Mapping the Customer Journey and What This Has To Do With the Media You Buy

I read on AdAge about new research that suggests marketers are not spending their budgets wisely. Are we really getting worse or are we not attributing media spend properly? Do we focus on filling the funnel rather than moving people through it?

The big 'elephant in the room' on this debate was that marketers are not spending enough on social media. In addition, the popularity of online display ads has inundated the market so much that their value is flat and/or declining. Yet we still do more of the latter and not enough of the former.

I want you to consider for a moment the phrase 'there is a time and a place for everything' as we think about traditional vs. digital media and how we connect and engage with our prospects throughout their journey to become a customer.

Chris Gorell Barnes states 'Marketers must stop considering each element of their advertising campaign, and budgets, in silos and start to consider the entire customer journey and the best medium to engage with them, whether that's social media or video.'

Regardless of B2B or B2C, social media has a place in the funnel. You need to determine where your customer is in the process when they engage with your brand via these channels. That should map your strategy and allocation of budget to proceed. Whether they are in the discovery phase or the decision phase, you need to run some analysis and determine where buyers are when they are spending time with your brand on social media.

Same goes for display or traditional media. I have typically seen these effective in 2 ways. The first is to position your brand in front of people who are at various stages ' hey, remember us, click here. And the second is to re-target prospects who took an action at one time however you haven't seen them in awhile.

Sit with your sales team and map out the customer journey. Similar to how we think about the types of content we use at various stages (whitepapers early on, datasheets and product demos later), consider the media you would use to reach people in various stages. The way you reach a cold prospect and the type of conversation you have may be entirely different than how you place your brand in front of someone who is heavily considering you.