How Social Media Impacts the Customer Journey

A customer’s journey from awareness to purchase goes through many behavioral stages and touch-points. But, can Social Media help the marketers discover the exact moments that help them succeed in converting the online-audience to customers? For this, marketers need to identify and determine the role of social media channels in today’s multi-touch marketing. Let’s find out by dissecting the journey into various stages.

Start

Marketing, primarily, is an exercise through which the customers become aware of the brand.  It’s the initial stage of awareness where the brand’s impression plays a vital role. Using social media channels in both inbound and outbound marketing strategies, marketers can create a huge first-impression about the brand on their potential customers. Paid social marketing can play an important role in creating these touch-points in the first stage of customer journey.

Intermediate

Once individuals are impressed by the brand, they usually set about to discover more about it. This phase is critical as it can make or break the potential customers’ journey before reaching the final stage of purchase. All the efforts put together in creating a notable first impression can go down the drain if this part of the customers’ journey is not handled diligently.

Social media can play a vital role as it is extremely helpful in this phase where potential customers are gathering information online, touching base with friends and peers, and seeking out testimonials from the existing customers. Various social media channels offer pulpits essentially meant to spread the good-will about the brand. Through smart target-messaging, the potential customers can be directed to dispose the other irrelevant or competing option, nurturing them into the final stage of the journey.

Final

When customers reach the final stage of initiating a purchase, the impact of good shopping experience can be high and intense. All the nurturing that has led the customers to purchase the product or service can be fruitful if the final stage is full-filling and satisfying. When this happens, social media can be shoved in again to gather the customer feedback. With their experiences recorded, marketers can then set about enhancing the further experience by keeping the customers engaged. Ideally, this can again be achieved through Social Media, where customer’s satisfaction levels can be enhanced by giving prompt-attention to their post-purchase reviews and improvement-advices, if any. Social Media platforms can also serve as interactive channels for post-sales support. For example, a demonstration video posted on YouTube by the company can help the customers to un-box and assemble the product easily.

Social media’s extrapolating role in every stage of the customer’s journey is inevitable by the various touch-points it manages to create. Qualitative metrics can be analyzed to decipher customer-behavior across these touch-points to make them more effective and enhance customers’ overall experience.

Key Takeaway

Right from the beginning of the customer’s journey through various comportments, social media plays a vital role. The wide range of social media channels integrating into various market-segments help the marketers create multi-channels touch points, nurturing the customers through the three-stage journey that includes awareness, discovery and purchase.