Maps help us get from point A to point B, C, D, or even Z, and customer journey maps guide your target market from start to finish through your sales, education, or sign up process.
Customer journey maps differ for every business and sometimes for different customers or goals of the business, but they all outline a customer going through some process your company outlines for them. Customer journey maps come in many forms, but typically take the form of an ever-narrowing funnel or a flow chart moving customers from left to right through a series of decisions. Typical phases for a run-of-the-mill customer journey map, with the goal of making sales, goes something like this:
- Awareness – Making your target market aware of your brand and/or company.
- Consideration – Educating your market on your products, service, and values.
- Preference – Helping your potential customers decide between all the choices you offer (products, services, and pricing models).
- Purchase – Wahoo! Ka-ching! You made a sale and hopefully gained a life-long customer.
Not all maps look the same. You can draw up customer journey maps for just about anything you or someone interacting with your brand wishes to accomplish. In other words, you can tailor customer journey maps to both your goals (brand awareness and education, sales, value building, etc.) and your customers’ goals (finding locations, learning about products, researching services, comparing you to the competition, etc.). You can create customer journey maps that are intended to blanket the journey of every individual within your target market, or you can develop more precise journeys customized to individual personas within your target market.
However broad or narrow your customer journey map is and regardless of the map’s ultimate goals, sharing these customer journey maps with your entire content marketing team (including the writers) will inspire content ideas and turbo-charge your mapped content marketing efforts.
Top 5 Ways Writers Use Your Customer Journey Map to Improve Your Content Marketing
1. Write with the Right Tone
Knowing a piece of content’s location on your customer journey map will help your writer create an appropriate tone. Your writer will adjust the tone of the content to accommodate its purpose and place. Whether the content serves as an introduction to newcomers, description of pain points, or further education for existing clients, writers can adjust tone accordingly.
2. Come up with Custom-Fit Content Ideas
Writers can tailor almost any topic of content to any audience or any purpose specified in a customer journey map. For example, your writer will put together an article about pizza differently if its intended for families ordering in or foodies tempting their taste buds.
3. Answer Unasked Questions
A customer journey map allows your writer to anticipate the audience’s questions and answer them in the content. Depending on where your customer is along the journey, they will have different questions and grow curious about different aspects of your business. Your writer will ensure they wander down the correct paths.
4. Provide Just Enough Information
Is your customer journey persona an industry expert or a relative newcomer? Writers don’t want to bore either group with too little or too much information. Too much industry jargon or too few acronyms. Overly basic or overly specific content. Introduce writers to your customer journey map personas so that we can deliver these technicalities the way Goldilocks likes them — just right.
5. Deliver Content to (Measurably) Meet Your Goals
The place on a customer journey map informs the purpose for new content and its goals. A thorough understanding of your map allows the writer to include applicable content and select the appropriate call to action statement.
Invite Your Content Marketing Team on Your Well-Planned Journey
When putting together your next content order, be sure to include a copy of the customer journey map that inspired the content. Let your writer know if the content is intended for a particular phase of the journey or a specific persona. Any information about the audience and purpose of the content that you can provide your writing team will enable us to create customized content that will help you achieve measurable goals specific to your customer journey map.
Jennifer G is a full-time freelance writer and editor with a B.A. in creative writing from the University of Montana. She enjoys researching and writing creative content to engage readers and developing professional voices for clients across all industries. She specializes in medical, health, veterinary, and financial writing. Having worked nearly thirteen years in finance, Jennifer applies her experience in the banking industry (marketing, social media management, consumer and commercial lending, customer service, accounts, and bookkeeping) to her writing work within the industry.
