Customer journey planning can be very complex and time consuming. And whilst putting in the effort leads to the best outcomes, sometimes we all need a handy little guide to quickly judge whether our customer journeys will work effectively.

Here’s a quick 5 step guide to help out in time-limited situations:

1. Focus - define the goal

What do you want the customer to do - e.g. fill out a newsletter subscription form? Or buy a product? Pick one goal and make this specific to the tool that enables the goal to be completed e.g. a newsletter sign up form on your website. 

2. Target - identify the types of customer that you want to complete the goal

This is quick, we are not getting into micro audiences, we want to identify groups of users with significant differences. Like retail customers and trade customers for example.

3. Visualise - what is the decision making process

For each customer type, ask yourself what will drive them to complete the goal? If their decision making process is significantly different, you will want to separate the customer journey for each customer type. If it’s similar, a single customer journey may suffice. 

4. Language - mimic your customers  

Language is of great importance when communicating with your different customer types for 2 reasons:

i. You want to ensure your customer understands you.

ii. You will want to ensure that a search engine can hook you up with that customer.

So talking in a way that the customer understands is vital. Ask yourself, as a business do we talk to these different customer types in the same way? If you do, then a single customer journey may be adequate. If not, you will want to separate your customer journeys  so that you can present the content in a way each type understands. 

For example, a supplier of fruit and vegetables will talk differently to suppliers than they would to retail customers. A supplier will be talking about ‘produce’, a retail customer will be looking for ‘fruit and vegetables’. And guaranteed, if they are talking ‘produce’ they will be searching ‘produce’, and vice versa. Therefore to get on the right search results pages, you need to use the right language.

5. Wireframe

A final check you should do is when you lay out your content in a wireframe - just sketch it on a notepad in a couple of minutes. Is the journey clear for each user who this page is intended to target? Or does the content for the other users get in the way. 

Again, it’s not too late to separate those journeys so that the path to goal completion is simple and easily understood by every target customer.

Conclusion

This is just a quick guide to get you thinking about the right customer journeys. Of course, this is no substitute for the entire process but should point you in the right direction if you need it in a hurry.

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