How to Create a Winning Customer Journey

We are always thinking about your customer journey. Creating the marketing plays to gain brand awareness yards with your customers and the ones you are trying to reach. Using a football field as a tangible visual, we tie each customer journey to the downs we complete as we move towards the end zone. The “touchdown” becomes increased awareness and engagement of your brand, your products and your people.

Outlining the journey visually is critical. It helps keep your team focused on goals. It can be created for personas, campaigns and channels to track impact and reach of each marketing tactic. I personally like to map the journey to find inspiration in testing new tactics or reaching a new segment.

Think of your journey map as an exercise to document the various ways your customers find you—high engagement, targeted, digital, segment or persona-based. Follow along as we outline the field zones and what to consider in building your customer journey.

Coming Out: Traffic

Generating traffic is the first step in the customer journey. Attracting your target customers—or fans—to your brand. These tactics can start simple and build over time to foster awareness. The first zone should focus on market targets, geographies and demographics to reach customers who are ready to start the journey with you.

Recommended Plays: Display Ads, Value Add Content, Press, Social

Open Field: Interest

Generating interest as a marketer is the best place on the field to learn from your potential customers. As your customers make the journey down the field, you execute tactics to reach them at the right time and place. The marketplace is noisy but placing the right content at the right time is fun. There are multiple touchpoints happening through the open field zone. Make sure your analytics are in place to measure and report what plays are working, and which ones might be out of practice. 

Recommended Plays: Retargeting Ads, Personalized Content, A/B Testing

Take a Shot: Action

At this point on the field, your customer is aware, interested and taking action. You will have an idea of the customer type and now it’s time to switch from marketing to a sales conversion focus. Your messaging and content should be specific to the persona highlighting the benefits and solutions you offer.

Recommended Plays: Personalized Content, Meetings & Zoom (B2B), Promotions (B2C)

Red Zone: Active Selling

You’ve made it to the red zone, arguably the most exciting zone of the game! Now is the chance to shine and focus on converting to a touchdown. All tactics at this point should be focused on personalization and user experience. Whether you’re B2B or B2C, your customer journey should map the lead experience, your MVP, to point of sale.

Recommended Plays: Great Product, Customer Service, Easy User Experience

If your customer journeys have grown weary in a more traditional format, test out our football field for mapping your next customer journey! It’s a strategic, yet simple document for current state–tying activities together for visibility and inspiration for future goal state. Drop our team a line if you want to chat further on mapping your customer journey, but we’re also open to have a few beers and chat football too.