How can you use consumer decision journey mapping to increase brand awareness?

1 What is consumer decision journey mapping?

Consumer decision journey mapping is a process of creating a diagram that illustrates the stages that a consumer goes through before, during, and after buying a product or service. It is based on the idea that consumers are not passive recipients of marketing messages, but active participants who seek information, compare options, and evaluate outcomes. A consumer decision journey map can help you understand the context, emotions, and behaviors of your target audience, as well as the channels, content, and competitors that influence them.

2 How to create a consumer decision journey map?

Creating a consumer decision journey map requires you to define objectives and scope, conduct research and collect data, analyze and synthesize the data, map the journey stages and touchpoints, and add details and insights. When defining the objectives, consider the goals of your mapping project, who you are mapping for, the product or service category, the time frame, and geographic scope. To gather insights about customer needs, preferences, expectations, and challenges, use surveys, interviews, focus groups, online reviews, social media analysis, web analytics, and customer feedback. To organize and interpret the data collected, use personas, segments, customer profiles or empathy maps. Represent the steps that consumers take from awareness to loyalty using a framework such as McKinsey's four phases: initial consideration, active evaluation, closure and post-purchase. Identify touchpoints with your brand or other sources of information or influence for each phase. Finally, enrich your map with elements such as goals, questions, emotions, pain points, opportunities and actions for each touchpoint as well as indicate satisfaction levels at each stage.

4 What are the benefits of consumer decision journey mapping?

Consumer decision journey mapping can offer a range of advantages, such as gaining a better comprehension of your consumers and their habits. Through this process, you can discover their desires, expectations, and difficulties. You can also identify how they evaluate your brand and those of your competitors. Moreover, mapping the consumer journey can provide insights and ideas to improve your marketing research and strategy. It can also help you validate or invalidate assumptions and test ideas. Additionally, it can aid in identifying strengths and opportunities to enhance your competitive advantage and differentiation. Furthermore, it assists in creating and communicating a unique value proposition and positioning.

5 What are the challenges of consumer decision journey mapping?

Creating a consumer decision journey map is not without challenges. You need to gather and process a large amount of data from various sources and methods, while ensuring the quality, validity, and relevance of the data. It is also important to simplify and visualize the complex and dynamic journey of your consumers, as well as choose the appropriate format, level of detail, and style for your map. Additionally, you must implement and update the map regularly, while involving and aligning your stakeholders in the mapping process and results.