As we all know, it's not enough for a brand to just have a great product or service. It's also important for companies to create memorable experiences for their customers by paying attention to every touch point in the customer journey.

This can be resource intensive, and for smaller companies or ones at the beginning of their lives there may not be a mature customer journey that a brand can be designed into. What can result is a beautiful brand with many speculative applications, but that is not optimised for the touch points that really matter.

At C+G we try to mitigate this as much as possible by tailoring our brand strategies and design to modern, relevant mediums over the traditional, speculative ones (I’m looking at you, unnecessary tote bags). We focus only on those high-impact touch points – key moments in the customer journey that can have a disproportionate effect on customer perspective.

‍

Nest

Our work with Nest is a great example of this. A paid social agency with an ambition to become the number one ecommerce marketing partner in Europe, they approached Cutler+Goddard to help create a strong, differentiated brand to stand out in a highly competitive space.

Our rebrand is tailored around their strategically crafted customer journey. The journey starts with LinkedIn campaigns introducing their high-quality, quarterly thought leadership reports. These reports are based on Nest’s proprietary data index – their key differentiator – and drive traffic to the Nest website which in turn generates sales leads.

Understanding this journey was the key to unlocking the foundation of our rebrand – an editorially-focussed approach was required that positions Nest’s perspective as an invaluable asset for sustaining lasting performance.

‍

Key touchpoints

‍

The differentiator for Nest is its focus on ecommerce brands gives them a unique, proprietary data set. Nest use this to spot trends and identify opportunities to improve performance for its clients. We gave this data a name – The Nest Index – to reflect the unique perspective that it allows them to bring.

‍

‍

The Nest Index forms the backbone of its quarterly reports. The reports have always been valuable IP but were getting limited traction. We redesigned the report, rebranded it as The Readout, and helped it become a highly shareable piece of industry content.

‍

‍

To drive traffic to the reports, and the rest of Nest’s high-quality thought leadership, LinkedIn campaign templates were considered a key touchpoint for the rebrand. It was essential that we could convey the editorial, early-value spirit of the brand in a tiny format.

A tight focus on the unique and essential customer journey allowed C&G to concentrate our resources on these impactful touchpoints.

‍

Evaluating the customer journey

Customer journeys are not always obvious, or crafted with intent – sometimes they just ‘happen’ - particularly in larger, distributed teams composed of marketing, design, product and engineering. One team might run an advertising campaign while another is updating the landing page. Engineering have a new feature they’ve just launched, and before you know it you’re in a mess.

In these situations, it helps to have a framework to sketch out the customer journey from awareness to loyalty, and look at how your brand is performing at each stage.

The framework should include each stage in the journey along with the corresponding touch points, customer expectation, emotion, and action. Once the touch points are identified, it's important to evaluate each one and determine if it's meeting the customer's needs and expectations, as well as our own brand expectations. Ideally, this evaluation should be ongoing to ensure that the customer journey remains optimised and memorable. But this is not always possible.

‍

Optimising for modern mediums

When constructing and evaluating the customer journey, it's important to consider whether each touchpoint is necessary or if another medium might be more effective. If a touchpoint is appropriate, it's essential to leverage the medium and brand to create the most effective experience possible.

Websites are a perfect example of this. As the internet has matured, websites have become increasingly standardised, reducing differentiation and making it difficult to stand out. However, the website provides a unique opportunity to create a memorable experience and leverage the brand.

By evaluating the website as part of the overall customer journey, we can focus on the most appropriate messages and create a more unique experience. Additionally, this approach can help identify gaps in the customer journey and ensure that every page and piece of content serves a clear purpose.

‍

‍

Again, our work with Nest is a good example of this thinking in action. By understanding how Nest were driving traffic to the website, we created a specific landing page explaining the benefit of the Nest Index, with the aim of generating sales leads. Another section of the site – resources – serves as the home of Nest’s high-quality thought leadership, and clearly asks visitors to sign up for more info. This engagement has clear benefits – after the launch of the new brand, traffic to the website increased 300% and the number of leads generated increased 200%.

‍

The C+G Modern Mediums workshop

At C+G we’ve developed a short workshop to allow our clients to evaluate and improve their customer journeys. Over the course of a half-day, together we’ll piece together the journey, evaluate the touch points, and generate ideas for improvement. At the end of the workshop you’ll have an updated customer journey map, along with suggestions to improve the effectiveness of your brand at each point.

If you’re interested in our workshop, drop us a line.

‍