What You’ll Learn About Personas and Customer Journeys
In this short video, John-Scott talks about the six advantages you should get from creating personas and mapping out the customer journeys. If you’ve ever gone through the exercise, you know it takes a significant amount of effort. Let’s make sure you actually receive the benefits of your work while improving each customer’s experience.
Creating an Effective Customer Journey
This is where strategic marketing really starts. Without understanding the customer journey, you’ll be making decisions based on guesswork or whim.
You can think of a customer journey map as a detailed sales funnel. It not only guides interactions with your brand, but it also connects each prospect to the next step in the process, with advocacy for your brand as the ultimate objective. The reason you’re creating a customer journey map is to shape the physical and digital experience (which includes advertising and social media) for each prospect as they travel. Here are 10 of the most important stages:
- Recognizing the problem
- Discovering potential solutions
- Identifying the brands providing solutions
- Understanding why they should consider your brand
- Learning how your solution works
- Determining your credibility
- Validating the experiences of others with you and your products and services
- Purchasing your solution
- Evaluating your solution
- Recommending your brand (Referrals Baby!)
At every stage, the goal is to think through the questions and feelings (positive or negative) each persona is likely experiencing. You’ll want to anticipate customer behavior – think through what they need to learn or feel before they’ll consider moving forward with you.
As mentioned in the video, at the end of all of this everyone in your organization should be on the same page when thinking about a particular customer type. They should be able to evaluate anything that impacts the website user experience and determine if it is in alignment with the persona and customer journey. They should be in a great position to write contextually relevant social media posts or create compelling ads designed to speak to certain personas at specific journey stages. They’ll should be able to analyze which personas are being served and which have been neglected. They should also know if they’ve spent too much effort focusing on some journey stages over others. In short, you should be able to balance your content development work. The reward happens as customers interact with your brand in a more meaningful way – which in our minds means increased sales and referrals.
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Let’s Talk
We’ve been helping companies like yours accelerate their growth since 2004. Let us know how we can start assisting you with your immediate plans for dramatic growth.
Persona & Customer Journey Map Video Script
Hi – John-Scott Dixon here at Aidan Taylor Marketing.
Today, I want to talk to you about the 6 things you should get from Personas and Customer Journey Maps.
First, what are Personas?
We define them as a representation of a person who has or works with people who have a problem that your company solves.
When thinking about personas and whether you have one, or a few, or a bunch – the acid test is if you had all of your potential prospects assembled, would you address them as a single body or would you prefer to break them up into smaller, homogeneous groups and speak to them differently?
Count the number of groups and that’s how many personas you should have.
The next step is mapping their respective journeys.
In our practice, we’ve identified 17 stages which are nothing more than questions each persona is likely to ask as they move from awareness of an issue to advocacy of your solution. That’s it.
If done right, what you should get out of the exercise is:
1. everybody in your organization should be on the same page as it relates to the attributes of each persona and the specific questions they’ll probably ask.
2. you’ll have a consistent messaging approach to your various personas at each stage of their respective journeys.
3. you’ll identify content holes – as in are your prospects asking questions where you don’t provide an online answer in the form of a web page or blog post.
This is a key element in producing a strategically-driven editorial calendar.
4. you’ll know which are the best keywords and key phrases to use for each Persona at each stage – so you can do a better job of optimizing your content for Google searches.
5. You’ll create better social posts and ads by thinking about the personas you’re targeting and where they might be in their journeys – each piece you’ll write will have the benefit of a relevant prompt – that is the appropriate messaging objective, key points, and sample copy to ensure a common voice.
And finally, #6.
You’ll be in a position to analyze the mix of content you’re deploying – you’ll know if you’re deficient when it comes to a particular persona or maybe specific stages of their journeys.
And because you know – it means you can make course corrections to have a more balanced approach or at least a more strategic approach.
Okay, those are the 6 things you should get from a Persona/Customer Journey Mapping exercise.
Please let me know if you have any questions, or would like to see some examples.