Customer Journey
With historical context and the full picture of how Marketing fits into modern business, the next key part of Marketing to understand is the Customer Journey.
A Customer Journey is the process customers go through to establish a commercial relationship with a firm.0
In simpler terms, a customer journey is the path of interactions that a person has with a brand, from before they even know about its existence, all the way to making a purchase and then the ongoing relationship afterwards.
Credit: gustdebacker.com
Marketing Funnels
To understand how customer journeys work, it is best to understand how they tie into the concept of Marketing Funnels and AIDA.
Credit: sitecentre.com.au
While a Customer Journey Map details a person’s interactions with brands, Marketing Funnels are plans that businesses use to have people engage with their brand specifically.
To better understand this, think of a typical situation of a purchase – a person buying a new cell phone, for example.
Their Customer Journey might involve talking with friends and watching videos to learn about their options, going on forums and looking at reviews to see opinions that resonate with them, testing out different models in-person, and many other touchpoints with various brands and sources of information, until they make their decision and purchase a phone.
If you’re a phone company that wants people to buy your phones, you have to align yourself with and insert yourself into your customers’ journeys. This is done using Marketing Funnels.
By understanding where your target audience engages with information at different steps of their journey, along with what they are looking for at each step, you can ensure that your brand and product are considered and hopefully purchased.
AIDA Model
Both of these concepts are joined together by the AIDA model – a basic model of the cognitive stages one goes through during the buying process for a product or service.
Credit: markinblog.com
By understanding the steps that people go through when solving their needs (AIDA) along with the ways they go about finding information and solving their problems (Customer Journey Map), one can align their brand with their target audience to be as accessible and as desirable as possible (Marketing Funnels).