5 Steps to Creating Customer Journeys & Personas

Marketing and sales teams often grow into silos. And although both are working toward the same goal, they have a lack of shared knowledge about where – and how – they can fit together based on customer activity.
Unfortunately, there isn’t a one-stop-shop for reference when creating marketing experiences, measuring engagement and integrating sales efforts throughout the lead nurturing process. But personas and customer journey maps can become a shared source-of-truth, bringing together both teams and ultimately creating a better customer experience.
4 Benefits of Customer Journeys & Personas
Journey maps and personas can help you: 

1. Better understand when and where your customers make decisions about your products/services.
2. Learn how to best support those interactions with marketing materials and how to best measure engagement for sales leads.
3. Create more personalized marketing experiences based on your customers’ needs and understand their highs, lows and motivations.
4. Know what type of channels or methods of communication best engage certain types of customers, as well as understand how a customer moves from one stage to another.

Good UX Means Good Business

In a world where technology is rapidly advancing and user expectations are rising, it’s no longer enough to have an average user experience; to delight your users and surpass your competition you must strive for the exceptional.

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5 Places to Start
To use these tools effectively, start by building a strong base for your personas and journey maps.

1. Start with what you know about the current experience, whether it’s from a marketing or sales perspective.
2. Gather and talk with each team to learn about their experiences and insights. Try to start with a base knowledge of personas, which you can revisit and revise after talking with people and doing more research.
3. Next, tackle the research to develop more knowledge about your customer experience. There are many methods to gather this customer journey data, including:
   – In-person, phone and web-based interviews
   – Surveys
   – Focus groups
   – Workshops
   – Quantitative digital data collection (e.g., diary studies, ethnographies)
   – Ride-alongs
   
4.  Track your touchpoints using your data and quantify the experience that you laid out via a customer journey. Through a collaborative effort, create relevant materials and make it a goal for both teams to revisit and edit these materials every couple months. Even if one team owns it, have check-ins to make sure it aligns with both sides.
5. Keep refining. It’s crucial that these materials are always being revised, and both teams use them as a source of discussion and a source of truth. It allows your marketing and sales to use a shared language and collaborate based on what your customers are really doing. And though that, both teams will better understand how to make the most of every touchpoint – and work better together, too.

How to Learn More
Looking for more ideas and insights? Ask our experts, and check out some of the free resources and blog posts right here on our website.