9. Shifting from Campaigns to Customer Journeys

We’ve seen how the infinite media era has fundamentally expanded the way we define “brand experience.” But the new era has also transformed how marketing gets done. In this final part of the book, we’ll examine strategies for executing context marketing.

Think about how marketing campaigns once worked. They were like tidal waves, drenching as many people as possible with a brand’s message and call to action. That mass of people filled the top of the sales funnel and—fingers crossed—a good number would convert to a sale and fall out the bottom as a customer.

As context marketers, we are trading in the funnel to become something much smarter than a simple catching device: we are guides, moving every customer through a personal journey. The new goal is to help each individual take the next step along the path, followed by the next one, and so on. As we’ll see, in some ways the new customer journey functions like a free-running river. It’s an ongoing system of organized brand experiences that constantly flows, with numerous individual currents that converge and diverge in a multitude of ways.

Context is how we guide the consumer along, providing the motivation to continue forward, wherever the person happens to be on the journey. To connect or reconnect an individual to the journey, we leverage triggers, which occur along the entire customer journey, not just at the beginning—because not all buyers start at the beginning (again, we are not filling a funnel). In context marketing, we rely on two kinds of triggers: natural and targeted. As you’ll recall from part one, natural triggers are those that individuals come across on their own, in the course of their day: your sick dog, an email from a friend, or even seeing a new gray hair in the mirror. Targeted triggers are those that your brand proactively deploys: sending an email about a new offering, engaging with consumers on social media, or maybe setting up a chatbot on the brand website. Marketers can use both kinds of triggers to motivate consumers in a contextual way, as we’ll explore in depth in the next chapter.

Note that the number of triggers along a journey, and the range of brand experiences you’ll need to maintain as a result, can grow exponentially, depending on the size of your market and the complexity of the sale. That’s why the only way to really scale context marketing is by leveraging automated programs, which we’ll examine closely later in this part. For now, understand that such programs are the key to scaling personal context. The programs do this by leveraging a wide range of data, combined with a new layer of technology to create bespoke experiences at scale. In other words, automated programs—such as lead nurturing, onboarding, and chatbots—are the always-on current that links the individual experiences and keeps your prospects floating downstream toward purchase, and beyond. When a prospect starts “heading to shore,” so to speak, automations alert your human staff to come to that consumer’s aid and provide the needed nudge.

Part three also examines a new method—agile—that marketers today will need in order to manage and optimize the seemingly endless networks of brand experiences and customer journeys under their care. Finally, we’ll see where the infinite media era has already started heading, toward a new business model: the context marketing model, which includes new leadership and tools for marketing departments to measure and show the value of what they do.

But first, this chapter examines what’s needed to begin the crucial work of mapping customer journeys and carrying out the intricate execution required: customer interviews to help you learn exactly what individuals are doing at each stage in the journey.

All Journeys Need a Map

Shifting from campaigns to constantly flowing and converging journeys is an evolution that few brands have made successfully (remember that only 16 percent of brands are high performers). Many have at least moved away from large, single-message campaigns in favor of smaller, more targeted messages that are pushed out more frequently, but most of these efforts are still focused on conversion and don’t rely on context to reach audiences.

Like any good marketing strategy, context marketing begins with in-depth customer research. This is a step that cannot be skipped or approximated. To understand the context in which customers move through their journeys, you’ll need to conduct personal interviews with current customers and groups of people you want as customers. These are not your typical interviews or focus groups, and a survey will not suffice. Contextual marketing requires a deeper level of inquiry, focused on the customer’s journey and the specifics of his or her natural movement along it. From those interviews you will create “buyer personas,” or representatives of specific groups of people who act in similar ways. This will allow for a more personal approach.

To learn more about this type of customer research, I spoke with Ardath Albee, a leading thinker in persona development and journey mapping and the author of Digital Relevance and eMarketing Strategies for the Complex Sale. Her best advice? Remember that “these are interviews, not interrogations.” In other words, your skill in making your interviewees comfortable is almost more important than the questions you ask. Allow them to lead the conversation. If they go off on a tangent that’s still related to things you need to learn, let them do so. Some of your best insights will come from simply listening and getting answers to questions you never thought to ask.

What’s more, when asking your interview questions, never refer to your product by name, Albee says. Instead, talk about the product or service category. People will then speak freely, without fear that they’re criticizing your brand. You’ll also learn what they find most valuable about the products or services they use.

As with everything else in the infinite media era, what you need to learn from your market research has dramatically changed. Effective customer journeys don’t uncover just key characteristics like age, geography, and demographics; that’s targeting data that can be obtained through simple observation. Rather, your context marketing research interviews will aim to uncover three key pieces of information: what your audience members are doing, thinking, and feeling at each stage of the customer journey.¹

Specifically, your interview questions about what consumers are doing will reveal what actions people are taking at each stage, such as searching the web, using social media, asking friends, or visiting a retail store. Your questions about what they are thinking really dig into what your customers want to achieve in each stage. And your questions about what consumers are feeling help you uncover people’s emotions related to each stage, such as anxiety or excitement.

What follows here are sample questions I’ve structured for your consumer interviews. You’ll see there is one set of questions for each of the six stages of the new customer journey, which I introduced in chapter 2: ideation, awareness, consideration, purchase, customer, and advocacy. Note that the kinds of personal consumer interviews outlined here require a great deal of work, time, and resources. Be sure you prepare for them and have the support you’ll need from various levels in the organization. Note, too, that each set of questions ends with the same blanket query: What did you do next? The answers you receive will help you understand the consumer’s viewpoint about the journey’s progress.

Ideation Stage

The first set of questions is designed to discover the circumstances under which the customer’s journey began.

Doing: What publications do you read? What social channels do you use, and whom do you follow on various platforms? (This will also give you insight into shared passions to guide your purposeful brand experiences, as discussed in chapter 8.)
Thinking: What was the initial thing that got you interested in this type of product (or service)?
Feeling: Have you bought anything in this category before? How prepared did you feel in your search? What emotion best describes your feelings at this stage?

What did you do next?

Awareness Stage

Here you uncover how the customer transitioned from an initial idea to a solution, and why he or she chose this option. Remember, the riskier the purchase, the more questions people will ask, so it’s important you know which questions they ask, in what order, and the length of time they spent in this stage.

Doing: What questions did you ask? Where did you look for answers? Were you able to find what you were looking for?
Thinking: What were you expecting when you started to look for solutions? What did you learn from those questions and answers? What questions were never answered sufficiently?
Feeling: How would you describe your experience of the process?

What did you do next?

Consideration Stage

Here, your questions should pinpoint your audience’s decision-making process for determining which companies made the short list and which ones were eventually crossed off and why. Again, it is imperative you know the number of questions, the order, and how long it took them to find satisfying answers.

Doing: How did your search terms change as you zeroed in on the best options?
Thinking: What concerns did you have going into the decision-making process? What options did you consider for fulfilling your need / solving your problem?
Feeling: How did the process make you feel? Was it easy to find the information you were seeking? Were you satisfied with the amount of information you had to make your decision? What was the best experience you remember from this stage of your journey?

What did you do next?

Purchase Stage

The purchase stage has many moving parts, and the sooner your marketing team optimizes for them, the better. Be sure to listen for the particular situations each person faced, how their concerns were addressed—which experience addressed them best—and how those things affected their purchase.

Doing: How did you make your purchase? Was a salesperson involved? If so, did he or she help or detract from the experience?
Thinking: What led you to make the purchasing decision? What did you want to happen that didn’t happen during the purchase? Was the purchasing process easy?
Feeling: Were you confident in your purchase? What questions remained unanswered, if any? How did the purchase process make you feel?

What did you do next?

Customer Stage

The customer stage is specific to how the individual uses your product or service and the customer experience. Each customer will have a different reason, or goal, for using your brand. The better you can guide customers through the steps of achieving their goal, the better their experience and the longer they will stay customers. These are interviews you need to conduct with your actual customers, and many of these answers can be expanded on from actual usage data, if it is available.

Doing: How often do you engage with the tool, product, or service? Which aspects do you engage with most?
Thinking: What do you hope to accomplish with this product or service?
Feeling: Are you confident in your ability to use the tool, service, product? How does using it make you feel? Have you been frustrated with the experience? Do you feel it is meeting your needs?

What will you do next?

Advocacy Stage

If you have advocates, ask them why they love your product. If you do not have advocates, find advocates of other brands and ask them what makes them love that company, service, or product to the point they will advocate for it.

Doing: When you truly love a brand, how do you share your opinions? Do you ever post about brands on social media? Have you ever participated in a formal brand community or group event?
Thinking: What compels you to become an advocate?
Feeling: How do your favorite brands make you feel? What brand experiences won you over?

What will you do next as an advocate for [the brand they mentioned]?

By focusing on the three areas of doing, thinking, and feeling as a guide for your basic questions in each stage of the customer journey, you’ll be able to uncover the larger questions that your brand must address for each “buyer persona” that you identify, as we’ll see in the next section.

Buyer Personas and the Customer Journey

Say you’re a computer storage device manufacturer. The questions asked in the personal interviews just described will uncover some particular categories of people who make up your consumers. These answers will form the basis of the buyer personas for whom you’ll be building customer journeys. You may discover more personas than you worked with in the past, or you may find more than one journey within each persona. In the case of our hypothetical storage device manufacturer, you may have dozens of buyer personas—college students, artists and designers, small-business owners, corporate IT heads, hospital administrators, and more. Despite there being many possibilities, I’d suggest you start by focusing on only one or two. Choose those personas that represent the largest population of your customers.

Now you’ll give each buyer persona a person’s name and face. You can use the names and faces of actual customers, or you can make them up. Beyond a name and face, you should also include demographics (age, location, gender) and psychographics (feelings, goals, behaviors) to develop each persona. The answers you received during your customer interviews regarding what individuals were doing, thinking, and feeling at various stages of the customer journey will guide you.

For example, from your interviews you’ll discover what each persona’s “top goals” are, both in general and according to particular stages of the journey. You’ll know what their biggest daily problems or obstacles are and when those arise, as well as what particular triggers drive each persona to act. There will be a lot of other information that you ascertain from your interviews; that’s the power of using such a simple set of questions that illuminate larger truths. But when writing up your buyer personas, try to stay focused on the high-level topics so that, ideally, each persona fits on a single page.

In the case of our hypothetical storage device manufacturer, one buyer persona the interviewers uncovered is someone they call “Designer Danielle,” a corporate graphic designer (see figure 9-1). Note how much the brand was able to infer about this buyer persona from consumer interviews, including some of the topics just discussed in the previous paragraph, such as goals, problems, and triggers that drive action.

Next, it’s time to map out the journey or journeys for each persona. You’ll base these on the qualitative data you gathered about differing goals among the people you interviewed. This doesn’t have to be complicated; think of it as a guide. Most important is identifying the major triggers for each persona across the journey and then capturing that “doing, thinking, and feeling” information along each stage. (We’ll cover triggers in depth in the next chapter.)

Figure 9-2 offers an example of a customer journey map—Designer Danielle’s. But understand that there are many ways to go about such mapping, and you can find a variety of templates online, each with slight differences. For example, the template in figure 9-2 refers to the customer journey stages as steps (1–4) rather than the six-stage journey I develop in this book that begins with ideation and ends with advocacy. My point is that it’s OK to use your own language as you develop your buyer persona journey. This is your internal document, and it’s best to use words your company is already familiar with. There isn’t a right or wrong. The most important aspects of the customer journey are that you have one that you can follow, that you break the journey down into defined stages, and that the journey is shared widely across your organization.

As we see in figure 9-2, Danielle begins her journey because she wants the ability to create richer digital experiences while keeping her current computer. That’s the initial trigger that drives her to start searching online and talking to her friends and family about her desire (ideation stage). Her search brings up a wide range of options, creating new thoughts, emotions, and actions. She becomes apprehensive because she doesn’t want to spend a lot of money on a solution, and she is clueless about where to begin. So she turns to Google and begins to batch questions, and she realizes that she has a few options, such as cloud storage or an external hard drive. Again, she discusses the options she’s found with friends and colleagues and looks online to compare her options (awareness stage).

From there she’s able to narrow her search down to a few brands she feels are credible (consideration stage), which leads to her next thoughts: just how do each of these solutions compare with one another? Since all the solutions are similar, she wants to try out the products. Continuing her investigation, she reads an article on one brand’s site, and the brand (the storage device company) uses a chatbot to offer a thirty-day free trial. She likes that idea and accepts the offer. She is excited to receive the device in the mail and begins to use it. A day after the package arrives, she’s happy to receive an email from a setup specialist at the company to follow up on any remaining questions and ensure she knows how best to use the product. As she familiarizes herself with the device, she’s relieved to find her computer runs faster now that her files are stored externally. Thrilled at how easy it was and feeling supported in her decision, she keeps the product and becomes a customer (purchase and customer stages).

As I’ve said, it’s important that customer journey maps be shared with the larger organization at all levels so that all members can align themselves with them. To further that alignment you can add your brand’s response to each situation. Again, there is no right or wrong way to do this. The map in figure 9-2 includes a row titled “Customer Experience,” which boils down each stage of the customer journey into a short sentence or two. The map also includes another row, “Opportunities,” which provides a draft of the brand’s high-level strategy to respond to the customer. These kinds of simple statements help align everyone around the persona’s needs and how the brand plans to respond in each stage of the journey.

Danielle’s journey takes place over several days, and as noted in her story, along the way the storage device brand leveraged a few triggers (such as the chatbot and the support email) to motivate her to continue and to guide her to the next steps.

That brings us to the next chapter: how to set up triggers. These will be the key moments connecting, or reconnecting, each individual to the journey. Your interviews will have pointed you to many of these key moments, and now we’ll learn how brands can leverage the context framework to motivate action within those moments. That means meeting buyers early, keeping them moving, supporting them once they become customers, and leveraging brand advocates to keep the cycle of context turning.