Customer Journey is often not the easiest concept to grasp. While mapping and mastering the entire customer experience holds the key to fixing what is broken in your marketing and sales, it is easy to get lost. We need better ways to get the points across, and visual explanations are usually more helpful than dry writeups.
Recently I have again run into the cult graphic from Marty Neumeier’s ZAG book that has been popping up on marketing blogs for over 10 years now. With a fresh look, I thought it was the perfect illustration of different views of the customer journey. So I decided to share one of the available versions and annotate each slide, with some notes on how every tactic fits into the bigger picture of the Customer Journey Mastery.
Now, let’s discuss each of the slides one by one
Slide 1: Marketing
When we talk about marketing “in general”, we are really talking about the overall strategy. Before we can jump into building any specific campaigns we have to get clarity about what we are promoting, to whom and why it should be valuable. Marketing strategy & message needs to be consistent through the entire customer journey.
Key highlights
- Strategic positioning & messaging
- All touchpoints & channels
- All steps in the customer journey
- Inbound & outbound
- Cold & warm, prospects & customers
Slide 2: Telemarketing
Here is an example of a specific channel & touchpoint, used for direct selling. Your sales force reaches out to prospects and makes the pitch. There may be multiple variations of how this is done and not necessarily over the phone. The key is establishing individual contact and executing a selling script via a conversation
Key highlights
- Quick tactical campaign execution
- Touchpoints for individual outreach (phone, messenger, email, etc)
- Typically initial contact & acquisition steps of the customer journey
- Strictly outbound outreach
- Primarily used for cold prospecting, but may cover engaging warm leads & prospects
Slide 3: Public Relations
PR or influencer marketing is all about selling indirectly. The channels vary from traditional press to various forms of social media. Specific platforms, be those blogs, Twitter, YouTube or Instagram matter less than the trust of 3rd party opinion leaders. This is all about leveraging this trust to generate inbound interest
Key highlights
- Range from short- to long-term tactical and strategic campaigns
- Touchpoints & channels are where the influencers and audiences are
- May drive acquisition or help close prospects in the middle of the journey
- Outbound outreach to influencers to generate inbound prospect inquiries
- Warms up cold prospects, heats up warm ones, reassures and grows customers
Slide 4: Advertising
Just like Telemarketing, advertising is an outbound tactic. The key difference is its impersonal nature. Instead of a direct selling representative, having a conversation with a prospect, you have to rely on an ad creative to do the job. The lack of intimacy is compensated by repetition, saturation and lower cost of touch
Key highlights
- Quick tactical campaign execution
- Touchpoints for mass media outreach (search, display, social, billboards, etc)
- May drive acquisition or help close prospects in the middle of the journey
- Outbound outreach to prospects to drive specific calls to action (CTAs)
- Cold & warm, prospects & customers
Slide 5: Graphic Design
Why does graphic design get its own slide? Because regardless of a channel or touchpoint, the right imagery is key to selling the value proposition. Look at this post – it is all about visualizing the concept of customer journeys through a funny cartoon. The right visuals are designed to trigger the right emotions in the prospects’ brains
Key highlights
- Strategic in design, tactical in execution
- Critical to most touchpoints, except a few (e.g. phone)
- May drive acquisition or help close prospects in the middle of the journey
- Inbound & outbound; Critical to rising above the noise
- Cold & warm, prospects & customers
Slide 6: Branding
Branding happens when your messages saturate your prospects’ environment and form a consistently favorable impression in their minds. That is why this publication is called 360° Marketing Blog. I can personally speak to building a brand by publishing a vision of Customer Journey Mastery and delivering it through just a handful of email and social channels. A few months of this completely changed the volume and quality of prospects inquiring about help with Facebook Ads strategy & implementation. If your prospects and customers know what you are all about – the sales process is a breeze.
Key highlights
- Strategic long term investment
- Brand equity constantly gained or lost with every touch over every channel
- Helps (or hinders) progress between any two steps of the customer journey
- Inbound & outbound
- Cold & warm, prospects & customers
Summary
- We need better ways to help visualize and explain Customer Journeys
- Strategy always comes first – you need clear value proposition & messaging
- Use ALL available channels & touchpoints to drive your messages 360° 24/7
- The right imagery & creatives are key to using most channels effectively
- Branding is the holy grail of marketing – if you got it selling is easy
Dmitriy Kruglyak
Making Advertising Profitable for Businesses
Building Marketing Tech since 1998
Latest posts by Dmitriy Kruglyak (see all)
- Speaking @ Chatbot Life 2019 on Building Bots for Business - April 30, 2019
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- “5 Pillars of a Facebook Chatbot Strategy” in FeedFront #45 - December 19, 2018
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