Your company’s sales and marketing departments aren’t the only ones who should actively exploit your customer journey to drive business activity.

For a variety of reasons, customer journey maps are also an essential communication tool. They assist you in the following ways:

Target Your Efforts

Public relations and communications professionals must know how to reach their company’s target audiences effectively. Budgets are generally limited, and every activity must demonstrate a return on investment. If comms pros keep proposing publications that their target clients aren’t reading, they’re either wasting resources or feeding their client’s ego by vanity pitching top-tier publications.

Discover New Content Concepts 

You should consider customer demands and pain areas during responsible communication activations. You can more readily discover the ideal narratives to pursue if you keep your communications staff updated on the client journey.

Enable Cross-Functional Collaboration

A customer journey map can benefit every customer-facing or customer-targeting department in your firm (thus, arguably everyone). Your marketing and sales teams are likely producing resources to help drive clients along their journey and down the sales funnel, specifically for communicators. Comms teams should be aware of these resources to avoid duplicating efforts and take the lead in utilising them to obtain additional backlinks to the firm’s website and company interviews in the previously identified relevant periodicals.

Make Sure You Don’t Make These Customer Journey Mistakes

Customer journey maps take time to create and maintain, and there are numerous ways for professionals to lead their teams astray with erroneous customer journeys:

Assuming Customer Journeys Are Simple

Customer journeys are complicated, and most do not follow a straight path from awareness to purchase. Nearly 71 per cent of businesses say it takes at least a month between first customer connection and purchase, and 61 per cent of businesses claim they have at least three pre-purchase touchpoints, with 32 per cent reporting six or more. To capture and track the nuances of how your customers interact with your business, you’ll need to use a multi-touch attribution strategy.

Working with Data That Has Been Separated

Multi-touch attribution is a data-intensive strategy, and many businesses lack the knowledge or infrastructure to make it work smoothly. One key issue is that data silos are cited as the most critical challenge by nearly 47% of businesses. Hire data-driven people and train your existing team to access and analyse your company’s data to address this. Examine your technological requirements to see whether you require additional integrations to make your data more digestible.

Relying on the “Simple” Data

If you don’t address the two factors above, you’ll most likely rely on the “simple” data—whatever is easiest to track through first and last touch attribution. As demonstrated by the complex client journeys, the issue is that the initial and last touchpoints are frequently only a modest component of the overall picture. Between those two places, there is a flurry of activity. If your technology doesn’t allow you to track those points, you can still do so the old-fashioned way: by asking. Ask how your prospects heard about you in your lead form to gain further knowledge, as your website is unlikely to be their first destination.

Creating a Positive Customer Experience

Investing in your customer journey requires the appropriate combination of commitment, skill, and technology, but the payoff might be the difference between winning customers over your competitors. While multi-touch attribution tactics may appear intimidating at first, by breaking down your silos and bringing your team up to speed, you’ll have the exact data you need to make informed business decisions.

Your customer journey maps should be seen as live documents and available across departments. Your cross-functional teams should frequently meet to examine your customer journey maps and identify new touchpoints or pain spots.