The chief endeavor of marketing has always been escalating growth. The secret behind perking up growth in the contemporary market is not static; rather it’s dynamic, ever changing. Marketers were always taught by their predecessors to be adept with the funnel- a funnel of the customer journey. A linear funnel began with awareness, followed by consideration and ended with purchase.
Gone are the days when marketers reached growth and frequency with the help of mass media. Earlier, marketers also used demographics to estimate the under intent and keep the target audience informed. However, this approach has nothing to do with today’s customer journey. From the beginning of 2018, Google started looking at thousands of users’ data gathered from a third-party opt-in panel. Results revealed that never two customer journeys are alike. Moreover, most journeys can’t be shaped like a funnel at all. These journeys resemble the shapes of diamond, pyramids, hourglasses, and so on. From this outcome, it becomes clear that once the linear path (Awareness-Consideration-Purchase) has been evolving rapidly.
If you look at Google’s Search Engine Ranking Page or SERP, you will find it entirely different from the one it used to be just a couple of years ago. We should not consider these changes superficial. Google is getting more into the portal.
With this transformation, Google enables users to go round the clicks to the websites or getting more information, taking some actions, and ever for the transaction. This change is going to affect every business. Therefore, every business should have a new strategy for their Search Engine Optimization as well as Search Engine Marketing.
How should a business deal with this new customer journey?
- Identify a convenient spot where customer’s goals can be aligned with business goals
Before mapping the customer’s journey, you should nail down your business goals. You should deliver marketing and communication opportunities, which should help your brand reach its own goals. Sometimes, business goals differ a lot from the customers’ goals. In such cases, you need to develop marketing and communication strategies that can help your customers reach their goals and your goals as well.
When it comes to the new customer journey, identification of customer and business goals assumes great importance. Since the customers now have more opportunities, their goals can vary from one platform to another. You should study each platform and determine how your customers are using each platform.
To make it clear, let’s have a look at Google’s Search page. Whenever you are searching for something, you will find Google Ads, local listing, and organic search results. It implies that these platforms you can avail to reach your customers. Observe each of these platforms to learn how your target audience is using the platform. Customers looking for Google Ads are more likely to buy the products or hire the services while visitors to organic results may have multiple goals. Identify their goals for each platform and align them with yours.
- Find out all of communication touch points in a customer’s journey
You should make a list of moments when you communicated with your customers in the traditional manner. Now classify these moments into three stages- pre-purchase, purchase, and post-purchase. Now, look at these stages to discover communication touch points you missed out. You need to monitor what actions and interactions between you and the customers happened during these three stages.
Considering these touch points, you dive into a lot of details. It may confound you. To avoid any confusion, you should focus only on those moments, which helped you achieve your business goals.
- Discover pain points and happy moments
You should find out what your customers are feeling at every stage of their purchase journey. Try to identify the moment when your customers are happy, try to understand what action is making them happy; try to discover the moment when the customers face a negative experience. By exploring the happy moments, you will be able to emphasize the actions, which are making your customers happy. By considering the negative experience, you will be able to improve those identified areas.
- Put Leg on the customers’ shoes
Google will prefer your online business when you will prioritize your customer’s preferences. Continuous changes in Google’s SERP are clearly bolstering this truth. To nail the changed SERP, you need to read the mind of your customers; try to understand their choices. You should think from the perspective of a customer. It will provide you with a clear insight into the customers’ takeaway.
As stated earlier, each customer’s journey can be different from others. Therefore, now you are not allowed to follow a generalized approach. Based on the trends of different customers, categorize them. For each category, come up with an effective plan.
- Envisage customer journey map
Once you are done with the previously mentioned points, you are good to go to the customer journey mapping. These days, writing down the customer journey and communication touch points are not going to pay you well. Instead, you need to come up with a visual map of the customer journey. Clearly, demonstrate how your customer’s journey will be at each of the touch points. This way, you will be able to have a bird’s eye view of the entire customer journey.
Listed below are four suggestions that can help a business cope up with Google’s new customer journey:
- Train the SEO battalion
By evaluating your business minutely, you will find that every role contains activities having an impact on SEO. Therefore, it is important for you to integrate your Search Engine Optimization strategies into those activities. You may ask your SEO team to identify those activities and train the people who are assigned to perform those activities.
- Focus on copywriters’ competencies
If you want to perk up this new customer journey, you should come up with relevant product information, new stories, how-to guides, etc. Such content will receive higher visibility on the SERPs when they will appear as a knowledge panel, within a carousel, or as a featured snippet. Make sure your bloggers, copywriters, and social media experts are developing content that is informative, appealing, and credible enough to compete with the organic competitors.
- Nail Schema and JavaScript for SEO
By implementing schema on your site, you will be able to help the crawlers understand your content. It can increase the odds that content gets when it is visible as a featured snippet. Featured snippet and similar rich content exhibit the double-edged sword nature of Google’s new portal-like look. Moreover, Google now allows a sheer number of markups for several content types, audible content, FAQ, event, etc.
- Keep Checking and analyzing Mobile SERPs
These days, mobile phones help businesses engage people more often. Therefore, it is important to keep an eye on the Mobile SERP. From 1st July, Google has started indexing all new sites using Google’s mobile-first indexing. This tool will organize the sites so that they can be easily monitored and examines mobile-first-indexing readiness. Nowadays, the majority of searches happen on mobile, therefore, the business should improve customers journey on mobile devices as well.
A Final Takeaway
It is an open secret that Google’s search interface is subject to changes. It is obvious that Google will bring more changes in the coming future. To deal with these changes, you should ask your SEO services company to map your customer journey based on the changes.