While building an optimal strategy for digital marketing to hit the right targets and track the potential buyers, the customer journey runs in the foreground and receives all the limelight. The marketing teams and players running in this field perform the major task that involves collecting the customer data, scrutinizing it, and planning the next move according to the information gathered. For the entire customer journey funnel, the motive is to provide a customized and well-updated experience to potential customers.
Those who have grabbed a significant spot in this market attach great importance to this customer marketing journey as they understand that the requirements of the prospective buyers would be advantageous to both sides. When brands are able to achieve a journey that focuses on the customer experience, they have accomplished a huge task that will push them forward in the business with magnified revenue and staunch customers accompanying them.
Once the steady customers have entered the customer journey funnel, the valuable resources of a business including time and money would be consumed efficiently. These potential customers stepping in may even help the businesses generate the best ROI in the digital marketing space.
The customer marketing journey has multiple channels and one needs to orchestrate optimization techniques and concentrate on every touchpoint existing on the way. Even if you have a winning strategy to move forward, this enhancement will escalate the process favorably. Consequently, you’ll have a powerful plan that will reach prospective customers.
While various digital marketing experts have tried and tested plenty of methods to strengthen the customer base, there are a few inaccuracies and errors that have been repeated with every new approach.
While increasing the efficiency of the customer journey map, some mistakes need to be rectified before continuing with the process. These challenges emerge in the form of pain points and it becomes vital to shift focus on them before making a firm decision about the approach to be followed in the future.
Once you have discovered effective ways to overcome the obstacles in this customer-centric buying journey, you will be able to keep a track of the data that’s collected, analyzed, and employed in a result-driven manner.
Let’s familiarize you with the prevalent pain points and challenges in the customer marketing journey and plug you into the panaceas for such hindrances. Keep your eye on the ball while you offer an unrivaled experience to your loyal consumers!
Pain Points
1. Amalgamation Of Divergent Data Sources
There can be distinct digital sources for collecting data ranging from your website, apps to paid media for creating brand awareness, and elevating revenue growth through external sources. The customer data that floods in through these gates offers a profitable perception of the touchpoints and sources that have stood out and taken us closer to the targets.
However, these contrasting sources might not be the answer to the questions that are filled up to the brim in the funnel. You need to understand the customer journey and the strategic ways to drive more customers towards your business and make them stay there.
Trying to fuse the different data sources that are usually on completely different paths can be a waste of resources. Instead, you can create a strategy that would help attract customers to your business. An integrated analytics platform (For example- Google Analytics 360, Adobe Analytics) would serve you with a convenient place to build a centralized store where all your customer data would be accumulated and sorted for your use.
This integrated analytics space has everything at easy access and in a systematic manner that you can view in one go. This space acts as a savior to steer clear of any confusion and piling up of unnecessary information that can be otherwise easily managed.
Data that enters the space needs to be analyzed and that task would become less challenging with the presence of such a platform at your disposal. Determining and optimizing the touchpoints would be an uncomplicated job with this. Apart from this, you can even save a lot of time squandered during verification of the sources or scanning the entire data collection from the disparate sources.
When you want to be acquainted with the outcomes of your marketing mix and their performance in the digital world, the above technique comes in handy and is highly significant in driving desired results. It will assist you with a piece of precise information about the touchpoints and the channels that have successfully converted the leads.
This way, you can make alterations to the allotment of budget, resources, and time according to the results displayed on the platform. The channels and touchpoints that have yielded positive and profitable outcomes travel ahead in this journey.
2. Customer Response Data – Connecting Online and Offline Interactions
Throughout the customer buying journey, there are phases that involve both online and offline interaction of the potential consumers with your brand. Consider this: A customer may engage with your website and app but at the same time, you may have developed a CRM system to manage the customer (existing and prospective) records and the transactions that eventuate. So, this whole situation calls for a coherent system that links the buyers’ online and offline behavior as they proceed in the conversion funnel.
Optimization of the messaging becomes crucial as that helps in maintaining a healthy balance between ads/paid marketing and organic marketing. So, how does one achieve this? The answer lies in the whereabouts and the behavior of the customers. As they shift from one level to another in the customer marketing journey, you’ll have a clear vision of what your next strategy should be.
The ads messaging and organic messaging need to be in accordance with the distinct selling points that attract customers. This should be a smooth procedure whether the interactions occur offline or online.
The effective linking would offer a comprehensive insight into the power of the online and offline marketing techniques incorporated by you to convert the leads. The touchpoints can be optimized in compliance with the behavior exhibited by the buyers in the conversion funnel as they head forward on this path that leads them to your business.
Importing offline data might be tricky if you don’t have an analytics platform and a cloud-based solution to support you during the process of bringing in the data and matching it at the user level in a specific way. That’s when Google Cloud, Adobe Cloud, etc step in to rescue you from all the unplanned clusters of information.
In addition to this, Google’s Ads Data Hub can form a link between your buyer data and Google’s proprietary third-party data that includes the data gathered from Gmail and YouTube and you won’t have to sweat about security and privacy invasion as it is all safe from there. Another option is to place data-driven creatives in your ad that possess the ability to display the ads based on the user who is interacting with the product or service offered by you. Of course, the analytics platform will judge the details from the signals it receives from the prospect.
As a result, you can be well aware of the touchpoints and sources that bring in customers and make them stay. That’s how you can manage your paid advertising and utilize your invaluable resources in the most efficient manner.
3. Concealed Customer Data Due To Data Silos
While optimizing the customer buying journey and building it to be entirely customer-centric, one hurdle that many marketing agencies have to deal with is the existence of data silos and eventually, the restricted access to the data of the buyers. So, this becomes a pain point for the teams who are keeping a track of their ad campaigns but having trouble reaching the customer data in one go. The lack of one storage space for all the assembled data might be the reason for the emergence of the obstacle.
The data silos give rise to an unsought challenge for the marketing team as they have to spend their valuable time rummaging through the information gathered by different teams including media groups, CRM team, customer loyalty team, and others. Then, they have to devote another few hours merging the data, analyzing it, and coming up with an action to drive results. That would be exhausting and unproductive.
Moreover, it doesn’t allow the marketing team to identify with the data of the leads that enter the sales funnel and step into the customer marketing journey. As you can imagine, the optimization process and figuring out the major touchpoints and channels that give us a sneak peek into the future of the brand can become a tedious task with the surfacing data silos.
By getting rid of these troubling data silos and having a single warehouse for all the data, the team can have all the information with regular updates to take a desirable action. When important information is isolated from the marketing group, the results become slower and they depreciate as they can’t view and utilize the real-time data when they need it the most.
So, with fresh data up for grabs, the marketing teams can understand the target audience and their interests. The paid ads can be controlled efficiently to avoid overspending and maintain the budget. The ad messaging is then customized as per the touchpoints that yield favorable results and hence, generate the strongest ROI.
The Inference
We can conclude that the customer buying journey holds a high place in the strategy devised by the team to bag a key spot in the marketing world and it has a powerful influence over the marketing mix of any company. When the agenda is to make the journey customer-centric and align the interests of the potential buyers with the ads messaging (both organic and paid), optimizing the touchpoints and channels that drive the most leads becomes essential.
When users find the experience to be convenient and productive, they choose to return and even bring more leads to your business. That’s how your business generates the best ROI and climbs the ladder of success. The marketing campaigns that you run on the digital spaces have a huge role to play in this customer marketing journey.
So, as you work towards creating a marketing strategy that is profitable and connects you with loyal customers, make sure that you offer the best customer marketing journey by picking the tools and tactics that are favorable to both – your business and the customers reaching you. You have to ensure that the ad for your product or service has a perfect placement and has the power to keep the leads engaged till the end of the funnel.
