‘Stop the disconnect between customers’ journeys and your marketing’
Cooperate is a platform that allows businesses to visualise their path to purchase data, so they can see exactly where their campaigns are succeeding or failing. Here, Justin Cannon, its CEO and co-founder, talks through why integrating the two elements is so important.
The need for marketers to understand their customers’ journeys has become a hot topic in the industry. Why? Because delivering marketing that’s built to answer a customer need – at the right time and place – is the single most potent way to achieve business goals.
But the path to purchase has become more complex in the last five years. There’s more types of channels – social, email, online publishers, video channels etc – all of which require a unique approach. And each one adds another branch, or offshoot, to your customer journey. Moreover, there’s also been a lengthening of the consideration stage – between awareness and purchase – because the internet has empowered consumers to educate themselves.
This atomisation of content and fragmentation of media channels has made our challenge exponentially harder. It’s now a fact of every marketer’s life that we need to think up, create and deliver more content, in more mediums, across more channels than ever before.
This is where everything gets messy, because before we know it, we’re down the rabbit hole called ‘tactical execution’ and getting stuck in the weeds. Without integration between your customers’ journey and your marketing, it becomes almost impossible to create a strategy that actually works.
In conversations we’re having with clients, we’re seeing a massive disconnect between the concept of the ‘customer journey’ and the day-to-day reality of the marketing going on. Too often a customer journey is seen as a one-sided document that simply outlines the path that customer wants to take to purchase. This is passive marketing at best because a laser-like focus on becoming customer-centric is required to influence the journey to purchase.
But we should try to influence the journey. As marketers, we need to deliver content that aligns with our customers’ needs. An effective customer journey uses a deep understanding of consumers to create a path to purchase that delivers on clear business objections and drives customer actions. Once a customer journey is attached to this type of framework, it becomes integrated into your business goals and can be aligned with your marketing strategy.
For example, one of our healthcare clients did a workshop with us and the marketing team built what they thought was an excellent customer journey for their particular brand and product. One stage was the consideration stage just before a visit to a pharmacy. The team determined that for their brand to be purchased, the person walking into the store had to already have the brand in mind to search for it. Why? Because the way pharmacies are designed today means they don’t necessarily display products by customer problem or condition, so the marketing job had to be done before the person entered the store.
Then at the workshop, we talked through what content could be consumed after awareness but before the store visit. The kind of content that would stick in mind when they were physically shopping. They were shocked at how little they actually had – it was an opportunity they’d been missing out on for two years.