By now you are quite familiar with Shootsac example, so let’s continue with it and create a customer profile for one of their target market segments i.e., "female professional wedding photographer." It could look something like this: a female working professional photographer with a dog—meaning, most probably, she is single—who just had a bad day on a shoot where she almost lost her lens. She is determined not to let it happen again, meaning she loves her work and is strong-minded about it. It is almost midnight when she fires up her browser, goes to Google and searches for "camera bag," "lens protector," or "lens bag." She finds Shootsac on the search results, browses the website and gets acquainted with the product. She is excited about the changing cover feature of the bag—she is artistic and loves art.
She is a realistic person; instead of impulse-buying, she wants to understand if the bag will solve her problem or not. She browses the Shootsac blog and reads what other customers are saying. She is interested but still not convinced. She goes to her favorite forum and posts her questions. The crowd gives her an unbiased opinion. She makes up her mind to buy the bag and goes to the website to place an order. She wants to make sure that the order is delivered on time, so she makes a phone call to the customer service center. She gets her bag and loves it. She takes photos and posts them on her blog.
This vivid description readily shows the customer journey and identifies the opportunities where a business can establish touch points i.e., Google Ads or search engine optimization; an active blog with customer testimonials; influences throughout the blogosphere; a website that clearly says how to protect the lens; close monitoring of blogosphere and forum posts to respond to prospects’ question; a painless one-click shopping cart experience, etc.
You can create this kind of vivid customer profile for your business by gathering information about customers from four sources:
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Existing customers—They provide you with a wealth of information on how they already buy (which channels they use, where sales volumes are going up, where they are going down, etc.) and how they plan to buy in the future. The best part is you can reach them with your in-house staff rather quickly.
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Competitors’ customers – Some competitive intelligence will allow you to understand the behavior of the most important customers that you want to acquire. One way of knowing their preferences is to visit your competitors’ websites and marketing collaterals, which tell you a lot about their strategies. You can collect this information very cheaply using in-house resources.
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Out-of-industry customers – Most companies sell products that look somewhat like those offered in other industries. For example, companies that sell boats share many characteristics with companies selling luxury cars—both of these products are targeted to high-end customers. Understanding their customer relationship cycle will provide powerful insight into your own customer relationship cycle.
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Customers in your blue ocean segment – These are the customers in new markets where you don’t have any prior knowledge. Targeting these customers poses the biggest risk, and hence deserves detailed research. Collecting information about them is a big undertaking. I recommend hiring consultants and/or market research firms to conduct a detailed study of customers in these market segments.
Once you have articulated persona of your customers, you can draw a clear customer journey map. Please note there could be different journey maps for different market segments and customer persona.
The second step is to identify objections that will rise as they will step through their journey. Preempting these objections help you create exceptional customer experience at every moment of truth.
Related:
- Table of Content
- Red Queen Effect – An Introduction
- The Billionaire Code
- Cracking the Code
- Implementation Plan