Customer Journey Marketing: The Journey VS The Marketing Funnel

Customer journey marketing is a marketing strategy that focuses on guiding and influencing customers as they progress through different stages of their customer journey with a brand. This involves creating relevant and personalized experiences for customers at each touchpoint, from awareness to post-purchase, in order to build a strong, emotional connection and drive customer loyalty. The goal of customer journey marketing is to turn casual customers into loyal, lifelong brand advocates.

Fact Time: What Determines Loyalty Within the Customer Journey

Here are 10 facts to bring you into the loop on how to improve customer loyalty from the beginning of your customer journey until the end:

• It comes down to experience: Improving customer experience leads to increased customer loyalty.

• Suckers for personalization: Personalized experiences drive customer loyalty and can increase customer lifetime value.

• Definition is key: A well-defined customer journey can result in a 49% increase in revenue.

• Map out your pain points: Mapping out customer journeys helps businesses identify pain points and improve processes.

• Align journey with customer needs: Aligning business goals with customer needs through customer journey mapping leads to increased customer satisfaction and loyalty.

• CX to increase retention: Improving customer experiences can result in a 15% increase in customer retention.

• Loyal to customer service: A customer-centric approach leads to increased customer satisfaction and loyalty.

• Customer centricity is key: Brands with a strong customer focus have a 60% higher advocacy rate.

• Increase CLV with emotion: Fostering an emotional connection with customers through a well-executed customer journey strategy increases customer lifetime value.

• Experience drives engagement & loyalty: Positive customer experiences drive customer engagement and increase brand loyalty and advocacy.

Aligning Your Marketing Funnel & Customer Journey

Aligning your marketing funnel with your customer journey is crucial for creating a seamless and personalized experience for your customers. By mapping out your customer journey and understanding their needs and pain points, you can tailor your marketing efforts to their specific journey and provide relevant, targeted messaging at each stage of the funnel. The customer journey serves as a type of process flow diagram, outlining the different touchpoints and interactions customers experience with your company or brand.

This approach helps to build trust and establish a strong emotional connection with your customers, leading to increased customer loyalty and higher conversion rates. A well-aligned marketing funnel and customer journey also enable you to identify and resolve any pain points, improving the overall customer experience. Ultimately, aligning your marketing funnel with your customer journey leads to better results and a more successful marketing strategy.

Collaborating with Sales Teams

Collaboration between marketing and sales teams is crucial for ensuring that their marketing materials and activities match the customer journey and buyer funnel. This means that they work together to make sure that everything they do for customers is consistent and aligned.

Working together helps both teams use the customer journey and buyer funnel as a guide to creating messages and content that are relevant and targeted to customers at each stage of the journey. This makes it easier for customers to understand what the business has to offer and helps to build trust and a strong emotional connection.

While marketing teams may be aware of the different stages of the customer journey, sales teams have richer and more direct customer insights than anyone. This is a great opportunity for marketing teams to identify existing pain points and take preventative action.

However, marketing based on your customer journey map goes far beyond just easing pain points. Creating strong buyer personas and understanding the various stages of the marketing funnel means that you can guide customers, rather than trying to convince them along their own path. More on this later.

Sometimes, sales teams run into problems during the customer journey. For example, customers may have questions or concerns that are stopping them from making a purchase. When marketing and sales teams collaborate, they can work together to create content that answers those questions and helps customers make a decision.

In conclusion, collaboration between marketing and sales teams is essential for creating a smooth, consistent, and personalized customer experience. When they work together, they can create marketing materials and activities that match the customer journey and buyer funnel, leading to better results and a more successful marketing strategy.

The Impact of Marketing on the Customer Journey

The role of marketing within the customer journey is to guide and craft a great customer experience through the use of data, technology, and personalized content.

By mapping out the customer journey and understanding their different buyer personas, pain points, and behavior, marketing teams can create targeted and relevant marketing campaigns that speak directly to the customer at each stage of the journey. This helps to build trust, establish an emotional connection, and increase the chances of conversion.

Beyond this, marketing teams should always have ideal buyer personas and ideal buyer journeys. Without this, marketing teams end up playing a game of cat and mouse, where customers direct their own journey and customer experience, while marketing teams pick up the slack once they identify sticking points.

A perfect customer journey can't be guaranteed. In fact, it's a rarity. Regardless of that, they're necessary benchmarks for marketing teams. Are customers following the ideal journey? Why or why not? Answering these questions will become easier with more customer data and insights, which come from interactions with your brand.

How Marketing Affects the Customer Experience

Marketing teams also play a key role in shaping the overall customer experience by using technology and data to create individualized experiences for each customer. This includes the use of customer relationship management (CRM) systems, marketing automation, and customer persona research to ensure that each customer receives a unique and relevant experience. In addition, marketing must work closely with other departments, such as customer service and product development, to ensure that the customer experience is consistent and seamless across all touchpoints.

In today's highly competitive market, the customer experience has become a key differentiator for businesses. Marketing has the opportunity to create a lasting impression by using the customer journey as a framework to deliver an exceptional experience that meets and exceeds customer expectations. By understanding the customer's journey, marketing can anticipate their needs, provide relevant information and support, and create a positive and memorable experience that drives customer loyalty and advocacy.

Using sales funnels and analyzing both existing and prospective customers is typically done with the goal of standardizing elements of your customer journey. However, this does not mean that the customer should feel as though their interactions with your brand are standard. This doesn't necessarily mean using personalization tokens everywhere, but rather keeping things interesting with original marketing materials to create and push brand awareness. From there, your customer experience can become more and more personalized as the conversion funnel narrows and you gather more information on your customer.

Finally, companies should take advantage of the automation tools available to them. Some see automation as the death of personalization, while it's quite the opposite. Start simple with 3-4 different automated campaigns that trigger based off based different criteria, then expand as you garner reactions and feedback from potential customers.