A Simple Customer Journey Map for Your Small Business

If you have a sales funnel, but don’t have a simple customer journey map, you may be missing out on 30% of additional revenue in your business. In today’s episode, we discuss 3 things business owners can do to plan their customer journeys for their business without hiring expensive consultants so they can work smart and sell more.

At first, planning this journey may sound daunting or complicated but it doesn’t have to be.

Depending on your budget, you can go as deep as you want to by conducting extensive customer research and hiring experts in each stage of the customer journey, to create an exact map of all the steps a customer takes in your business before they make a purchase or call your sales people.

But, in the spirit of keeping things simple for busy marketers, in today’s episode, we can show you how easy it is to create your own customer journey map by focusing on 3 sections of your customer journey. A simple customer journey can help you gain a competitive edge over your competitors – it’s true, Jovana shares her own personal experience.

What is a customer journey and why is it important to have one?

There are many definitions out there, you just have to enter the question into Google and there will be thousands of entries with many different variations that show up.

Mailchimp is one of the oldest marketing automation platforms and has been serving small business customers around the world since the dawn ages of the internet, and this is what they have to say about it:

“The customer journey consists of actions your customers take before and after they make a purchase.” {Source}

It is that simple!

What this means is that by spending a day or two, identifying all the actions your leads and customers take before, during and after they make a purchase, you would’ve ensured a smooth and seamless customer experience. If you’re already paying for ads, SEO services, networking etc, then you’d know how important it is to know what steps your customers take before they become your customer. If you don’t have it figured out, you’d be wasting your time and money attracting the wrong people to your business.

Because not all customers are created equally, we would recommend that you have a map of your customer journey before building a sales funnel. A simple customer journey map will help you plan all the actions your customers take before they make a purchase or send an enquiry.

Once you plan these actions, they can trigger an automated sales funnel to kick in which will help you save time in nurturing the leads into a desired transaction so they call you when they are ready to do so.

A simple customer journey map allows you to visualise your own marketing and sales process in your business. Once you have this, you can build a sales funnel around it using any marketing automation software you like.

The ultimate goal of a customer journey map is to create a memorable experience for your customers, so they can buy from you not just once, but many times over.

Here’s how you can start creating a simple customer journey map for your business

As we mentioned in our episode, the easiest way is to put yourself in your customer’s shoes.

Have you ever had a bad customer experience?

Have you ever had an amazing customer experience that you had to tell your friends about?

We’ve all had them! Tune in to find out what our are, as we share our own experiences in this episode.

If you can recall all the steps you took as a customer to make a purchase, and what were the aspects of the actions you’ve experienced that put you in the “bad” or “good” mood – this would be the most visually important way to start planning.

The next step is to pick 1 customer that you would absolutely love working with.

Think how they came in contact with your brand. What did they say?

What language did they use to describe their pain/frustration before purchasing your products or services?

You can also refer to our previous article to learn more about the AIDA model, which is the most commonly referenced model to describe customer journeys – Are you forgetting this crucial stage in your marketing?

What is the benefit of having a customer journey map for your business?

Once you have your sales and marketing process mapped out, it will be so much easier for you to think about how to build your own sales funnels and begin thinking about automating all the steps in your marketing to save you time and money.

By understanding all the steps your customers take before they buy from you, you will be able to measure them and improve them.

A simple customer journey map helps you better your sales process and can ensure you convert more leads into customers, and improve your overall customer experience.

You will be more efficient in attracting the right customers to your business.

And by introducing technologies, such as a marketing automation system, you can track the success of each action your customers take and then make decisions about what to do or not to do about those actions.

A good example of how technology can help you implement your customer journey map is before they even make a purchase, they might read your website, read your social media posts, sleep on it and then hopefully they will return to call you or place an order. With automation, you can easily identify these steps and send them a reminder email – or if you are selling services, you can then follow them up by phone.

In this episode, we share examples of our own experiences to help you create a simple and smart customer journey map for your small business and we hope it will inspire you into action to start doing it sooner rather than later.

Let us know how you go – you can share your examples in the comments below.

As mentioned in the episode, you are welcome to book in for a FREE chat with Jovana and we can talk about your customer journey map – We are confident you’ll walk away with plenty of ideas to implement!