You know loyal customers are gold for your business.

So how do you ensure you always serve clients in the best possible way?

How do you build a truly loyal customer base, that won't just use your product or service, but love and share it with others?

The customer journey is a powerful and easy tool to help you map out and optimise the moments people interact with your brand. It helps you lead your customers from becoming aware of your product, to being happy and loyal.

If you haven't thought about your customer journey yet, here is how to get started and harness its power.

Key Takeaways

A Customer Journey map helps you understand your customer's goals, needs and actions over time, and reach and support them best.
As social media covers more and more parts of the marketing funnel, the customer journey is a brilliant way to optimise your social media strategy and gain happy and loyal customers.
Customer journeys help you pick your channels, choose your tone of voice, and select metrics for measuring success.

Why are Customer Journeys So Powerful?

The customer journey is a visual representation of a customer trying to reach her goal by using a service or product. It includes all her interactions with the brand and her goals and concerns at these moments.

Customer journeys help you address your customer's concerns at the right time in the right way and move them through the different stages of the marketing funnel.

They help you decide what social media channels to focus on, the tone of voice to pick, and what content to deliver. And give guidelines on what metrics to track for evaluating the success of your marketing efforts.

Social media is an integral part of a successful customer journey. It is used for creating awareness, gathering reviews, as a purchasing platform, and for delivering customer support. Integrations between different social media platforms and online marketplaces, like Facebook Marketplaces and Instagram Checkout (available in the US), speed up this development.

Also, customers are increasingly likely to reach out to brands via Facebook and Instagram for support, rather than visit the website to look up the customer service phone number.

How to Get Started Making a Customer Journey for Social Media

Start by picking one of your personas, and map out the journey he goes through as he interacts with your brand.

The aim is to describe all the points of interaction between you and your (potential) customer. At each moment, you want to define their goals, concerns, and how and where they interact with your brand.

It helps to structure your customer journey into stages that correspond to the marketing or sales funnel—the phases someone goes through to become a loyal customer.

As a guideline, include the following five stages:

Awareness: People discover your brand and become aware of its existence.
Consideration: Potential customers consider your product, weigh the pros and cons, and compare it to other products.
Decision: The moment someone decides to buy or use your product or service.
Delivery & use: The experience your customer has while using your product or service.
Loyalty & advocacy: If everything goes right, your customers end up as fans and share your product with others.

You can include many things under each stage. These are our suggestions:

Goals: What does your (potential) customer want to achieve? What is the desired outcome?
Concerns: What worries her? What keeps her from making a decision, or makes her choose another product?
Channels & methods: How and where is she likely to reach out and interact with your brand?
Metrics: What are good indicators of success at each stage of the customer journey?

We can take the example of Anthony, who wants to book a hiking trip into the Austrian mountains. Imagine he is in the consideration phase—he is aware of your brand but has not decided to book with you yet. His customer journey could be:

Goal: Finding a 2-day hiking trip that will live up to his expectations without any undesired surprises.
Concerns: "Will the experience be just as good as advertised?", "Are there any hidden fees?", "Are all the essentials covered, and does the travel agency provide proper equipment?", "Could I get my money back in case I get sick?"
Channels & methods: Using Google to search for hiking trips and agencies. Asking for recommendations on Facebook, checking out photos and reviews on Instagram. Looking for inspiring pins on Pinterest. Reading reviews on online hiking forums.
Metrics: Number of trip brochures downloads and information requests. Positive reviews of FAQ questions on the website. Number of visits (specifically the Pricing, Features and FAQ pages), and length of visits.

To inspire you, here is an example of a filled-out customer journey by Rail Europe:

And here is an old-school example from 1956 (!) by Disney, one of the companies known for its incredible customer journey across all platforms:

Why Customer Journeys Work So Well for Social Media

Social media is increasingly becoming part of the entire customer journey.

But with so many different options for channels, types of content, and various ad formats, it can be challenging to pick the right strategy to serve your customers well.

Customer journeys help you make these decisions. By mapping out the stages from brand awareness to loyalty, customer journeys clarify the goals and concerns that influence your audience's decisions. And the places they look for information so that you can reach them best.

Take our earlier example of Anthony looking for an agency to book a hiking trip. Mapping out his customer journey could make you decide to:

Invest in online hiking forums by starting a thread on best places to go hiking in Austria
Create valuable pins on your Pinterest profile that address some of the major concerns of the customer (e.g. list of provided equipment)
Post on Instagram and ask followers what they consider essential for a hiking trip, helping you discover what potential customers value most and showing you care
Create and share articles comparing your offer to other similar services via your social media channels

Customer journeys are incredibly valuable and can be used by anyone to level up their social media strategy.

If you're looking for a deeper understanding of your customer's needs, make sure to read our blog post on Jobs to be Done. It will help you figure out the "why" behind your customer's actions, and how your product or service fits into their lives.

And don't forget to sign up for our free monthly Social Trends Update! Here we will share our insights on the latest trends in social media and tips & tricks for rocking your online presence.