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Google Marketing Services — 5 Ways to Use the Google Customer Journey Mapping Tool

Do you use the Google customer journey mapping tool? This tool allows advertisers to view the customer's experience through a holistic lens. Each point of interaction a customer has with a business can provide advertisers with valuable insights. For example, what are their pain points? Where does your business stumble when interacting with customers? Reviewing the customer journey allows businesses to improve the customer experience wherever improvements are needed most. Learn the various ways you can use Google's customer journey mapping tool to visualize the customer experience from end to end and improve it–to improve your level of customer satisfaction and, hopefully, your bottom line too.

Discover Engagement Points

As an experienced advertiser, you might think that you know when and where customers engage with your company in the customer journey, but mapping that journey out is bound to provide you with some brand-new insights. You can use the journey mapping tool to pinpoint when you habitually engage customers, but you can even go a step further. Remember: we're living in the digital age, the customer lifecycle has been made far more complicated. You have to find every possible customer touchpoint and address your customer needs in the context they expect to be engaged with. Your marketing team always needs to be in the journey mapping process. The most important

After you list out these engagement touchpoints, group them based on when they occur in the journey. You can group them in categories such as pre-purchase communications, communications that take place during the purchase process, and after-purchase communications. Now, you can examine each group with a more finely tuned eye to uncover where you might have missed an opportunity to communicate. These groups are simple to set up in google analytics.

As you evaluate these engagements, you should consider if those touchpoints are enough. For example, is there a point in the journey where you can interject suggestions for similar products or services? Are you reminding customers about the rewards you offer them? On the other hand, are you overdoing the interactions? Do you need to tone it down? By focusing on your lists, you can fine-tune your interaction touchpoints to be more in line with your goals. Remember, even there are a lot of stages to the customer journey, as long as you build connective tissue via your engagement channels, you can find a lot of ways to build towards a purchase step-by-step. Marketing is like fashion in that it is never finished.

Journey Highlights

As you examine your customers' journey using the Google mapping tool, you're bound to discover peaks and valleys. First, evaluate the peaks. These demonstrate points where you're getting the customer experience right. Define these interactions. Where do they occur in the journey? Have you made the purchase part easy but somehow stumbled during the post-purchase series of communications? Have you made browsing a breeze but made purchasing a bit clunky for customers? All of these questions are great for getting you a better understanding of your customers. If so, use the highlights to help you improve the customer's journey. These are areas where you're getting communication right. Can you duplicate these high points in other parts of the customer's journey? Remember, every moment in the customer journey is an opportunity for content marketing.

Journey Pitfalls

It's vital to use the Google customer journey mapping tool to find the pitfalls in the process. Where are the low points, and in what ways are these interactions likely failing your customers? These bumps in the journey might be minor, but they could also be genuinely negative experiences that need to be addressed. Where are these touchpoints exactly, and what do they involve? Do these snags relate to a technical problem that could be remedied by your web design team? Is this an issue for your copywriters to resolve?

Knowing where the problems are lets you and your team address them in broad daylight with no confusion. For instance, it's not uncommon for a terrific ad to achieve a high click-through rate. While you're getting these clicks (and paying for them), you might be wondering why you're not achieving the conversion rate you hoped for. It might be because when the customer clicks, they're landing on the home page or a category page rather than on the actual product page that attracted them in the first place.

So use the Google customer journey mapping tool to uncover these stumbling points and attempt to fix them. Your first solution might not hit the mark, but with subsequent uses of the tool, you can apply different fixes to finally arrive at one that works best. Remember, there are lots of ways to tackle ecommerce marketing. But your customers questions and concerns need to be at the center of your marketing strategy.

Be the Customer

Businesses are often so focused on promoting their products and services that they might forget what it's like to be a customer. It's really important to determine your buyer persona. So use the map to take the journey yourself and essentially become the customer. Experience your website and the typical interactions that your customers experience. Think about each interaction. It is really important to think of these issues from the customers point of view. Did they lead you further down the pipe toward making a purchase? Did anything strike you as misplaced or confusing? If you're too close to the process, put together a focus group and invite them to experience the typical journey that your customers do. You can then take their feedback and use it to make the necessary changes. Not only that, but this empathetic perspective can really improve your user experience. It also helps you to have as much customer data as possible so you can react to their needs in as close to real-time as possible.

Identify What Resources You Need

With the Google customer journey mapping tool, you will discover where you should invest in next. The highlights of the customer experience may indicate where your resources are working best. Maybe you are spending your advertising dollars well and getting the traffic you need. Maybe your web designers have done a fantastic job and have made the browsing and purchase process easy for customers. However, some bumps in the post-purchase process might indicate that you don't have adequate customer service resources. So this might be the next logical place to invest in so you can improve your customers' post-purchase experience. Create a landing page for each experience.

The customer journey tool can help you identify where you need to add resources at any point in the process. Your customer service could be amazing, but are your reps fielding a dizzying array of calls because the online copy for popular products is confusing? Maybe you need to hire more copywriters. This tool gives you insights that can help you elevate those areas of the journey that are sagging.

There are many ways to use the Google customer journey mapping tool. This tool isn't just a one-time resource either. Use it often to stay tuned in to what your customers are experiencing when they engage with your business. It removes a considerable amount of guesswork and helps you narrow down where issues are occurring so that you can improve the situation. Try the tool and see for yourself how effective it can be for revealing what your customers are experiencing.

This article originally appeared in the MuteSix blog and has been published here with permission.

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