Picture the scene, your marketing director wants to plan next year’s budget for forecasting in the current economic crisis. The marketing team have done their key customer demographic analysis (see our earlier article here on what this entails and how to do it), however don’t know where the customer and the brand interact.

Why should you map out your customer journeys?

Mapping out your customers’ journey helps to identify the effectiveness of your previous marketing campaigns and strategies, generate fresh ideas to take advantage of new technologies and platforms since the last campaign, and plan where and how the future ones might look to start conducting gap analysis and training needs analysis on.

A customer journeys map can be updated over time to see how it has changed, however also be shared with external consultants to reduce the impact of groupthink (see our creative groupthink article here) when you have highly homogenous groups working together.

How it helps you to see your branding gaps

To get the most benefit, you should have the marketing team with a small number of representatives from other departments – such as the operations, PR, and sales.

Next, take a smart-board (or a normal whiteboard if not available), and plot out your customer’s normal daily routine, and then your brand’s activities for Q1 of the next financial year – and look for these moments of overlap. These are known as your ‘touch points’.

From here, you’ll see a number of near-misses and gaps that can be remedied by increasing resources to your marketing strategy or optimising it to increase the likelihood and impact of touch points occurring.

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