Your clients are on a journey. The best way to make sure that the journey is positive is to script it out and be intentional about taking them along for the ride. Read 8 Figure Firm’s blog to learn more.
What is a customer journey?
The term customer journey is used in the marketing sphere to describe the points of interaction that a potential client, or lead, will have with a brand, from their first contact to their first purchase. But the journey is even longer than that.
Your customer journey should extend beyond the point of sale until the client no longer wants the relationship, which could mean a lifetime of contact and interaction points. These interaction points are also known as touchpoints.
Touchpoints include marketing emails, social media posts, website visits, text messages, video delivery, and any other interaction a lead has with your brand. As potential customers evaluate a company, they will double back to touchpoints they’ve already visited.
How do you develop a customer journey?
Developing your customer journey can become challenging, especially when anticipating which touchpoints will be the most effective. While there can be an overwhelming amount of nuance in building the journey, it boils down to a handful of concepts. Let’s work through them.
Define your objective
Your customer journey has four objectives: establishing a connection, building trust, reassuring the decision, and developing the relationship. However, these goals are directly related to your firm’s mission, vision, and values.
Identify your clients
You can’t clarify the customer journey if you don’t clarify who your customer is. To consistently and reliably land the ideal client repeatedly, you need to know everything about that client.
To build your customer persona, you need to be able to answer the following questions:
- What is their personal demographic and socioeconomic background?
- Where can you find them?
- What is their education level?
- Where do they work, and what is their position in their job?
- What do they do for fun?
- Where are they getting their information?
- What information do they consume?
Segment customer personas
Segmenting customer personas means developing more than one customer persona. Regardless of your firm’s practice areas, you may benefit from identifying multiple customer personas within the same legal niche.
In addition to segmenting customer personas based on who will be seeking your services, it’s vital to segment based on how the individuals will be seeking your services. Knowing who you’re trying to reach will help you create suitable marketing campaigns.
Hone the stages of the journey for each segment
The customer journey encompasses critical stages that take your leads from brand awareness through deliberation to acquiring your services. However, your journey can’t stop when the client signs the retainer – you must also focus on retention and referrals.
Determine your touchpoints
Each time an individual experiences a touchpoint with your brand, they get to know you better. When brainstorming touchpoints, consider how they will affect a client before, during, and after the acquisition of your services.
Implement the journey
Consider implementing your firm’s client journey through a group effort. When communicating the plan to your team, it may help to include visual tools. You should also begin rolling out each component of the customer journey map in phases. It can be cumbersome to greenlight every step simultaneously, and it will be more difficult to track analytics.
Collect data and feedback
The customer journey cycle is ever-evolving, and one way to ensure you’re on top of both natural changes and friction points is through collecting data and feedback. You can conduct DIY data collection through Google Analytics reports, website hosting dashboards, and by asking your clients for their feedback.
Utilize data and feedback
Mapping the customer journey serves dual purposes. Not only does it allow you to funnel your leads to your services, but it also provides an organized way to analyze which aspects of the customer journey are or aren’t working.
Analyze problems
The customer journey should be in a constant state of refinement. Always be ready to pivot by adding into or taking something out of the journey that’s not working. By being flexible, you will have a greater chance of creating a genuine connection with clients, which leads to more referrals.
Repeat the process
The key to nailing down your customer journey is your willingness to refine the process through repetition. Certain aspects of the process may become less valuable over time, and unless you’re working through the steps, you won’t know when to make changes.
Speak to the experts
Developing your customer journey is crucial to growing your firm. It helps you convert leads into clients and builds a strong relationship between your firm and clients, increasing the number of referrals you receive.
While it’s essential to grow your firm, developing a customer journey can quickly become challenging. Here at 8 Figure Firm, we’re here to help you build a journey that works. Learn how to create a compelling journey by registering for ONE.Client Journey.
If you’re ready to take your law firm to the next level, register for ONE.Client Journey today. We’ll help you turn your law firm into a law business.
