Understanding the Customer Journey | Part 1

Understanding the customer journey is one of the foundational principles of marketing. Why? Because it helps you to understand how to structure your marketing strategy and messaging so that your activity is meaningful and so your messaging connects and converts your audience.

Let’s unpack this as the customer journey and truly understanding the role your brand plays throughout this journey is going to be key to your success.

What is the Customer Journey?

In simple terms you can think about the customer journey as the stages that your audience moves through before they become a customer. This is often why it can also be referred to as the consumer journey, buyer journey or customer decision making funnel. Don’t let the names confuse you, as for the most part, they’re all referring to the same thing.

As with all marketing, the best way to understand your audience and this journey is to put yourself in your customer’s shoes.

Think about a time where you needed to buy an item of clothing, or had a gift to buy for someone close or were even in the market for a new car or insurance product.

Subconsciously or consciously, you will have gone through a decision-making process before you were ready to make this purchase.

Marketers and advertisers know this, and use this information to influence your behaviour.

The Key Phases in the Customer Journey

There are a number of funnels, or models, or journeys out there. Just Google “Customer Journey” or “Customer Journey Map” or “Marketing Funnel” and you will start to see all the variations.

For ease, we’ve focused on the top end of the Customer Journey, so the phases that your audience goes through before they make a purchase, or before you as a brand or business acquire them as a customer.

👉 Awareness

👉 Consideration

👉 Purchase

These three phases can also be referred to as Top of the Funnel, Middle of the Funnel, Bottom of the Funnel, and you’ll come across this language more when you start to work with agency partners or digital specialists in your Facebook Advertising campaigns, but more on this another time.

The Awareness Phase

In the awareness phase, your audience are only just getting to know you. So as the name suggests, your job here is to simply create awareness that you exist as a brand.

Your audience may not even be ‘in market’ for the product or service you’re offering, so your goal here is to simply create awareness of your brand with your audience, so when they’re in market, they think of you.

Messaging at this phase needs to be emotive and at what we call at ‘brand level’, so focusing on your why, your vision and what you as a brand care about is going to help you attract the right audience and create a meaningful connection.

This is even more important if you market to Millennials and Generation Z as more and more research is showing that these groups are choosing to align themselves with brands that share similar values.

So, if you’re a brand that is not sharing your values, it’s going to be hard for your audience to connect with you.

And worse, if you’re a brand that is unclear on what it values or is lacking depth when it comes to this area, your target audience may be turned off and choose to go elsewhere.

The Consideration Phase

OK, so now that your audience knows who you are, this is where the fun part begins. And your job as a marketer really steps up a notch.

This phase, often referred to as engagement or middle of the funnel, is when your audience is ‘in-market’. This means that they have worked out they need to purchase a particular product or service or thereabouts and are actively shopping around.

This phase can have sub-phases within it, but for now, we’re just going to talk about it as one.

When your audience is in the consideration phase, your job as a marketer is to make sure your brand is on your customer’s consideration list. Which is a mental, or even written list that your audience has made listing out the brands or products or services they are choosing between.

And this is why Awareness is key and the first phase, because, if your audience doesn’t have awareness of your brand, it’s going to be hard for them to put you on their consideration list.

In this phase, your audience is likely shopping around. They may be Googling the category you operate within to learn about the best products or services e.g. “best baby cot”, “safest cars”, “on-trend dresses” or talking to friends and family to get their advice.

Or they may know the brands and exact products they are comparing and are visiting websites, social media pages to go through the pros and cons of each option.

Your messaging in this part is going to shift from that ‘brand level’ we spoke about earlier, to get a little more product-specific, as remember, we know in this phase, your audience is ready, or ‘in-market’ to buy.

Having a thorough understanding of your target audience, the questions they might have and importantly some of the barriers they are working through, is going to help you as a marketer ensure you have the right messaging available in this phase.

And even more importantly, going to help you to move your audience through to the next phase - the purchase.

The Purchase Phase

This is when your audience is ‘hot’ and ready to make a purchase. It’s arguable the most critical phase in the customer journey as this is make or break time for your brand.

It’s also where a lot of marketers spend the most amount of marketing dollars, as come this point in the game, they know their audience has a high propensity to buy.

Messaging in this phase needs to be sharp and hard-hitting. This is where you can really dial up the retail messaging and even use offers, end dates and other retail tactics to influence your audience to make the purchase.

It’s also where you’re going to want to make sure you answer any last question or overcome any last reservation your audience may have before they make their purchase such as shipping details, refund and cancellation policies.

The Customer Journey Part 2

We hope this has shed a little more light on the customer journey and inspired some thinking when it comes to how to approach your marketing and messaging throughout the customer journey.

Stay tuned, as we will release Part 2 on the Customer Journey which will break down the channels to use throughout each phase of the customer journey and share practical examples of marketing activity across each phase.