From the course: Growth Marketing Foundations

What is the customer journey?

From the course: Growth Marketing Foundations

Start my 1-month free trial

What is the customer journey?

“

- We talk about funnels all the time in marketing, purchase funnels, sales funnels inbound funnels, call what you want but they're all ultimately describing the same concept. A funnel is really just a way to represent a customer's journey as they move towards the purchase of your product or service. At the top or the widest point of the funnel is where a buyer starts their journey and the bottom or the narrowest part is where they complete it. Our goal as marketers is to funnel prospects into buyers moving them from the top to the bottom of the funnel. As a buyer makes their way through the funnel, we describe each fundamental stage of their journey from awareness, interest, desire, action and then advocacy. That's great at a high level but the path to purchase is rarely linear. So we have to go a step further and start to understand what the journey looks like through these stages. Take a minute and consider something you bought recently. Did you walk into a store and pick out an item on the shelf? Did you order something from a website? How many steps were involved in that process? Did you look up a review, search for a coupon, look at neighboring products on the shelf? Did you explore the company website? Sign up for their newsletter, maybe download a case study. Were you introduced to the product through a friend's referral or maybe an online advertisement. Each interaction from identifying that you needed to buy something to completing that purchase at the local store had you moved through each stage of the funnel and interact with various pieces of messaging. And the buyer may actually move up and down the funnel and this movement and all of the touch points create the customer journey. When you know the customer journey, you'll know where you have leverage for growth efforts, with growth marketing, we're working to identify what touch points are the most influential in moving that customer closer to purchasing or keeping that customer loyal to the brand so they become an advocate in turn pushing more people into the funnel. The more we understand this journey and how it connects to pushing a consumer down the path to purchase, well the more influence we have.

Contents