such a loaded term. I’ll innocently refer to what we’re doing as our working together to build a “flow chart” or “whiteboard diagram” to get everyone on the same page.

However you have to do it, I recommend you don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater. A customer journey map -- when used correctly in your organization as a construct and a tool -- is a great way to align cross-functional teams as well as inform marketing activities and resources.

Maximize impact from thought-leadership

We've all heard variants of the expression, "you can have it fast, good or cheap; pick two."

I am reminded of this saying every time I read yet another content marketing article telling me to "just" create great content your audience finds relevant. Well, duh. A recent Ragan post termed these generic exhortations "annoying" and I 100% agree.

So if it pleases the content marketing court, I'd like to stipulate that every marketing leader shares the goal of creating content that is both "great" and "relevant" in the eyes of their target audience. This is a never-ending quest, and we will not rest until that magic formula is found.

In general, I find it more actionable to share ideas around distributing, amplifying and repackaging the content you do create. Today, let's explore one idea for getting the most mileage from contributed, thought leadership articles. This needs to be one of the programs in every marketers toolkit, especially all my growth hacker marketers out there trying to build awareness and achieve cost effective scale.

My strategy for maximizing contributed content has three elements: Place it, Family it and Bring it Home.

Place it.
Contributed content can include bylined articles, recurring columns, guest blogs etc. With so many publishers on the lookout for quality content, you are sure to find appropriate outlets for your articles. Even when you do not have an executive or founder whose name can secure top-tier placements out the gate, you can still find ways to contribute content. Getting your messages out there, in any appropriate outlet, will have a positive impact on customer acquisition.

It's important to remember that while you are authoring articles to benefit your product, the articles themselves are not branded. The article needs to be helpful and relevant to the publishers' readers so there is no call to action to visit your website. Your objective with contributed content is to introduce the key thought leadership ideas within your desired themes that help educate and inform your target audience. Thought leadership can stimulate need identification in your audience plus help them understand how to best differentiate among different offerings in the category. Once your content is published, the next two elements can be immediately activated.

Family it.
'Family' in this context is my shorthand for the blogs and social marketing efforts of related products and brands. If you are marketing a product within a large organization, this could include blogs and social personas of other products and services as well as the corporate brand itself. Of course, not every marketer is lucky enough to have this setup. But even if you don't have a ready-made family, you still have the opportunity create your own 'family' of products and brands that can co-operate together and support this content amplification strategy.

First, your 'family' can and should amplify the contributed placement itself. This typically takes the form of a tweet or Facebook post sharing the published article link with their audience. But the impact can be extended when you repackage to make it relevant for the Family blog and social audiences.

When you repackage for Family, bring the themes and ideas introduced in the original, unbranded contributed content one step closer to both products/brands. Relate the features and benefits of the specific products and brands to the broader themes introduced in the contributed content. You want to find relevant ways to talk about both your product and the Family product. Many times this falls into a "better together" story where you can also feature a customer story to help illustrate the benefits. Again, you will link to the contributed article as you reference the themes, but you will also link to relevant conversion pages on your own and/or your Family's sites.

Bring it home.
Finally, you need to bring it home. In this step, you take the thought leadership ideas introduced in the contributed content and draw big, bright lines directly to your product and brand. Like with 'Family it', you first amplify the published contributed article itself through your blog and social channels. And then you can, on an on-going basis, reference the themes in thought leadership and point readers directly to conversion paths for your product and brand that highlight those themes.

Because your thought leadership content was identified from the core positioning and differentiation of your product - and these are fleshed out on your site - there will be many opportunities for your social team to reference the theme (and link to the published article) while also pointing readers to an optimized conversion path on your site.

All together now.
While the strategy may appear simple, its execution is more complex because, generally, different teams are responsible for the different elements. Contributed content often sits in communications and public relations, while Family sits in other organizations all together, often product and corporate marketing. Bring it home comprises website, content and social teams that have to work in concert. Articulating the strategy in this way helps align diverse and dispersed team so each understands their role in maximizing the benefits of contributed content.

Emotion First, Then Rational Thinking

This morning I read an interesting article on Forbes.com by Kimberly Whitler linking the discipline of marketing with the study of neuroscience. She reinforces an idea from my Mind Pops post last month, tying the discipline of marketing with an understanding of how our brain process information and stimuli.

Whitler shares that our brains first react emotionally and, only then, after reacting emotionally, does it access our rational thinking. It is this ‘emotion first’ order of our brain’s processing that is likely behind our sometimes seemingly “irrational” decisions.

All marketers should remember that our brains are wired to always work this same way: emotion then rational.  'Emotion first’ processing is as relevant to B2B as to B2C marketers. because our neuroscience physiology doesn’t change just because we’re working or making decisions in our professional life.

‘Emotion first’ is why strong brands matter.  Brands influence how customers feel about our companies and our products and about buying and using our products.  ‘Emotion first’ is also why benefit and solution messaging (when executed well) tends to be most effective.  

Of course our target audiences still need marketing content with all of the facts, figures, graphs, charts, videos, comparison tables, case studies, testimonials and white papers, etc.  All of that is still necessary to address their subsequent rational thinking.  It's never "just" emotion or "just" rational -- it is always both.

Building and executing your marketing strategy thinking about your target's emotional and rational thinking will lay the best foundation to successfully influence your customer's behavior.

It's not boring to your customer

Earlier this week I read Sean McVey's Content Marketing Institute blog post on how it's possible to create engaging content even for "boring industries".

His case study was a supply chain professional services firm offering supply chain focused educational and thought leadership content in its blog for its 7,000 supply chain managers.

Ummm, yeah -- that makes sense.  A supply chain professional services firm would want to offer supply chain managers the information, insights and community interaction around what they need to be successful.

Maybe it was the use of the word "boring" and the implication that "no one" could possibly be interested in supply chain management.  And that this firm somehow achieved the impossible and made the topic interesting.

"Boring" is great, provocative copy for a headline about content marketing. But supply chain related guidance, tips and white papers are not at all boring to supply chain managers.  I would like to believe that this is the career these folks have chosen, where they have developed their skills and proficiencies over time and where they find their flow. 

So to me, this case study once again illustrates the goodness that can happen when you learn about and understand your target audience.