Of all the types of work I do, consumer journey research and mapping is by far my favorite. It represents so much opportunity! A springboard for countless ideas, creative and content executions, and new connection points! And while most brands that I’ve worked with in my career understand the importance of this foundational work- they can easily be scared off by the potential costs of executing a full-scale journey mapping expedition. And this is understandable. I’ve worked with brands that have invested tens, even hundreds of thousands of dollars and sometimes over a year to get a solid understanding of their customers’ journey, and the gaps that exist for them therein. However, I believe it is easy to do this work even without a massive budget and a sprawling timeline, as there are a ton of great free and inexpensive resources that can help you tap into the insights you need.
Reddit (and Quora, etc.) Online forums can be a gold mine of qualitative insights into pain points, untapped uses, trending brand experiences, confusion, etc. The public nature of these forums means it is free (if potentially time-consuming) to dig in and learn what your customers and prospects are freely sharing with the world.
Your owned social media channels. Talk to your social media team. They will have an intimate understanding of how your social audience is responding to what you put out into the world. Trending comments, shares and likes, especially popular (and especially UNPOPULAR) content. This can all uncover important aspects of what resonates and the journey your consumer experiences.
Public Social Mentions, Tags, and UGC. This one can be a little more time-consuming to scrub, but can be a true goldmine of information, especially for consumer brands. My recent journey work in the theme park industry was greatly informed by UGC content on YouTube and publicly available social mentions of the brand. Social listening tools can help with this SOME- but those have become more limited in their utility with the recent turmoil within X.
Your internal customer service and CRM teams. Those on the front lines of customer relationships have a front-row seat to the pain points, problems, and suggestions being made by your customers and prospects. Don’t discount how powerful a source of intel this can be in mapping out the journey and ideal experience, and make time for some stakeholder interviews with these important figures.
Your web team and site/app analytics. Traffic patterns, exit points, and time spent on specific pages or sections of your app can offer important clues about what’s important to your audience once they are far enough along their journey to be digitally engaged with your brand.
Your existing customers. The most important source of information about your customers is actually- your customers! Design ways to get information about their journey directly from the source. This could look like a quick online survey, intercepts where they are gathered (especially if you have a physical presence), or even more in-depth 1:1 interviews by phone, online, or in person. Offering some sort of incentive is always helpful to improve recruitment, but that could be as simple as discount codes, product, or modest gift cards for their time.
Your Defectors. Usually harder to recruit than existing, satisfied customers, BUT- if you can source and speak with defectors, they will undoubtedly provide excellent insight into where they exited their journey with your brand, why, and, most importantly- what might bring them back.
Existing Research. Don’t forget to check for who else may have been doing research recently that you can use! Segmentation studies, focus groups, Usage studies- anything that gives insight into what a customer’s experience might be, even if not fielded with the specific purpose of shedding light on the journey, can be an important input into the journey map. Publicly available research and studies from within your category can also shed useful insight.
Inexpensive Qual. After exhausting all of the inputs listed above, you may already have a pretty good skeleton of a journey, and a better understanding of where your real gaps in knowledge exist. This is a great time to line up some informal interviews with real people who represent the audience in question, focusing especially on these gaps in understanding. This doesn’t need to be a heavily expensive endeavor- there are online tools for inexpensive recruiting (my favorite is User Interviews), and instead of a professional moderator, just find someone on your team who is invested in the outcome and that you believe can lead a good discussion with a solid outline. Maybe that’s you- how did your stakeholder interviews go?
Understanding the journey that your customers, prospects, and even your defectors take should be the first step in developing an audience-centric comms strategy. And if there is limited budget, time, or specialized resources to get you there- there are enough free and easy-to-mine resources available that there’s no reason you can’t map it out and start making impactful change. BTW- I’m always eager to hear new sources of intel I may have missed- what else are you using to inform your journeys?
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