The integrated customer journey in 2024

An integrated customer journey should seamlessly unite multiple touchpoints to drive business success. From engaging strangers to cultivating promoters, uncover the strategic insights and challenges behind crafting a cohesive and customer-centric experience.

If there’s one concept you need to understand to drive your business’ success, it’s the integrated customer journey.

This concept is integral to Spitfire Inbound’s strategic approach. Going far beyond ‘smarketing’, an integrated strategy is customer-centric and ties multiple touchpoints together under a unified approach, ensuring all efforts are aligned and work harmoniously towards the same goal.

However, this is far harder to achieve in real life than it is on paper! After all, a single view of the customer is a challenging goal, almost a state of nirvana for businesses. It requires understanding all digital touchpoints and engagements, and recognising that people react differently to the same content. 

Let’s break down the Integrated Customer Journey

Let’s start with a very simple end goal: to sell more products. That often means finding more customers who need your products or services, and scaling your business accordingly. The traditional way brands attempted to do this was through outbound marketing - letting as many customers as possible know about them and hoping this led to more sales. Now, with more sophisticated customers, and the ability through tools like HubSpot to track and engage with prospects across multiple touchpoints, we know that the journey is more complicated than that. We also know it’s possible to do more than ‘hope’ to get to your end goal.

Strangers to promoters

Customers move through a journey to purchase, starting as strangers who don’t know our solutions and may not even realise they have a problem. On the other side, we have promoters who are acutely aware of the problem we solve and love our solutions - and best of all, they actively promote our brand. Successfully engaging with customers goes far beyond the sale, and rather aims to build a robust relationship with every person that engages with the brand.

Realistically, not everyone becomes a promoter, but we aim to attract as many as possible through a nuanced customer journey experience. The journey starts as strangers become visitors through digital platforms, physical engagements, or sales interactions. As we understand their problems, they start seeing the relevance of our solutions and become leads. 

Between the visitor and lead stages, we focus on building trust by connecting with them and solving their problems. A customer-centric approach is essential. When we deeply understand their needs and deliver on our promise, they become promoters. The more consistently we solve their issues, the more enthusiastically they promote us.

All of this is possible by understanding your customer touchpoints.

Customer touchpoints

The key to understanding which touchpoints we focus on is integral to the strategy Spitfire Inbound takes when working with your brand to understand your bottlenecks, pain points, pushbacks and rejections. Our strategy influences the various activities we engage in to attract, engage, and delight customers, and can include webinars, conferences, online and digital events, direct engagements, podcasts, social media, TV and radio adverts, magazines, email nurturing, blogs and more.

Knowing what we're selling, who we’re selling to, and how many people we need to reach allows us to strategically plan for the greatest impact. A critical layer in our strategy is the data layer, which continuously feeds our strategy by gathering information and setting campaign expectations. By measuring outcomes, we can identify and address blockages in the conversion process. For example, if we see an increase in website traffic but poor sales conversions, there may be a problem in the marketing-sales conversation.

We deeply believe in and constantly modify our strategy based on a deeper understanding of both analogue and digital engagements and their interfaces (this is partly why we believe monthly reporting is absolutely crucial for all brands!). This allows for integrated and data-driven decision-making, and it’s why we also constantly look to how your ideal buyer persona reacts to your brand, and don’t make knee-jerk reactions based on a single customer’s feedback. 

"You can be the ripest, juiciest peach in the world, and there's still going to be somebody who hates peaches." - Dita Von Teese.

Integrated systems are crucial, especially in a world that is increasingly sensitive. As a business, if a particular individual doesn’t resonate with our message, they might not be our target market or this campaign may not resonate with them. It’s vital to focus on serving those who want to work with us, rather than wasting time trying to win over a few at the risk of losing many.

Data gathering

We must continually measure and test our strategies. We deal with dynamic human behaviour, involving biases and unpredictability. The challenge is to distribute efforts evenly across all areas. Some clients focus heavily on promotion but struggle with lead acquisition, leading to a disconnect in their strategy.

Understanding customer journey means looking at aggregated data and addressing the majority, rather than focusing on outliers. 

An integrated customer journey is complex, personal, and ever-evolving. While it’s crucial to not lose the wood for the trees, it’s also critical to continually evaluate the data to change your strategy to get the results that matter to you. With our award-winning work, this is something we do particularly well - you can explore our case studies to see how this looks in real life. 

Contact Spitfire Inbound for a consultation to see we can take your business to the next level.