Mapping the Customer Experience, Segment By Segment

Though you may typically approach customer segmentation and experience mapping as separate efforts, combining them is an important way to help your brand understand its audiences and drive marketing strategy more effectively than either tool can on its own.

Segment-specific experience maps can bring together the disparate parts of your business and help you empathize with your customers’ journeys. Creating these maps is essential in understanding the unique attributes of your brand’s priority audiences, so you can develop and deploy a winning strategy. Unfortunately, it’s a step that teams often overlook.

Why Your Segmentation Strategy Matters

There’s no one “best” marketing strategy, product innovation, experience innovation – you name it. There’s only the one that’s the right fit for the customers you most want to reach. To that end, a good segmentation framework organizes customers into subgroups with common characteristics, so you can prioritize the right choice (again, whether we’re talking marketing, product, experience or branding).

Not only can rigorous segmentation help you identify which types of customers are the most valuable to your brand, it can also provide a nuanced understanding of what they need – ultimately helping you deliver on those needs.

Of course, there often isn’t one “best” experience map, either – your target segments may each have their own unique path to purchase.

The Benefits of Segment-Specific Experience Maps

If an effective segmentation framework is a key first step in creating a clearer picture of your customer base, segment-specific experience maps are the way to sharpen the image and add necessary detail.

Rigor

Good customer segmentations are rigorous. In addition to attitude-based survey data, they integrate client databases, third-party data, CRM insights and more. These diverse inputs lead to high-quality outputs: frameworks that reflect your brand’s priorities, drive key decision-making and help move your business forward. Customer segments, then, provide an extremely substantive base to build on when it comes to experience/journey mapping.

Accounting for Nuance and Avoiding Assumptions

Customer segments can tell you a lot about your various audiences, but they aren’t designed to tell the story of every touchpoint those audiences have with your brand. Segment-specific experience maps do tell that story, however, providing the nuance you need to avoid any costly assumptions about your customers or users.

Bringing Your Team Together

In an ideal world, a good segmentation architecture on its own would be enough to bring your company’s various teams together – from research to product to marketing and beyond – to rally around the needs of your customers or users. In most cases, however, that isn’t quite the reality, and segmentation frameworks need to be employed. Given the way they tell the story of each segment’s journey, experience maps fit the bill perfectly. They make it clear how teams must collaborate to deliver a better overall experience for each segment.

Tips to Build Segment-Specific Experience Maps

Applying a segment-focused lens to your experience map(s) will change the end product. For instance, because your target segments have more homogeneous attitudes than your customers as a whole, there may be fewer types of journeys reflected in the map. Or, because target segments are likely to have an already high affinity for your brand, you’re liable to see a shorter discovery phase, with fewer brands in your targets’ consideration set.

All that said, the process of creating an effective segment-specific experience map is no different than creating a broader customer journey map. It’s all about following a key set of principles.

A segment-specific experience should…

Reflect the Unique Experience of the Segment

Experience maps tell a story from one point of view and should capture events, actions and emotions as perceived by the segment – not your customer base as a whole. They should also elevate the segment voice by using language that reflects the way the segment talks about relevant actions and emotions.

Be Linear

Experiences unfold over time. Consumers don’t experience time loops or rewinds, so your experience map shouldn’t rely on warping time to tell the story. Start with a timeline, not a cycle. Similarly, whenever possible, focus on telling a realistic step-by-step story, rather than an idealized, replicable process. Consumers rarely repeat an identical process of steps, even within a segment created to act homogeneously.

Focus on the Story You’re Telling

No single map can show every detail of a multi-step experience. If you focus on a shorter section of the experience, you’ll have room to include more detail. If you need to include an experience from end-to-end, you’ll need to zoom out and reduce the level of detail.

Reveal the Ecosystem

Experience maps make visible the invisible forces that influence your target segment’s behavior and memory. Good experience maps succinctly show the map reader how an ecosystem of touchpoints – including people, places, policies, tasks and culture – influence a customer’s experience.

Want to learn more about how Material can help you deepen your understanding of different audience segments with actionable insights and customer journey maps? Let’s chat.