Where Have My Customers Gone? Mapping Out the “New Normal” Customer Journey
When the COVID pandemic hit I changed roles at Meltwater, bringing my focus back to our clients and thinking of ways that big data and AI could help to get them through the crisis. This has led to some fascinating conversations with insights and research teams.
Something I’m often asked is: “Where have our customers gone, and how do we reach them in the new normal?”
A recent Marketing Week and Econsultancy study found that 53% of marketers believe the Covid-19 pandemic caused ‘radical’ or ‘significant’ changes to the customer journey.
This is obviously true in retail: with online shopping up as much as 129% week-on-week in Europe, some experts believe that consumer habits may have changed for good. Their suspicions are borne out in data from China, where 55% of people intend to permanently shift to online grocery shopping.
But this is not just a retail problem.
As millions of people adjust to a new way of life with less commuting, fewer meetings, no events and lots of time at home, customer journeys throughout both B2C and B2B have been diverted into unchartered waters.
Companies have asked me for example, “what do we do with our sponsorship budget now that our clients are no longer going to conferences?” and “if our target customers are all working from home, how do we find them?”
The answer is quite simple: clients are spending even more time than usual in front of their computers and online.
And where people are online, they produce data.
This is a very interesting situation for marketers.
More than ever, human beings are leaving behind digital breadcrumbs about what they feel, what motivates them, and what goes into their purchasing decisions. The “new normal” can be a tremendous opportunity for those who embrace a data-driven approach.
In order to make the most of this situation, I would suggest starting with three focus areas:
- Understand how your customers are feeling
- Know who your customers trust and respond to
- Track how your audience segments are shifting.
Understand how your customers are feeling
2020 has been a very weird year for most of us.
Even if you are healthy and delighted to be working from home, it is hard not to be unnerved by daily death tolls and the sheer number of times you hear the word “unprecedented” in an average day.
Inevitably, our day-to-day decision making has undergone a change — and much of that change is documented in real time on social media, as people locked in their homes reach out to their online communities to vent their frustration or to ask for advice.
Since the crisis started, I have been tracking the emotions that people express across Twitter and Facebook in the English-speaking world:
An analysis of millions of social posts shows that people are less worried than they used to be, but also less hopeful (although in the last few weeks hope has been making a slight comeback — it will be interesting to dig in and see why!)
In my work with EMER²GENT (an alliance between Meltwater, IBM, Rolls Royce and several other organisations to help kickstart the economy using data science), we have have been interrogating social media to answer questions like:
- What is holding people back from taking trains? What are passengers most worried about, and how can train companies help to alleviate their concerns?
- How do people feel about booking holidays abroad this year? What are the top destinations they would like to travel to?
- How are people coping with the lockdown? Is the general population at a breaking point, or are we mostly keeping calm and carrying on?
This work has been for public bodies, but the same principles apply to corporations. With some clever data mining you can quite quickly begin to understand what concerns your customers may have about getting back to business as usual, and how your organisation can help to get them back on track.
From there you can ensure your content and product offering reflect the new reality, and adapt your messaging in a way that is likely to resonate positively with your customers.
Know who your customer trusts and responds to
In times of crisis, we lean on those whom we know and trust.
One would assume that this would be true when making purchasing decisions these days as well: we would expect to see prolonged time in the “consideration” phase of the customer journey, as buyers go about purchasing products and services in a way that is WFH-friendly and mindful of dire economic forecasts. Presumably this would increase the importance of influencers, reviews, and online referrals.
Of course everyone is different though and we can’t make assumptions.
Luckily there is actually quite an easy way to find out if your customers are likely to lean more on referrals than they have previously.
A tool like Meltwater’s Audience Insights service can make an estimation of how important referrals are in your customers’ decision-making by observing their behaviour on social media (in an aggregated form to respect PPI), and deducing likely personality traits using IBM Watson.
If our service gives you a graph like this:
…then you know that — based on the way your customers are expressing themselves online at the moment — recommendations are likely to be extremely important in their current decision making process.
As a next step you can use a service like Audience Insights to identify the influencers your clients follow specifically. It is also important to monitor social media closely for fans who are speaking highly of your company so that you can amplify their content and show the world that you are trusted and valued by your customers.
Understand how your audience segments are shifting
The covid-19 crisis has laid bare a clear divide in mindsets and behaviours.
The chances are that some of your customers are calmly following governmental advice, some are worried about leaving the house at all despite being quite low risk, and some want to pretend the pandemic isn’t happening at all.
Those three groups of people may have belonged to the same audience segment previously, but that segment has since splintered into sub-segments.
This article by Hill+Knowlton provides examples of new segments brought about by changes in behaviour during the pandemic. To cite a few extremes:
Rebelliousness/obedience: Those who are rigidly sticking to the rules of the lockdown, versus those who are constantly seeking ways to flout the rules.
Collectivism/individualism. Those who see this as a time to take extra responsibility for others, versus those who are solely focussed on themselves and those they love.
Revolutionary/status quo. Those who had long argued the world needed some form of revolution (from one of many angles) and those who are looking for a return to normal.
As we shift into new clusters and categories, data-mining is really important to help make sure that the tone of your content is aligned to how your customers are approaching the pandemic.
For example, below is some personality mapping I did ftor a yoga brand recently:
The light green bubbles represent the general population, and the dark green bubbles represent the followers of this company.
Personality mapping allows us to deduce that the yoga brand’s followers are fairly easygoing and unlikely by nature to panic about a pandemic (must be all that lovely mindfulness!). This should be verified by a social media search to see how these customers have talked about covid specifically, but it is reasonable to assume that a positive and optimistic tone would resonate strongly with this group.
The role of audience segmentation and personalisation will become even more critical to brand building in the coming years. It will be increasingly important to devise a personalised outreach strategy for your customers, and to tailor messaging and propositions to new segment pain points, wants and needs. Morris Hargreaves McIntyre does a great job of envisioning post-covid audiences in this article — well worth a read.
Key takeaways
- Be data-driven and remember that social media is an incredibly powerful source of insight in WFH times
- Keep a real-time pulse on changing customer preferences
- Innovate and redesign your customer journey in order to thrive in our new context.
Thank you to Perri Robinson for her contributions to this article.
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