Mapping Digital Customer Journeys – The Right Way

If you’re not using data to drive your marketing endeavours, you’re most likely missing a fair few tricks.

Having said that, knowing how to do so, and where to start when there’s heaps of data to analyse can be overwhelming. Yet, optimising the digital customer journey is a delicate process, and whether you’re looking to map it or improve it, there are certain steps you need to think about.

Here are just a few examples of various analytic tools and apps you can use to analyse your digital customer journeys.

Google Consumer Insights

Unsurprisingly, Google has apps and tools galore for informing, strengthening and mapping (among other things) every aspect of the digital customer journey. These include:

• Shopping Insights – a tool allowing you to see highly aggregated regional trends (city, region, season) and search volume data for 6000+ products and services,
• Google Trends – perhaps the ‘daddy;’ of them all, see consumer search behaviour and insights, segmented by geolocation, timeframe (up to the past 5 years, should you so desire), suggested topics and overall themes,
• Display Benchmarks – Your display campaigns come alive with up to date industry benchmarks, filtered via vertical, geolocation, ad format and ad size.
• Consumer Barometer – like it says on the tin – see which online sources impact and influence your consumer’s journey, throughout the funnel, in 45+ countries and 10 product categories.
• Test My Site – do you know how well mobile-optimised your site is? With the future becoming ever more mobile-oriented, it’s time to find out. With this tool, you can see your site’s loading time – in real time – and get clear to follow tips on how to make it faster.

Otherwise, Google also has some unparalleled – and regularly updated – reading and reporting on consumer insights.

Sugar CRM

Don’t be fooled by the name; it’s much more than ‘just’ a CRM. Sugar CRM allows you to monitor and analyze social sales, content enablement and marketing automation, amongst some pretty hefty analytical capabilities. This is down to some impressive integrations, as well as some native functionality.

Smaply

A bit different to other tools, this is much more project-based, and allows you to develop, tweak and adapt your client personas. It’s actually a great way of mapping your digital journey, forcing you to think as they would, and experiencing it in the same way. Mapping stakeholders, displaying customer relationships and personas allow you to see and analyse data in real time, giving you a highly detailed digital customer journey to enjoy – as well as a data-backed plan.

Touchpoint

‘Collaboration, collaboration, collaboration’, as the expression goes – Touchpoint allows you and your team to collaborate, optimize and visualize your digital customer journey via templates, imports and more. You can map and test out other features, displaying ROI, impact and cost, among other important factors.

The Benefits of Data Mapping

While there will surely be a lot of data to handle, the above apps and services will go quite a long way in helping you break it down to learn and optimise your customer’s experience. After all, your marketing strategy is only as strong as your data analysis – so it’s time to get analysing!