Effective Social Media Marketing Through Customer Journey Mapping

Abstract

An essential pre-requisite of effective Social Media Marketing is a profound understanding of customers and their behaviour as this has been subject to dramatic changes.

Social Media marketing is about using social networks and tools to guide prospect (potential) customers through a series of steps – a funnel – to get them to take the desired action, e.g. becoming a new customer and buying the company’s product and services, with the end-goal of turning new customers into loyal customers with a high lifetime value.

There are a lot of media tools. With all these Social Media marketing tools at the disposal, how should the company decide which ones fit to optimally to the social media funnel, and in which order they should be used? To answer this question, the company has to know who the potential customers are and how they can be reached most effectively. The social media marketer also has to know about the company’s objectives, how it should measure these objectives (i.e. the metrics that should be analyzed) and what numbers should be set for those metrics. The social media funnel provides a comprehensive overview connected to the three stages of a typical customer buying process: Awareness, Engagement and Action.