Building healthy Customer Relationships plays a pivotal role in cultivating loyalty & positive word of mouth. Every organization aims to provide the best product & services to its customers in order to meet business requirements at all points in time. Since customers interact with offerings & products in numerous ways, mapping the Customer’s Journey becomes an essential aspect to consider when trying to gain holistic customer insights. By gaining in-depth insights about your customers and analyzing their touchpoints with your product, you’ll be able to gather actionable insights about the aspects of your product that need to be refined.
Mapping Customer Journeys also helps Marketers reveal patterns in user behavior. It allows Marketers to get in the shoes of their customers and look at the product from their perspective. Once you understand their behavioral patterns, you can predict their decisions and provide individualized attention to deliver an enhanced experience.
In this article, you will get an in-depth understanding of how to Map the Customer Journey through Attribution. It will also explore the complexities of the Mapping procedures in the Customer Journey process to help you develop a Customer Map. This article will also introduce the Fundamentals of Marketing Attribution and its models. Finally, it will help you develop your Customer Map to maintain performance consistently. Excited to learn more about this topic in detail? Before we get into the details, watch this video to get a gist of our detailed course on Mapping Customer Journey through Attribution.
P.S. This course is a part of our Marketing Analytics Masterclass curated by Global Marketing Leaders. Click here to register for this Masterclass and upgrade your Marketing skills to effectively map your Customer’s Journey through Attribution.
Table of Contents
The Complexity in Mapping Customer Journey
Mapping Customer Journey is a complex task because customers interact with the organization and its products in multiple ways. As each customer has a different thought process when it comes to the usability of your product or service, it is important to give each customer individual attention. This complicates the process of Mapping the Customer Journey.
It is imperative that organizations understand what brands influence their customers and also predict customer behavior. This can be done by refining your Marketing Strategies and adopting a People-Based Approach.
Establishing a People-Based Marketing Strategy
Nowadays, organizations are more focused on gaining insights on how their products and services are performing in their respective markets and niche rather than understanding their customers and improving the quality of their products and services. This type of marketing strategy is known as Performance Marketing.
Performance Marketing has a product-oriented approach and does not take in regard the customer’s interaction with the product or service into the picture. Some organizations are changing this approach and opting for Omni-Channel Marketing. In Omni-Channel Marketing, the main focus is on engagement and Customer Journey. The thoughts of customers are considered when setting short and long-term goals and the product/services are constantly reviewed.
Another form of Marketing that is completely Customer and Value focused is People-Based Marketing. In People-Based Marketing, the organization takes decisions in accordance with the needs of each customer and goals are automated to meet all customer requirements.
People-Based Marketing provides the following benefits to your organization:
- Customer-Centric: A People-Based Approach helps you better understand your customer’s behaviors and patterns so that you can gain valuable insights from them. All the decisions taken are based on what your customers feel about your products/services.
- Delivers Relevant, Integrated Marketing Communications: Once the customer’s needs are addressed, all the teams can make customer-oriented decisions and make relevant and strategic decisions.
- Optimizes Marketing Budget & Improves Program Outcomes: Once you have an in-depth understanding of your customers & business requirements, you can optimize your expenses to enhance your product & customer experience. A People-Based Approach also improves any ad campaigns and programs as customers know that these campaigns help them to learn more about the product to enhance their experience.
- Comprehensive Measurement for Insights and Optimization: The People-Based Marketing strategy provides valuable customer insights because it prioritizes the needs of your customers over the performance of your Marketing channel and campaigns. This helps improve upon the number & quality of insights gained and make better data-driven business decisions.
The below figure depicts the benefits of People-Based Marketing.
The below figure shows the goals of Performance Marketing, Omni-Channel Marketing, and People-Based Marketing.
Fundamentals of Marketing Attribution
Attribution is the process of identifying a set of events that can result in the customer’s behaving in a particular manner. It is generally used to identify customer behavior patterns throughout their experience with the product or service. Attribution techniques can additionally help identify customers that can potentially convert into leads. Further, it can also help in analyzing their purchase histories across their journey.
There are 4 types of Mapping Attribution Models:
1) First-Touch Marketing Attribution
It is a type of Single Source Attribution Model, where Marketers focus on 1 particular event to convert customers into leads throughout the Customer Journey process. In a First-Touch Marketing Attribution model, all the credit goes to the first event the customer interacted with. For example, a downloaded resource like a datasheet. This type of Marketing Attribution doesn’t take into account the interactions after the initial event and is less effective as compared to other Marketing Attribution Models.
The figure below shows the First-Touch Marketing Attribution Model.
https://www.salesforce.com/blog/what-is-marketing-attribution-model/
2) Last-Touch Marketing Attribution
It is also a type of Single Source Attribution Modelling, but here the credit is given to the last event that the customer interacted with. As it’s the last event the customer interacts with before converting to a lead, it is relatively easy to identify and give credit to the event. The problem with this Marketing Attribution is that it fails to consider any initial or previous interaction a customer had before the credited-event was identified. Hence, it further misses out on key insights associated with other Marketing channels.
3) Multi-Source Marketing Attribution
In a Multi-Source Marketing Attribution model, each event is valued and given credit for converting a customer into a lead. These events could include Ads, Social Media Posts, Webinars, and E-Newsletters. Although all events are given credit, the Multi-Source Marketing Attribution model fails to account for each event’s respective portion of the credit contribution.
The figure below shows the Multi-Source Marketing Attribution Model.
https://www.salesforce.com/blog/what-is-marketing-attribution-model/
4) Weighted Multi-Source Marketing Attribution
This model helps you to account for all the customer interactions throughout the Sales Cycle and gives credit to all the events that contributed to lead conversion. This model, however, can be challenging to implement.
What is a Customer Map & What are They Used For?
A Customer Map is a visual representation of the Customer’s Journey while using your organization’s products/services. It captures all your customer’s interactions and experiences with your product across every touchpoint.
A Customer Map helps Marketers identify numerous events across their Customer Journey’s, change the Marketing Attribution Model if required, and improve upon their Marketing & business performance by analyzing valuable customer insights. With a systematic, comprehensive, and flexible Customer Map in place, you can personalize the Customer Journey for each customer or prospect seamlessly.
Developing a Customer Map
A Customer Map can be developed by implementing the following steps:
- Define Segments: By grouping customers having similar business needs & requirements into segments, you can define common goals for them. Common metrics such as Lifestyle, Lifestage, and Motivational Similarities of these customers can be gathered from 3rd party applications to define clear and concise segments.
- Segment Profiles: Once the segments are defined, you can expand upon those segments and map out the key components for each customer. This brings out a unique Customer Journey for each customer even though they are part of the same segment.
- Segment Portfolio Analysis: When customer profiles taken from the segment are further analyzed, Marketers are able to identify the needs of each individual customer accurately. Marketers can consider past transaction history, survey responses, and Marketing engagement histories to determine which customers can become promising leads.
The figure below depicts the steps to develop a Customer Map.
Establishing a Customer Journey
Once a Customer Map is developed, the next step involves establishing a Customer Journey, that helps your customers better understand your product/service. Comprehensive Customer Maps also help analyze and gain insights into your customer’s behavior patterns. Since Customer Journeys aren’t singular in nature, multiple avenues can be considered to understand and achieve your business goals.
A sample approach that organizations can leverage to establish a Customer Journey is given below:
- The organization has a Desired Business Objective: A Customer’s Journey usually starts with the goals defined by the organization. These goals can include the number of leads the organization wants to acquire, the amount of revenue they want to generate within a time period, etc.
- Establishing Unique Interaction Steps: This step involves developing a systematic Customer Map to gather customers to use the organization’s product/service.
- Determine Engagement Channels: Once the customers have been identified, the organization must determine effective Marketing Channels to interact with them. This will help identify their business requirements.
- Map Desired Business Outcomes: Once the customer’s needs are identified, the organization has to map the customer’s needs with their business objectives.
- Establish Relevant KPIs (Key Performance Indicators): Relevant KPIs help organizations keep track of their business performance, meet deadlines and establish growth-generating strategies that help improve upon the product quality and meet customer expectations seamlessly.
The figure below shows how organizations can establish their Customer Journey.
Creating the Attribution Model and High-Level Tracking Plan
An Attribution Model helps you analyze which Marketing Channels lead to customer conversion. A High-Level Tracking Plan helps keep track of all transactions your customers make, throughout their journey. By having these models and plans in place, you can establish a systematic and personalized Customer Journey for each of your customers.
Building a Customer Map with Unified Data
Another technique organizations can leverage to build a Customer Map is by using Unified Data. A Customer Map provides a bird’s-eye view of your Customer’s Journey and experiences when they use your products/services.
Unified Data helps showcase and incorporate all touchpoints/events in the strategy to build an effective Customer Map & convert customers into leads seamlessly.
Creating a Tracking Plan
A Tracking Plan is a document or spreadsheet that helps organizations standardize their data. A Tracking Plan can also help keep track of customer needs and behaviors. By creating a Tracking Plan aligned with the organization’s goals and Customer Journey, Marketers will better understand their customers and make better-informed decisions.
Conclusion
Customer Interaction plays a vital role in improving the quality of your product/service and gathering insights. By having a dynamic and systematic Customer Map in place, organizations can experience and analyze their product/service from a customer’s perspective and accordingly enhance the Customer Journey. They can also incorporate different Marketing Attribution Models into their Marketing activities to better understand their customer behaviors and patterns. By Mapping the Customer Journey through Attribution, you can gain a holistic view of your customers’ interests and decisions.
If you’re wondering how you can truly map your Customer Journey through Attribution, then our Masterclass on Marketing Analytics can be your one-stop-shop solution! In this Masterclass, you will also learn the latest Marketing Analytics trends, tips, and strategies directly from the global marketing thought leaders. There will be 7 on-demand video courses covering 26 different topics and 1 live Q&A session at the end of this course. Book your seat today and get ready to map your Customer Journey Through Attribution like never before.
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