Customer Journey Mapping | Week 4 | Review

Customer Journey Mapping & User Research

This is the fourth blog post as part of the series of blog posts in which I will sum up my learning experience with CXL Institute attending their Growth Marketing Minidegree.

Last week I talked about Customer Research.
Today I will continue with "Meeting Your Audience & Customer Journey" summing up my learning experience and review the following key takeaways:

#Meeting with users is essential to marketing success

As we mentioned before in the previous blog post, If you want to understand people so that you can persuade them, you must spend time with them. Yes, we are all busy but it's essential to meet with our users as much as we can or once a month, pick a day at the month and meet with at least 3 users then set down as a group and reflect on what you’ve learned and what came out of this meeting. To make it most beneficial, have a pre-defined subject that you need to discuss with users, it could be anything really a landing page structure or an email marketing campaign. Make sure you engage with the user in a meaningful way, why not invite them in the campaign creation draft, you can also share an activity with the user it will help you more knowledge about the user and the user can be more relaxed and not pressured. 
it's optimal to meet the user one-to-one instead of a group as it gives the user more space and freedom to say his/her opinion with no pressure. if you find it hard to meet users in person then seek remote alternatives like zoom, skype or a dedicated tool like lookback. 

#Deep dive into Customer Journey Mapping

What we learn about the user from our user research needs to be clear in our minds as marketers so that we can easily communicate it with our team, to achieve that we tended to use Personas but as we stated before traditional persona is not enough. Because Traditional persona is a static snapshot in time, and they don't reflect the journey that the user goes on, to the point of conversion. The customer journey changes as the user interact with us and go to the point of making a purchase. The customer journey represents a visualization of this journey. 
The customer journey doesn't have to be 100% accurate and it's okay because we have different users with different buying journeys and we can't sum it all up. Every user journey is slightly different,

Customer Journey is a story of 2 main components:

• The steps of the journey;
  
• The user information at each step of the way; 
  
  

At each step of the way, what are the touchpoints users interact with you through? it might be online or offline, you begin to build up a picture of which touchpoints you need to be using which points of the journey. Which are going to be most effective at a particular time.
Customer journey mapping is a story that helps you understand the user better.

one of the best ways of mapping the journey of customers is to run a customer journey mapping workshop. It’s important to not do it alone. Involving other people from other departments not only expand your view but also give them a sense of ownership which makes them support it and be serious about it. So inviting the sales, customer services, social media team and anyone who has access to user data will be helpful. you might also think of inventing senior management. also if you can manage to invite a user to the workshop that would be ideal.
After settling on the journey mapping, visualize it. Keep it nice and simple, tell a story and doesn’t be 100% accurate. lastly don't forget to put an expiry date to it, making sure that it will be revisited.

#Getting the most out f user research

Focusing on the user as the heart and centre of all our marketing activities. User research can sharpen marketing campaigns in a great way by taking user research, turning it into empathy maps, then turning it into customer journey maps, and then putting it on the wall. Have it up in front of you the whole time. 
When starting a new project start with users and users need, there is a technique paul mentioned that might be helpful focusing more on user needs which are called User Story Cards, So we specify projects with a collection of cards, each card has a statement on it “I am ... I want to … so I can ...” I am a certain type of user, I want to do a certain type of thing, so I can achieve an ultimate goal. 

#Involving the User in the Campaign Design 

By involving the user you get to have the user perspective involved in the campaign design and assure that you're using the right tone of voice in designs and marketing copies. 

There are different exercises that help understand what tone resonates with users, I will mention some of them paul mentioned in the course: 

• Book Cover
  Asking the user, to sum up, a product you offer as the book cover does, so what goes on the spine, what goes on the back, and what goes on the inside flap.
  So what goes on the spine is that attention-grabbing thing from when it's placed on the bookshelf. What goes on the front is your kind of key selling point. What goes on the back is a little bit more detail, and what goes on the inside flap is even more details. this way you understand more about how a user thinks and what best tone to be used.
  
  
• Waiting Room
  describe the waiting area of our company, how it should be like? asking a user a question like this helps in giving an indication of what company's selling points really matter to the end-user.
   
• Pick A person
  Here you ask a user to think of your company as a person and start describing this person. Then extract all keywords good and bad so that the copywriter and designer take them into consideration when designing the whole campaign. this way you make sure that you're close to using the best-fit tone of voice that can resonate with your users/target audience/potential customers.
  

Who to invite when doing such exercises? if you’re trying to test tone-of-voice then you have to target real users that you're actually trying to reach, people who have not signed for your product or service IDEALLY.

For testing selling points and so, you can use your current customers. worst-case scenario If you can’t find an audience, try anybody outside the company. Friends and families which is better than nothing.

-----

More about {Testing campaign design with the user and structuring the website with user's mental model using card sorting} in next's week blog post.