What is Journey Boarding, and Why Does it Matter?

Journey board, customer journey map, process map – no matter what term you choose, the purpose of this exercise is to help visualize the steps customers go through while engaging with your company.  A journey board can focus on a product, a service, your website, any aspect of the interaction between your organization and its customers.  Basically, any experience you want to better understand, and improve, can be the focus of a journey.  In a nutshell, it’s a powerful tool that can positively influence the customer experience, leading to increased retention and revenue.

For demand generation teams, the topic of a journey board is typically the customer lifecycle.  This provides the organization with a common vision and shared language for attracting prospects and converting them into customers.  Although marketing may be the primary beneficiary of the output, creating a journey board should be a cross-functional effort involving marketing, sales, product management and customer support.

What is journey boarding?

There are many approaches to developing a journey board, most of which involve brightly colored sticky notes – and lots of them.  A journey boarding session is a collaborative operation where teams document the process as well as what the buyer is thinking, feeling and doing along the way.  Regardless of the format, a completed journey board should include these elements:

• Buyer Persona – Focus on the decision-making process of the persona. Capture their needs or questions at each stage.
• Buyer Interactions – Document the human and non-human contact your persona has with the company across the buying cycle. Be sure to also understand touch point intensity.  What are those moments of truth that affect the customer experience?
• Content Mapping – Consider the asset types and channels your customers prefer at each stage of the buying cycle.
• Engagement – Focus on how the persona is engaged at each stage. What level of authority do they have throughout the process?

Once you have a journey board created, it’s important to validate the information with a buyer.  This will ensure it is accurate and reflective of the customer experience.

Why do journey boards matter?

In today’s world, the buyer is in control. Brand loyalty is hard to establish, and customers are bombarded with digital communications.  To cultivate a memorable experience, organizations need to truly understand their buyer.

Creating a journey board is a good starting point, but like any map, it alone can’t get you to your destination. To effectively engage buyers, use the journey board to inform other critical strategies:

• Content Personalization – Once you know your persona’s needs and questions at each stage, you can create content that addresses those concerns, and in the desired format.
• Campaign Design – The journey board will provide direction on the type of campaign needed for each stage in the buying cycle. Campaigns that deliver content pertinent to the customer’s need at that stage help improve engagement.
• Cross Channel Orchestration – As part of persona development and journey boarding, you should have captured the buyer’s preferred channels at each stage. Use this intelligence to target contacts with personalized content on those channels.
• Sales and Marketing Alignment – the journey boarding process will provide a common understanding of the buying cycle and develop shared language between teams. This can be the catalyst for improved lead management and sales enablement.

Moving away from generic, tactic-based marketing will point your team in the right direction. As teams strive to work smarter, optimize resources and increase ROI, they need to leverage all the tools available to them.  Please contact us to learn more about how we can help you build a journey board and set you on the path to success.