What is a CJM?

What is a customer journey map

A customer journey map (CJM) is a visualization of the customer's path, starting from the moment a need for a product arises through to its purchase. Unlike an ordinary funnel, it accounts for the entire path the customer travels, not just the part that takes place within a specific resource. This way, you gain a broader understanding of your customers and can assess the existing touchpoints. A properly built CJM lets you think through and formulate an advertising strategy for social media.

Breaking down the customer journey with an example

Let's look at one example of a CJM. A person wants to buy a refrigerator. They have developed a need for it. What do they do? Their first steps are searching for products on Google, watching reviews of the best refrigerators, visiting websites, and checking prices on different models. At this stage, it is already possible to show the user advertising. The main advantage at this stage is that we are dealing with a warm audience.

After the user has visited our website, we record this using Facebook Pixel and Google Analytics. From this point on, we can show them more targeted advertising depending on which stage the person is at.

How long to run the advertising

The marketing team can analyse how much time a user needs to make a decision to buy a product. Based on this, it becomes clear how long the advertising needs to run in order to achieve the coveted purchase.

The following option is also possible. Suppose that for the first few days after visiting the website, the person sees one type of advertising, the next days another, and then a third. As an incentivizing factor, you can offer a discount on certain products (usually these are the products the users were interested in).

Where to show advertising at each stage

Based on this map, you can build out how and where we will show advertising to the user. At the initial stage, this could be YouTube and Google. After visiting the website and viewing the product page — Facebook and Instagram. All of this is only possible provided that Facebook Pixel is correctly implemented. This way, out of the thousand people who develop this need every year, we can convert into a sale not a hundred but three times as many.

How we work with CJM

When working with any brand, we try in one way or another to build out the map. Our key task is adapting advertising platforms to the client's marketing model and CJM (if they have one), assessing the quality of various creatives, and building an advertising strategy with maximum effectiveness. Our goal is to spend the advertising budget as efficiently as possible.