Customer Journey Mapping is an excellent technique to give us a picture of how we’re viewed from an outside perspective. It highlights the interactions a customer may have and illustrates many omissions and weaknesses in our marketing.
In an article called How to Win Potential Consumers with Customer Journey Mapping on Google, author Christopher Hofman Laursen explains how the idea can be integrated with search engine data in a fascinating way. His process identifies the major topics that potential clients are querying, the search intent, the most important ‘touchpoints’ on Google and their timeline.
Going past keywords
The exercise is useful because it helps get us over obsessing with keywords, so we can concentrate on user intent. But it takes us even further, because the topics we usually develop to represent user intent only tend to cover the ‘interest’ and ‘desire’ stages in the middle of the customer journey. Here, we can take into account the earlier ‘awareness’ and subsequent ‘action’ stages.
The process as described is surprisingly old-school, featuring post-it notes on a whiteboard, but it yields some very actionable results. If all this seems a little unclear, have a read of the article; you might find it quite intriguing and relevant.