What's the Difference Among Customer Personas, the Customer Journey Map and the Sales Funnel?
The difference among customer personas, the customer journey map and the customer lifecycle are the questions they help you answer as you design, and later, evaluate your marketing strategy. Customer personas answer the Who and the Why. The customer journey map answers the What and How, and the customer lifecyle answers the Where and When.
These tools are complementary and work together to help you understand the ways you can influence your customer and measure whether or not your strategy is working.
Customer Personas are the Who and the Why
Customer Personas help you define your customer (or who you want as your customer) and the job they are trying to do or the problem they are trying to solve. If you already have a lot of customers, you have an opportunity to use quantitative and qualitative research to create an actuate picture.
But what if you’re new and you don’t have a lot of customers? Then building a customer persona is a little more art and a little less science. Instead of profiling the customers you have, your job is to profile the customer you want. Using the customer persona tool will help you figure out how each component of the Marketing Mix impacts your customer.
Questions you can ask yourself, or better, ask someone who could be your customer:
- Does your Product solve a problem?
- Is your Price is affordable and attractive vs. other options?
- Is the Place where you sell convenient?
- Which Promotional channels and types of messages do they listen to?
- How would they like to interact with you on their purchase journey?
These questions relate directly to the Marketing Mix. Find a refresher on the 5Ps of the Marketing Mix here.
Customer Journeys are the How and the What
When you put together a customer journey map, you recreate or imagine HOW your customer (that you deeply understand via your customer persona) progresses from the moment they decide they have a problem that needs to be solved to the moment they are so delighted with their purchase that they decide to tell their friends.
And similar to using the customer persona tool – if you don’t have existing customers that’s ok. You can treat it like a science project and make a hypothesis.
Imagine the start of the journey for instance. Do you think your customer will learn about you because they are searching how to solve their problem online, because they pass your storefront on a lazy afternoon, or because they hear about you from a friend?
Once you’ve imagined the pathway, it’s time to start thinking about WHAT you can do at each step along the way to bring your customer closer to you. This is the fun part where you get to be creative!
If you’re not sure where to start, you might begin by thinking through each part of the Marketing Mix and seeing how you can make each category contribute to your strategy. Remember, your goal is to help connect a customer who has a problem or job to be done, with a solution that will delight them.
The Customer Lifecycle is the Where and the When
Consumer behavior and purchasing research tell us that buyers of any type of product progress through a series of decisions before making a purchase. Sometimes the decision happens in an instant – like when you grab the laundry detergent off the shelf. Sometimes they take longer like with high ticket or complex purchases like cars or computers. The sales funnel represents each step in that decision making process.
The customer lifecycle, like customer personas and the customer journey map, can also be used as a tool to help you develop and manage your marketing strategy. In this case, the customer lifecycle is how we measure WHERE the customers in the decision making process. (The picture on the right is a simplified representation so you can get the idea.)
And later, once we have some data, the customer lifecycle can help us make assumptions about WHEN we might get a sale.
Even before you have customers, understanding the funnel is helpful because it helps you think about what information or communication your customers might need as they progress from one level to the next.
How do I use Customer Personas, the Customer Journey Map and the Customer Lifecycle?
Use Customer Personas, the Customer Journey Map and the Customer Lifecycle as a toolkit to build your marketing strategy. I definitely recommend you start with the customer persona. Think of the customer journey map as a representation of what your customer is thinking, feeling and doing as they move through the stages of the customer lifecycle.
By the way, if you’re creating your Customer Journey Map and are stuck for ideas for marketing tactics, be sure and download my FREE Learning Guide, 52 Ways to Grow Your Business that are NOT Social Media
