Defining the Customer Journey to Online Purchase (Path to Purchase)
A user journey/path to purchase is useful to help you develop communication, content and marketing strategies that are from your customers or potential customers point of view (i.e need based).
I like to simplify, so I have abandoned the classic AIDA model (attention, intention, desire and action) which was used in school way, way back then for: See, think, do and care - which from my perspective is more straightforward and easy to use in the work I do with my clients and more applicable in our current context (remember the AIDA model originated around 1898).
The key to data driven decisions
In today’s data driven world there is new data to gather insights from every minute of the day every day, from multiple locations, from multiple devices in various contexts about your customer, campaign performance and sales.
A monthly or weekly report for data is now obsolete, since the information you are viewing is not necessary relevant anymore and the information is already outdated when the PDF-reports start to hit your inbox.
And by the time you had the opportunity to get a gather all the relevant reports from all your relevant sources, the information is probably not relevant and in most cases only targeted to your marketing department within your organization.
To solve this challenge there are a plethora of new tools available to build a dashboard to vizualise the data in real time. Som simple apps you can download to your iPhone other more complex where you can add TV spot info and view in relation to visitor flow on your website.
How to create a KPi framework
The key to knowing if you are investing in the right marketing activities and have a website that works for your business is to set your purpose and goals and have your customers pain points/needs and journey (as in path to purchase and beyond it) well defined.
How to create a roadmap
One of the easiest and simples tools for planning activities and aligning a team (including the client in the team here if you work "agency side") is to make a roadmap. This creates focus, and puts the work in a context in terms of time needed as well as for example what other external agencies need to pitch in and deliver by when to get things done.