Guest Post by Daniel Doan, Growth Marketer

User journey mapping is very important to today’s online business practices. They can help you clearly see the different avenues a customer takes to finally complete a purchase. This insight is a key resource since there are so many ways for prospective customers to discover your products and services.   

From social media, to email marketing, to searching for things directly through search engines—the possibilities to find your business continues to grow. User journey maps can show you each of those interactions in an organized fashion and through these maps, you can use them to figure out which avenues create the most conversions, and which ones can be cut or improved upon.

Vital for a Digital Content Creator

If you’re a digital content maker, user journey maps can especially be the key to your success. For instance, if you have a business that specializes in building and maintaining a weather app for handheld devices, you may need to sell more than just the app—you’d also need to be able to offer customer support and FAQ or Troubleshooting pages. By using a User Journey Map, you can identify just how easy or difficult it is for customers to find those support pages.

How to Build Your User Map

Mapping out your customers journey is easy, but first you need to try to build it. The process is quite simple and straightforward. You can start with your main sales funnel, which should demonstrate most of the touchpoints potential customers need to move through in order to complete a purchase. You can use this information to define the buying process and to determine how each phase of the process feeds into the next.

Then, go through the different sales processes yourself, keeping track of the various steps and choice combinations. While going through these phases, try to think like the customer and determine if each subsequent step feels natural and fluid. If you’re tempted to close your window with products or services in your online shopping cart, your customers likely are as well.

Identifying Weak Points

When you come across a touchpoint that doesn’t feel quite right, mark it for future adjustment to make it better for new potential customers. Then you can organize the identified touchpoints into logical groups, such as “social media touchpoints” or “web page” touchpoints. These touchpoint categories can help you identify how customers interact with your brand on different mediums.

Testing… Is This On? User Personas.

Remember! Customers are more than just consumers—they’re people like you and me. Each customer is different, each one buys different things for different reasons. So, when you start going through your touchpoints from the customers perspective, try creating User Personas.

You can catalog a list of reasons why you think a customer would visit your website and why they would want to purchase from you. By using these archetypal user mindsets, you can better identify where the various touchpoints of your digital content may fail to meet customer expectations.

For instance, if you’re an app developer and you have a customer who is very self-sufficient, he or she may want to try and figure out the features of the app on their own. They would look for whatever online tools you have available, like FAQs or Troubleshooting Guides. For a customer like that, you’d want to ensure that the features available on your site can accommodate a user who wants to figure it out without external help.

On the other hand, you may have a customer who does not like to figure things out on their own and may instead want to contact support directly. You’d want to have services readily available for that customer, as well.

Always Improve Your Map

You really want to keep the user journey map as up-to-date as possible. Perhaps you’ve added new services or products, or maybe you started a new marketing strategy that seeks out new customers via a new avenue.

Whatever the reason, keeping the user journey map updated can help you stay in the know with your brand’s customer interactions. A clean and current user journey map will continue to provide you with data that can help you keep user experiences smooth and assure that your products/services are easy to use and easy to find.

All in all, understanding your customer’s expectations increase your productivity. User journey maps enable you to work on improving only the touchpoints of your business that need the most attention.

They help you see which touchpoints require that attention and help you to better understand the preferences of your customers. While building a user journey map may be a little time consuming at first, it will be time well spent as it can be a very powerful asset that help your business continue to grow.

Be sure to join our Workonomy™ group on Facebook for more actionable advice for your business. We cover topics ranging from organic SEO, online storytelling, making investments, partnerships, negotiations and more. Share your voice over at Workonomy™. We’re listening and we’ve got answers.

In the Office Depot Workonomy group, business professionals, coaches and experts come in and share their expertise about a specific business topic. Our ideas come from business owners who’ve shared their experiences and pain points and are seeking solutions to those obstacles. Daniel Doan explained how to utilize and amplify user map journeys to help you not only find more customers, but to also retain the ones you already have.

[Outro by Jason Eisenberg, Community Program Manager]

About the Author
Daniel Doan is an award-winning growth marketing consultant and digital strategist with over half a decade of experience building brands, growing communities, and directing marketing strategy for hundreds of venture-backed startups, creatives, and companies worldwide. He has also been described as one of the top digital marketers in eCommerce and interactive software.

You can discover more growth marketing strategies and tactics to grow your business on his personal blog: http://www.danieldoan.net.