Every great product begins with an idea to solve a problem. Just look at innovate solutions such as Uber’s car service, Apple’s iphone, or the Watson A.I. platform from IBM. Great products sell themselves when customers fully understand their value and the impact on their lives.

But it’s not enough to just create a great product.

You need to better understand the behaviors of your customer: why they buy and stay loyal to your business. A customer’s journey describes this realization and goes a few steps further, establishing your average customer’s thoughts and feelings before, during and after a purchase. The easiest way to visualize this is in a map—what’s known as a customer journey map—which depicts the possible emotions a customer will have while interacting with your business.

To beginners, customer journeys can look absolutely daunting, like a complex web. That’s because you will likely have more than one map, depending on how they found you and what their reaction to your product is. Mapping their journey helps mitigate bad customer experiences and cut a clear path toward the right outcome.  

What Problems Can You Solve By Understanding Customer Journey?

A customer journey should be like reading. If this article were filled with typos, yuo wuld tinhk its weidr. You would stop and start and get annoyed. The same thing happens with customers—if they don’t enjoy a smooth onboarding process or user experience, they’ll get annoyed and simply leave.

One of the biggest benefits to understanding customer journeys is that they force you to lay out and consider your sales process in an analytical way. They reveal opportunities to interact with your customer and ways in which you can address different emotions, whether they’re overwhelmed by initial research or skeptical of a sales pitch.   

These macro insights into your sales process can also reveal opportunities for integration between devices, departments and platforms. A good example of this is on-hold customer service: if you’ve ever been on hold and repeatedly heard a message informing you that you can discover answers to almost any question on their online FAQ, that’s a byproduct of someone analyzing a backlogged customer-service line and realizing there was a way to cross-promote digital awareness with a practical solution. That’s part of the customer journey.

How to Prepare for Your Customer Journey Map

The first step is research. You likely already have basic data on your customers from website traffic and social-media analytics—gender, location, time spent on your site and engagement are all easy enough to track.

But the harder part is knowing how to interpret that data. A long time spent on your site might not be a good thing—it might mean the user is having a hard time finding whatever it is they’re looking for.

Using a social tracker that measures sentiment (positive, negative or neutral) will be helpful if your brand has a big enough social following. If not, a survey is a great way to gain insight into your audience and pinpoint areas you may not have realized needed improvement. It’s easy enough to entice people to take a survey if you offer them something in return, like a coupon or free product. (Plus, you’ll find an extra chance to grow your email newsletter.)

What to Keep in Mind When Mapping Customer Journeys

Always be sure to keep the customer first. This is about them, not you—you’re telling their story. Sometimes, what they think or feel might sound unfair to you, but if that’s what the data shows, that’s what you’ve got to fix.

Map out every possible interaction your business might have with a customer, from various ads (social, TV, radio, print, etc.) to their eventual purchase process, unpackaging, customer service and aftermath. Leave no moment overlooked.

One of the biggest things beginners should watch for is how your perception lines up with reality. If you’re advertising a TV that you claim can be installed by anyone in less than 5 minutes, you should verify that that’s the case—and, if you’re finding people complaining often enough that it’s taking a half-hour, that’s a key takeaway for both your marketing department and your product-development team.

Customer Journeys Never Really End

There are a myriad problems that you can realize only once you put yourself in your customer’s shoes.

Even once you’re done your map, you may not actually be finished. As your product stays with them and technology changes, you’ll want to revisit how well you and your business are keeping up with the times, whether strategies are becoming obsolete or whether customer satisfaction is changing.

Keeping on top of customer journeys is long-game work, but it’s necessary to maximize your business and stay ahead of the curve.

As a small business owner, you likely don’t have enough time in your day to be selling your services door-to-door or cold-calling prospects – and you probably won’t close leads with those tactics anyway! We’ve compiled a list of five marketing strategies you can implement into your strategy to step up your game and start converting more prospects right away.

Enjoy!

For more tips on building your small business marketing strategy, check out these blog posts:

• 64 Small Business Tools To Prevent Marketing Madness
• How To Avoid The Biggest Small Business Marketing Pitfalls
• Top 20 Small Business Marketing Blogs to Follow to Boost Your Marketing Smarts
• The Fixings for a Perfect Small Business Marketing Stack
• Small Business Marketing On A Budget: 5 Low Cost-High Impact Strategies
• How to Effectively Leverage Social Media With Limited Time
• The 3 Non-Negotiables For Building Your Small Business Social Media Strategy

For small business owners, summertime can mean different things.

For some, like restaurant owners, summer means an upswing in business. For others, it’s the slowest time of year. No matter which boat you’re in, you should be dusting off your marketing strategy and tweaking it during the summer season.

We use the word “tweak” for a reason. This isn’t a complete overhaul of your marketing strategy. In fact, your primary goals will stay the same. Instead, you’ll refresh key components of your marketing strategy and maybe add a few new elements.

1. Step Up Your Visuals

When the temperature’s high and attention spans are short, visual content is the way to go. An interesting, well-edited photo is the kind of thing that stops someone from mindlessly scrolling through their feed and instead interests them in your product.

Now, this is easier for some businesses than others. An ice cream shop can snap pictures of their smiling customers enjoying colorful cones. But what if you offer a service like accounting? In this case, selling the story is the trick. Instead of taking photos of spreadsheets and paperwork, shots of happy customers or team building activities will help. Link your image to a quality landing page that details your prices and boom – you’re selling through photos.

2. Amp Up Your Social Media Presence

Since summertime is all about social activities – vacations, restaurants, beaches, barbecues – your customers are spending a lot of time snapping and sharing those experiences. This also means they’re on the lookout for what other people are up to. Sharing photos on Instagram or videos through Snapchat increases your chances of engagement and brand awareness even during your slowest season.

3. Make the most of Mobile

Turn your attention to mobile marketing and if you haven’t put much thought into making your ads and blog posts mobile friendly, it’s time to do so now.

Today, more searches are conducted via mobile and people are engaging with their social networks from a smartphone. This means that optimizing your content for mobile phones is vital for your company’s exposure.

Mobile content is especially important in the summertime because there’s less likelihood that your prospects and customers will be sitting at a computer. Instead, they’ll more likely be out of the office, on the move and using their mobile phones.

4. Put Out Your Best Content

Visual content is perfect during summer because generally speaking people aren’t in the mood to read long, dense blog posts. But let’s say your customers are big readers. Summer is the time of year where they’ll catch up on the backlog of content they wanted to read during the rest of the year, but couldn’t.

If you’re going to release an e-book, make sure it’s an entertaining read and that your writers put extra effort into making it the sort of thing your ideal customer would want to download to their tablet and read on the way to the beach.

5. Make The Most of Your Out of Office Emails

If you’re running on a skeleton staff during the summer, don’t just throw in the towel on your marketing. Find ways to keep the conversation going with customers – even if it seems one-sided.

Create customized out-of-office emails that prompt recipients to sign up for your newsletter, check out a specific piece of content on your blog, or contact someone else if needed.

6. Plan For The Fall

Most of these recommendations are geared toward your marketing strategy. But summertime may call for a few tweaks to your overall small business strategy as well.

A major summer initiative should be figuring out how to retain customers who may be making changes over the mid-year months.

The last thing you want is to be blindsided by a client who ends their contract in order to cut costs. If business is slow in the summer, use your downtime to revisit your unique value proposition and think of ways to position your business as a vital service just in case you need to be ready to convince customers to stay.

The warmer months put everyone in a relaxed, laid back mood. But when it comes to your business’s marketing strategy, those are the last two things you should be. So, if you’re attracting fewer customers and have extra time, use it to update your marketing strategy with some of these tactics to put yourself in a strong position for the fall.