Customer Journey Mapping or Marketing Automation?
Most companies would say, what? That’s a bunch of buzzwords and I really have no idea what you mean. So, let’s get you up to speed on keywords like ‘marketing automation’ and ‘customer journey mapping’ that you should know when it comes to how companies are getting and keeping more customers.
Customer Experience Journey Mapping
The first concept is the term Customer Experience (CE). Customer experience is the impression your customers have of your brand as a whole throughout all aspects of the buyer’s journey. It results in their view of your brand and impacts factors related to your bottom line including revenue. Unless you’ve taken courses around CE, it is easy to get confused.
Next, is understanding the concept of the customer or buyer’s journey. These are all the typical steps your prospects go through before they buy your product or service. It is the goal of the selling company to map the customer journey steps and then make this whole process as simple and streamlined as possible.
Marketing Automation
One of the ways you can streamline your marketing and sell to your prospects is by using Marketing Automation (MA) technology. Marketing automation is a technology that manages marketing outreach campaigns across different channels – using technology to share relevant content with specific audiences. This automation can be accomplished with a mix of technologies or (even better) using one marketing platform that manages all marketing outreach. It helps the marketing team (whether that is just the owner or a small team) to scale personalized communications. The ultimate output of digital marketing automation is the ‘conversion’ which may include the sale, the demo or meeting booked, a service subscription, etc…
MA traditionally covers:
- Email marketing including sequences (a series of emails that take prospects through a specific path)
- Social Media Marketing
- Landing pages
- Conversion Rate Optimization
- Analytics and Reports
With advanced AI capabilities in your marketing automation platform you can include in the mix:
- Events/ Webinars
- Surveys
- Chatbot/Live Chat
All-in-One Marketing Platform
With a single marketing platform, you have one place for managing the various marketing campaigns running at any one time. Think how great it would be to see all planned emails – both nurture and one-off, event strategies, and social media campaigns centralized so the marketing team can easily see and manage campaign delivery results.
The intersection of the customer journey and sales is where marketing automation technology shines. Check out the latest release of Zoho Marketing Plus to see for yourself.
Finally, beyond just having a marketing campaign that drives a customer to buy or use great technology, is the concept of creating an integrated customer experience. An Integrated Customer Experience (CX) is much more than a marketing strategy or technology alone. This is the end-to-end ‘being in the customer’s shoe experience.’
The process for creating a complete customer experience starts with Persona mapping (know your customer), leads into research (your company data, interviewing your best customers, public data, paid unique research), then making decisions on what key interactions to focus on in sales and marketing, handoff to delivery, post-sales support, account management including identification of up- and cross-sales opportunities, customer advocacy (recommendations, referrals, reviews), and optimization of your product/service based on customer feedback/ customer ‘dashboard’ insights.
Integrated customer experience includes mostly any system in the organization that touches customers – MA, CRM, personal social media, intent data (like Bombora), and customer service (like Zoho Desk).
Zoho Marketing Automation
With a single marketing platform, you have one place for managing the various marketing campaigns running at any one time. Think how great it would be to see all planned emails – both nurture and one off, event strategies, and social media campaigns centralized so the marketing team can easily see and manage campaign delivery results.
The intersection of the customer journey and sales is where marketing automation technology shines. Check out the latest release of Zoho Marketing Plus to see for yourself.
Finally, beyond just having a marketing campaign that drives a customer to buy or using great technology, is the concept of creating an integrated customer experience. An Integrated Customer Experience (CX) is much more than marketing strategy or technology alone. This is the end-to-end ‘being in the customer’s shoes experience.’
The process for creating a complete customer experience starts with Persona mapping (know your customer), leads into research (your company data, interviewing your best customers, public data, paid unique research), then making decisions on what key interactions to focus on in sales and marketing, handoff to delivery, post sales support, account management including identification of up- and cross-sales opportunities, customer advocacy (recommendations, referrals, reviews), and optimization of your product/service based on customer feedback/ customer ‘dashboard’ insights.
Integrated customer experience includes mostly any system in the organization that touches customers – MA, CRM, personal social media, intent data (like Bombora), and customer service (like Zoho Desk).
