How to Maximize Engagement Through Data-Driven Customer Journey Mapping

What companies think they know about their customers may not always align with how their marketing messages are being received. Without correctly applying accurate campaign data, brands risk overlooking valuable opportunities to expand their audiences and losing out on efficient new methods of guiding users through the sales funnel.

Fine-tuning a marketing campaign for a better overall experience requires a closer understanding of the average customer’s journey — with each interaction, your brand can learn more about the most impactful strategies leading to conversion. Here’s a quick look at how advertisers are using data to guide media mix decisions and account for changes in user behavior, technology, and audience reach.

Mapping Touchpoints in Your Customer Journey

Successful digital marketing requires an in-depth understanding of the key touchpoints, motivations, and obstacles a typical user encounters when interacting with your business.

The route a new customer takes from brand discovery to completing a purchase is generally comprised of a series of events — it’s our job as marketers to determine where these individual steps are impacting customer decisions the most, and to optimize future campaigns according to these findings. Salesforce findings suggest as many as 80% of customers now consider their experience with a company to be as important as its products, emphasizing the connection between better customer mapping and optimal ad spend.

There are several best-practices in place for more precisely mapping out the customer journey, which can prove especially useful for businesses seeking an initial pool of data from which to draw. Tracking cross-device activity, personalizing marketing messages by past user activity, using pixels from different shopping platforms, and integrating first-party data wherever possible will cater your branded marketing messages to relevant individual interests. More relevant ads lead to more detailed insights into what’s working (and what isn’t) to encourage conversions.

Optimize Both High and Low-Funnel Efforts with the Right Platforms

The typical customer journey isn’t a static target — it reacts as customer needs and behaviors inevitably shift, and meeting these changes on different platforms can be a challenge. Social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram offer great brand awareness opportunities, while others like SEO and email marketing might be better-suited for remarketing and conversion-based tactics.

Any link between a business and its potential customers provides an opportunity to identify messaging gaps or technical hurdles preventing users from progressing toward a purchase. While it may require a holistic overview of your brand’s active platforms to understand shifts in audience behavior, maximizing the success of your campaigns requires playing to each platform’s strengths.

Meeting Users Where They Are to Maximize Engagement

A company’s media mix will always include its own unique industry-specific variables making certain platforms more advantageous than others. Brands in need of a starting point leading into the new year might be interested in exploring the following ad types to meet and engage customers where general marketing data shows they spend most of their time:

• Video Ads: CTV and OTT ad spend (ads accompanying streaming video or services on both large screens and personal devices) is an up-and-comer, but still being overlooked — more than 60% of advertisers have not yet spent on CTV/OTT advertising, though many consider it to be a “top priority” in 2022. Advertisers failing to expand their strategy to include CTV ads are missing out on the 80% of U.S. households now streaming video to a connected device.

• Native Ads: Native marketing provides an opportunity to more directly control the context of a user’s experience with your digital efforts. Native ads are demonstrably more readable and shareable on social media compared to display ads. Native marketing also encourages a more positive user experience through its easily-accessible information in a non-intrusive format.

Social and Display: Social and Display channels span the entire sales funnel, lending themselves well to simultaneous prospecting and remarketing strategies. The end goal is to use prospecting to feed an upper funnel KPI and remarketing to drive conversion. Social and display ads can construct a seamless conversation with the consumer as they progress through the customer journey, and alert your business to potential obstacles when that progress suddenly stops.