Digital Marketing – Critical Success Factors

Again, we will be putting ourselves in the customer´s shoes and how marketing communication looks from their point of view

Step 1: Who is the customer? (Chose 1 option)

• OPTION #1.A CUSTOMER OF YOUR´S In case you are working for a company (and even have personas to choose from) - you might wanna go with a specific customer you are marketing to

• OPTION #2. YOU - in case you don´t have a customer you can refer to, just take yourself and look at a purchase you made (that wasn’t an impulse purchase)

Sidenote: For those of you who have a B2B customer, make sure to differentiate between the buyer and the user resp. just pick one. Though make sure to write down the interdependences - between the different parties involved - that might come up along the way.

Step 2 : Choose a customer journey map

You can take ours (see next subchapter) or a different map (that you found in the additional materials section of chapter 4.2, like in this article that lists different customer journey maps) - if it seems more appropriate to your situation or business. Yet, remember that any map is just a starting point and you will probably ned to adapt it to your needs.

No matter which map you choose you first wanna look at the different stages of the buying process (in the horizontal axis), second you wanna look at the vertical axis (in our case: The critical elements).

Step 3: Since we can´t upload a paper, you might wanna solve the „matrix issue“ like this (we take our map as an example):

1. Awareness phase
   A) Feelings, thoughts and actions:
   B) Triggers & Influencers:
   C) Touchpoints (offline & online):
   D) Customer experience:
   E) Opportunities:

2. Research phase
   A) Feelings, thoughts and actions:
   B) Triggers & Influencers:
   .....

3. Purchase
   ....

4. Usage
   ....

5. Repeat purchases
   ....

6. Refers new customers

PS: You might encounter the „problem“, that you can´t always fill in all the „boxes“ of the matrix/ map or you are unsure about the stage of the customer. And probably other issues that are unique to your situation.

That´s ok, because we are creating a theoretical model (our best educated guess) that can evolve over time. But it might also indicate that you missed to identify a critical step in the journey or critical elements that are vital to your business/ situation but are not part of your map yet.

And keep in mind WHY we are doing this: It´s to get familiar with the practice itself, which in the end is thinking from the customer´s perspective. Which is, of course, easier when you are the customer yourself
(By the way: You might be surprised by the analysis of your own behavior since we usually don´t think abut it.)