To provide better customer experience in their purchase decision, you need to develop your marketing communication plan based on customer journey.

[tx_calltoact button_text=”Know More..” url=”http://taposbd.com/my-view/understanding-consumer-journey/”]Understanding Consumer Journey[/tx_calltoact]

Today we will learn how can we develop our communication plan to fit in consumer journey to give better customer experience.

consumer journey graph
consumer journey 

In the first phase we need to create awareness about our product or brand. Consumer will discover about the product in this stage. This can be done through two different strategy:

1. Push: Placing Tvc,, rdc, banner etc in regular communication slot/ place
2. Contextual : placing communication when people search for similar product or service or a content.
In the second phase of communication plan, Consumer will try to engage with the brand to get educated, compare with existing similar product and ask for recommendation. We can educate our target consumer through web pages, social media, blog, advertorial, branded content etc. Comparison module can be developed in own site or social media to showcase competitive advantage. However, consumer may visit different e-commerce site or blog for comparison. In this case, we need to keep our bold presence in those sites and highlight key competitive advantage in those communication. Moreover, we need to provide necessary information to those sites so that they can highlight our product for high score. Target consumer also visit different review sites or sells person to be sure about the product quality. We need to monitor those sites and provide explanation if any one make any negative review so that the potential consumer gets the full view.

A campaign can be easily unsuccessful if we can not make the product available to consumer. In the competitive scenario it is hard to believe that a target consumer will give extra effort to buy our product until the product is highly exclusive in terms of price or quality. Hence, 3rd stage is to make the product available. Moreover, we need to collected the list of our consumer to followup if they are getting full benefit of the product. Solve as early as possible if any consumer face any difficulties. Make the consumer educated so that they can extract full benefit of the product. We need to keep in mind that they are not just our consumer, they are also our brand promoter. Next time another target consumer will ask to them for recommendation. Hence, it is important to make them satisfied about the product quality.

Final stage is share where consumer share their positive or negative experience about the product to their peer group, to the social media. This is usually comes organically. But we need to keep in mind that unsatisfied consumer talk more than satisfied consumer. Hence, we need to identify satisfied consumer and request them to share their experience in different media. This can be done through different activity in paid, own and earned media. Providing hashtag, promo offer for share etc can be used to generate positive word of mouth.

It is important to track consumer journey in every stage and try to solve if we find any issue in any stage so that we can provide better customer experience. Without proper tracking system, it is difficult to identify the issue and improvement area. When we are tracking in 1st stage, we need to monitor reach frequency. In 2nd stage we need to know how much consumer get engaged in different engagement channel (social media, own site/app, phone call, contact with sells person, email etc) and how many of them found those information useful. in 3rd stage we need to track how many sells has been happened in different channel and which channels our consumer are preferring. In last stage we need to track conversation through hashtag, comment or like etc. We also need to monitor positive vs negative conversation ratio.  This are the basic roles of make effective communication plan; you should explore and experiment more to identify which works better for you.