← The Digital Marketing Podcast
The Digital Marketing Podcast
User Journey Mapping
00:15:22
Daniel talks us through the process of User Journey Mapping, a simple method to get us all thinking very hard about what content we need and where to place it within your content marketing strategy. We talk through building effective persona’s...
Loading summary
Transcript25 lines
- [00:00]
A
Welcome to the Digital Marketing Podcast brought to you by targetinternet.com hello and welcome back to the Digital Marketing Podcast. My name is Kieran Rogers.
- [00:18]
B
And I'm Daniel Rolls.
- [00:19]
A
And today, Daniel, we are going to be talking about user journey mapping.
- [00:23]
B
We are. So user journey mapping is a technique that, that I've been using more and more with lots of different people and it seems to be coming up more and more kind of strategy planning, content marketing, all those kind of things. And it really helps us to think about what content we need and where and why and when and to really try and focus in on are we providing the right stuff? And it kind of stops you from shouting buy my stuff everywhere you go. Because it's a bit of a risk across social media and email that you're just gonna burn people, annoy the heck out of them, and then they're not gonna look at your stuff at all. So this would come under User Centered Design, UCD and User Centered Design is a whole techniques we use to try and keep the user at the center of what we're doing. And there's two core little techniques that will come out and we'll use in this process. So the way you start this is you come up with your Personas, and your Personas is a representation of an individual that represents a group of people that you're kind of targeting. So for example, for Target Internet, we have got individuals who are marketers. Digital marketers want to improve their own skills. So that'd be one Persona we'd build. We've got another one that is a marketer, digital marketer, that wants to improve their team skills. They have a group of people. We'd have a small business owner or kind of entrepreneur that wants to improve their own skills and improve their business directly. And then we've got our kind of learning and development managers who are in charge of big groups of people. They don't really care about digital marketing. They're just responsible for delivering those kind of skills. They don't care. Well, I think it's possibly true. I think quite a lot of people don't care about digital marketing. So the, the reality is that we've then will build a representation of that group. We'll give them a name, we'll give them demographic details where they are. And it's not supposed to represent everyone, but it's a representation of that person. You normally come up with a picture and you will go through what is it that's important about what we're doing to them. What do they care about, what are their values, what are the challenges that we could solve for them, and so on as well. And you make it as kind of robust as possible. The idea is then if your Persona is called Kate, you could say, right, does this work for Kate? And you kind of look at what motivates Kate and you can say, okay, and you've got a number of Personas and what you're really doing is kind of just checking that you're thinking about your target audiences and are you providing the right content. So this, for example, when we did it, really identified to us that our small business customer Persona, we didn't really have quite the right content for them in terms of what they needed and the kind of level 101 kind of level staff and the very practical stuff. So we've gone off and started building all that sort of. So you build these Personas and you're trying to think about them at all times, you're trying to bring them into the mix of what you're doing whenever you create any content. But very much you would want to then map this against the user journey. So I would start identifying my Personas and build those out fairly robustly. Bear in mind, I've seen things where in agencies, they have life size cutouts of the Personas and that cutout lives in the meeting room so that Kate is always present and things like that. And I don't think it's a bad little technique. I've seen agencies turn up to pitch meetings with Kate under their arm so that Kate can be present in the pitch and is front line center for the client. The point is it's a good way of just focusing on what your customer wants. Okay. What you don't want to do, which I've seen happen a lot. People get really excited when you do this as an exercise because it's kind of fun and they start building a narrative and all that kind of stuff. The reality is that if you're not careful, you build these from what you think. What I think Kate's probably about 28 and she's really. She reads this newspaper and she likes to listen to podcasts. Where has that all come from? It's come from my imagined cut customer. You need to interview existing customers, you need to look at your target audience, who you'd like to kind of attract as well. And you might find it's a little bit different to what you expect. So we build those and then what we want to do is have a multi stage customer journey that we map them against so you would start off with something like a sales funnel or you could use See Think Do Care, which is pretty much exactly the same thing. So let me explain. So a sales funnel says at the top there is the browsing, kind of vague notion stage. That's where you're not really thinking about this product or service at all. You're just hanging out online like you normally do. You are using the social websites, you're doing searches, but it's just kind of stuff you do day by day. Then you've got the active interest in the topic area. You're not looking for this particular product or service necessarily, but you're interested in the kind of area around it. Then you've got the active seeking, you're actually looking to buy a product or service and then you've got loyalty. So a very basic user journey, four stages. See, Think Do Care is pretty much the same thing. So C is your largest addressable qualified audience, that is anyone that could buy your stuff. So if you're Tesco or Massive Supermarket, that's anyone that eats food, which is pretty much everyone. Right. Whereas if you are kind of our target audience is just anyone with any interest in digital marketing whatsoever that might have an interest in it. When you get to think it's they are actively looking at stuff in that topic area. So that's where people are actively looking, particularly potentially for us to improve their skills. Not necessarily thinking about E learning, but thinking about improving the skills. The do is I am looking for some digital marketing, E learning, online training courses, that kind of stuff. And then the care is the loyalty. And for each of those stages I will need different content. So at the the C stage, the very top of the funnel, I need some fun, engaging stuff that you might come across in social media, tips on best practice, those kind of things. When we move into the Think stage, that's when the skills benchmark or something that comes in because I'm actively already thinking about it.
- [05:54]
A
Comparison charts potentially sort of. There are grades to this, aren't they?
- [05:58]
B
Very much so. I mean we've gone four stages. You can actually have 20 or whatever it may be and you can try and plug those in accordingly.
- [06:04]
A
Fascinates me. Some activities overlap. So like a product comparison chart would be for me sitting somewhere between thinking.
- [06:12]
B
About it and actually doing it. Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. And I think you just gotta map this out. I would come up with those kind of four key stages of starting point might split them down further. But then what you want to do is take a Persona and you want to map a Persona against each of those stages. So for Persona 1, what content do we need at each of these four stages? Now, bear in mind stage four, the loyalty can very much be the stuff that you see at the very first stage, the kind of browsing, vague notion C stage. Because if I'm doing blog posts, I can then sign those posts them to you via email and that will essentially keep you engaged with me over a period of time. So that you don't need to just have content in one space. But you go, right, this is Persona and it lets you see think, do care right at the top, I've got the Persona. What do I need to see? What do I need to think? What do I need to do? What do I need to care? And what channels am I going to deliver that in most appropriately? Then you go on and you do the next Persona and you map that out as well. So you can imagine a kind of matrix to do this and you start to identify where you've got holes in your content and where you haven't got the stuff you need. The problem with some digital marketing is we focus very much on the do so you can end up, if you're not careful, all your email marketing being do, buy our stuff, buy our stuff, we've got this, we've got that, and actually if I'm not at that stage of the journey, I'm going to irritate you by descending you this stuff all the time. And then you're going to end up not reading any of my emails. So I'm going to burn my email list by doing that. Or in social media, if I keep sending you stuff, selling you things, it's really going to get on your nerves because it's just not the right place to do it unless you are aware that someone might be interested in doing that. So generally the do content can be triggered quite often as well, using retargeting and things like that as well. Now, before we get into, I mean, you can do retargeting really badly as well. It's one of the easiest things in the world to do badly. So that that's one way of approaching it. What I would also do is map it out slightly differently this time. So you take a particular Persona and then you do a separate chart for them and along the top of the page you might have see, think, do care, you've got your four stages again and then along the side you've got all the different channels. So you've got search, paid search, you've got Facebook, you've got Twitter, all those different things. You might have offline channels in there as well. And you try and kind of map idealized narrative of how they, they move between those stages, what content they're consuming and how they kind of move between them. So you do a little bit of a diagram. So you say, well, they're going to start off and they are browsing kind of Facebook and I know they've got an interest in this. So I'm going to show you some great content. They're going to come through to the website, Idealize and they're going to sign up for an email and then you kind of go through that channel, the process of mapping out the channels against the stages for each Persona and then you can really start to see what stages are important. And bear in mind this might be third party content as well, like reviews on other websites and speaking word of mouth to friends and family and so on. So you've gone through, first of all, you've identified your Personas and you've done a real basic what kind of content. See Think, do care.
- [09:03]
A
Yep.
- [09:04]
B
Then you go through and for each Persona you do a bit more detail, See Think do care along the top and then along the side each of the channels and you map out a bit of a narrative and you're really looking for the important points and you know, where are really kind of critical stages in the user journey. Then what I would go through, I would go through and look at your content calendar. And a content calendar should say what content you're putting out and when. And it says normally what you're going to do in terms of social sharing. Is it going to an email? Are you going to do any social outreach, all those kinds of things. And you can download the content calendar that we suggest and we'll put that into the show notes as well. But I would also add a column that lists your Personas and it just kind of says which Personas is this bit of content for? Because you want to make sure that you're not constantly publishing content that's for one Persona or one group of Personas and missing others out. And I think this is something we've identified as well, that we might be doing really well for one group of people, but not necessarily doing content that covers everyone. And then you can scan through your content calendar and you can quite quickly start to work out, yeah, we're not really speaking to that person enough. They're kind of missing. Now if you do these three things, it should really identify for you. Bit more thinking about how the user journey works, but also just thinking about what content and when, and then hopefully not shouting sales messages down people's throats too much as well.
- [10:22]
A
It's interesting, isn't it? Because it seems like when you first come to this kind of process, it seems like you're really going around the houses. But you know what? You can't have a really joined up, watertight strategy, digital strategy, if you haven't done this stuff.
- [10:37]
B
Exactly.
- [10:38]
A
Because it really does just make your activity watertight. And there's no harm in digital marketing. It's very, very easy to be busy all the time.
- [10:48]
B
Right.
- [10:48]
A
But are you busy on the right things? What I would say about this user journey mapping that you've just laid out, Daniel, is it really is great at getting you to focus on what the right things are for those people that really matter, the people who are already your customers and those people that are kind of coming round and warming up to being your customers. Actually, those people who don't yet know they're your customers, but they should be.
- [11:11]
B
Right? Exactly. So what we'll do on the show notes, we've got some great stuff that we did for the Chartered Institute of Marketing Digital Summit at the end of last year, which shows the user journey maps. It shows you the user journey mapping process that I've just spoken about and the Persona development stuff as well. So we will get that up on the show notes so you can download that as a PDF. So that should be a really good resource as well. When you're doing any strategy planning, you normally do some situational stage at the beginning. So if you use something like Softack, which is Paul R. Smith's soft kind of planning framework, and it's been used for a long time, I really recommend it. But the situational stage of that, like where are we now? Basically, and there's always a where are we now? In any kind of strategy model should really include your Personas. Who is your target audience, which is missing a lot of the time. And actually what's the user journey they're going on that we want to kind of develop as well, and therefore what do we need to fill that? And then when you get into the kind of the tactics and the action, the actual building of the content, you can make sure you're delivering on that user journey. But it is massively important. So it's definitely worth putting in there and just thinking part of that and it just amazes me. We've been running a lot of really intensive digital marketing courses where you get a Lot of marketing directors in the room and you do like a three or a five day really intensive digital marketing session. And when we come to the strategy piece, this is a revelation because it makes life a lot simpler. It's just missing a lot of the time. And when you actually look at it, it's just like a chart with a couple of bits of this and that and it's not that complicated, but actually it makes you think very differently.
- [12:34]
A
The number of times I've worked for different organizations and in a fit of desperation they've pulled in extremely expensive agency to present what this solution is to all of our problems. This always forms the absolute core of it and you'll spend thousands and thousands of pounds getting an agency to create some very elaborate charts and graphs which basically just really follow this process that Daniel's just outlined.
- [13:01]
B
And it's just going back to fundamentals saying, actually, who are we targeting? What do we want them to do? What do they want? And just aligning all of that stuff.
- [13:06]
A
And it's brilliant, isn't it? Every time that I've seen that happen, the most senior people in the room go, my goodness, this is amazing.
- [13:13]
B
It makes sense suddenly. Exactly. So rather getting lost in the tactics. So rather than spending all that money on agencies, not that you shouldn't spend lots of money on agencies, but go onto the website targetinternet.com podcast and in the show notes you can download the kind of PDF guide to all of this and there's loads of more information in there as well, so hopefully you will find that useful. One thing you might not be aware as well, because we don't tend to plug what we do that much. We try not to. Anyway, we are Running Digital Strategy 2 day digital strategy course and there's a load of stuff that goes with it. So it's gonna be in London and we're running them really regularly in London. So again, if you target Internet.com you will find the details of the course and the key thing is that you with the course and you should be doing this anyway, you will walk away with a complete plan of actually what you're going to do. So the idea of this course is that, not that you just kind of learn about digital strategy, but you walk away with an actual plan and you know the gaps that you need to fill in afterwards as well. So that's enough plugging. But yeah, have a look at the website and have a look at the digital strategy course and again, we'll put this in the show notes. You can, you can see it as well. And if you need to do a digital strategy, you will walk away with one after the two days as well.
- [14:19]
A
So if you've enjoyed this episode and you've enjoyed hearing more from Daniel. Yeah, come and spend two days with Daniel in London and you know, learn more about this and walk away with a bit of hand holding and not big groups, are they?
- [14:32]
B
No, no. Generally any 10, 12 people, no more than that. Yeah.
- [14:36]
A
And walk away with a structured strategy specifically for your organization.
- [14:40]
B
So thanks for listening to the digital Marketing Podcast and we'll speak to you again soon.
- [14:51]
C
Thanks for listening to the Digital Marketing Podcast brought to you by Target Internet. If you're investing in your digital marketing skills, take a look at our free benchmark skills test and look at the wealth of online learning we provide to help marketers get up to speed and stay up to date. Just visit targetinternet.combenchmark.