Top tools and tips to help you supercharge the customer journey

As marketers in the 21st century, we’re dealing with customers and clients who are more tech-savvy than ever before.

Nowadays, they don’t rely on salespeople to help them understand the products and services they’re looking for. They do a lot of their research online. And they consume content and form their own opinions well before they contact you.

Today, your website is often the first port of call for your prospects – as soon as they hear about your business, they’ll Google you. As marketers, we all know the importance of having a well-optimised and targeted website. What’s more, it should be loaded with useful, informative content aimed at helping your prospects make their buying decisions.

But have you looked at your user journey recently? Are you giving your customers and prospects the easiest and best path to purchase? Is there anything you can do to optimise and streamline the experience and maximise your sales?

Consider these questions:

• Do you know how visitors arrive at your website?
• What devices are they using?
• What information and content do they most commonly look for?
• Which paths do they typically take through your website?
• Where do they go once they’ve clicked through from that social media ad, for example?

If you’re struggling to map out answers to these questions and get a clear picture of your customer journey, there are some tools, tips and tricks you might want to try – read on to find out more!

Mapping the customer journey

We’ve covered how to map your customer journey in detail in another blog post, but to sum up this important first step, here’s what you should be doing:

• Creating your buyer personas, to fully understand the needs and pain points of your prospects
• Nailing down your business and marketing goals and objectives
• Pinpointing all customer touchpoints (both online and offline)

If this seems daunting and you’re not sure where to start, simply diving into your Google Analytics data can be a great starting point.

But you may be looking for deeper insights that help you really get to the bottom of how prospects interact with your business. Marketing analytics and attribution tools like Mediahawk are your secret weapon for this.

Let’s look at some key things you should be focusing on when it comes to improving your customer journey (and how Google Analytics and Mediahawk can help you).

Optimising your website for those all-important mobile users

In Google Analytics, you can easily see what percentage of your web traffic views your website on a mobile device or a tablet. You can use the user flow report (filtered on mobile and tablet users) to see the path they typically take through your website, and where any drop-offs happen.

In Mediahawk, we can capture device type, device brand, model, browser, and operating system.

And when you bring your sales data from your CRM into Mediahawk, you can attribute which devices and other aspects tend to generate the most ROI.

You can apply any of these as a secondary dimension in Mediahawk’s reports, too, to slice and dice your data even further.

Discovering the keywords people search to find you

When it comes to finding the keywords and phrases your prospects use, Google Search Console can be a goldmine of information.

Mediahawk takes this even further by using speech recognition features to listen for keywords used in phone calls, as well as those typed in search engines.

With this, you can see which keywords prompt calls, and understand their context. For example, are visitors ready to buy? Are they looking for more information? Or are they not able to find the right information?

With Mediahawk set up, you can track trends in your keyword performance over time. You can even upload your sales data to Mediahawk and link your revenue to keywords and see which ones deliver the best ROI.

Making sure ranking URLs match what web visitors are looking for

Let’s break this one down a bit. When people search for something in Google, they expect the web pages they see in the search results to give them the information they’re looking for. But this doesn’t always happen.

For example, imagine someone searches ‘care home pricing’ in Google. Your care home’s website appears in the search results, but it links through to your terms and conditions page. Not what the user was looking for.

This is obviously something you’d want to fix. If you have a really informative pricing page, you’d want that to be the first page people see and click through to.

You can identify these issues manually by searching the keywords your web visitors use and seeing which pages come up in the results. Or you can use Google Search Console to see which of your web pages rank for certain search terms. You’ll then need to look at improving SEO for pages that aren’t ranking as you want them to.

But what about the people who call you? What if your phone leads are being routed to the wrong departments and you’re losing sales through people hanging up, frustrated?

Financial services firm Worldpay found themselves in a similar position. A large number of callers dialling in after searching terms like ‘merchant account’ were selecting the Customer Service option when they got through to the interactive voice response (IVR) system.

It didn’t make sense that existing customers would search for terms like ‘merchant account’, and ‘contactless card machine’ to find their customer service number, so Worldpay used Mediahawk to dig deeper. Analysis of the data showed that callers searching for these products were actually sales leads but were being routed to customer services instead, as they were pressing the first option on the IVR.

So Worldpay placed the sales team first on the IVR for non-brand campaigns. This simple change solved the problem, improving both the customer experience and the firm’s marketing attribution.

Understanding the true meaning of exit rates and bounce rates

If you see high bounce rates from your landing pages, consider the possibility that visitors may be converting on the phone.

Mediahawk can show you the number of calls you’re receiving from each web page, as well as the number of visitors to those pages. You can also send call data to Google Analytics, and view your calls directly alongside online conversions.

Knowing what content is missing using the site search

In Google Analytics, the Site Search report can help show you the things people are searching for – giving you an idea of what content they may be struggling to find, or questions they may have about your products or services.

But don’t forget your phone callers, too! Phone call recordings can be a rich source of data on the questions callers ask and the information they seek.

When customers and prospects call you, Mediahawk’s speech analytics feature can reveal whether they’re struggling to find the info they need.

Identifying any barriers stopping web visitors from converting

First of all, consider if there are barriers in the first place! People might convert on the phone, but if you’re not tracking calls, you won’t know.

Secondary dimensions in Mediahawk’s reports can help you see any patterns in user behaviour that might affect conversion rates.

For example, a Mediahawk client recently noticed a drop-off in PDF downloads from its website. However, this was only happening with Android mobile devices users. They were able to identify this and the client was able to fix a device compatibility issue with its PDF marketing assets.

Seeing how different campaigns are performing and improving poorly performing ones

Mediahawk shows all your paid platforms in one report so you can easily compare their performance.

Be sure to tag all your campaigns with UTM tags. You can track multi-channel campaigns more effectively and see which sources are performing better. Some may be better for online conversions, while others may be more suited to offline conversions. Finding this out will give you a specific area to focus your attention.

Uploading your sales data into Mediahawk will give you a clearer picture of performance and ROI. You might find the campaigns that seem to be performing poorly at first glance are generating the most valuable conversions of all.

Once you’ve established whether this is the case, you can use secondary dimensions to drill down in finer detail.

Optimising your customer journey isn’t easy. It’s something every marketer struggles with at some point in their career.

The good news is that, as 21st-century marketers, we have the tech, tools and techniques to hand that can help us tackle the task and build super streamlined customer journeys that deliver results for your business.