A customer journey consists of actions your clients take before and after they hire an IP expert. It should be part of your overall marketing strategy to improve business development and enable more effective marketing. By understanding the different actions your clients take before and after contacting, you can start brainstorming new marketing tactics to improve the client experience and keep them coming back for more.

What is a customer journey?

A customer journey outlines the different steps your clients take to become clients. Without the customer journey, your marketing funnel could not exist. A marketing funnel helps you market your services to customers based on where they are in their customer journey. For example, someone searching for IP experts is at the top of the marketing funnel or at the very beginning stages of their journey.

Ultimately, a customer journey map tells a story about how clients interact with your law firm, including how they first discovered your business to whether or not they will make a repeat mandate. The journey lays out different interactions someone could have with you, although not every client needs to use all those touch points before converting.

While not all customer journeys are the same, you can use your website and marketing efforts to easily guide customers through the journey by taking them through different touchpoints.

What are the phases of a customer journey?

Knowing the customer journey definition is only the beginning; now you must learn the different stages involved. A customer journey is made up of phases, which are the distinct stages a customer passes through as they are guided to take specific actions. The phases you include will depend on your business goals.

Do you want a user to adopt a new IP software you have released? Are you looking to get inactive newsletter subscribers to read your emails? Is your aim to turn occasional clients into regular, loyal clients? All these marketing paths require a strategy for getting your clients from point A to point B.

Most customer journeys will usually account for these phases:

  • Awareness: This is how someone discovers you and your law firm, usually through a search engine or paid advertising efforts. Let us say your new future clients see a LinkedIn post by you about your field of IP and they click through to your website to learn more about you. Now your offering is stored in their memory.
  • Acquisition: Congrats! You can now call that new future client an actual client, because they loved your LinkedIn post. Not only that, they also connected with you on LinkedIn, so that they can be the first to learn about any new legal developments.
  • Onboarding: Now that you have acquired a new client, you can send them a series of messages or emails to make them feel welcome, showcase other offerings they might be interested in, and help them understand when and how they might want to contact you in the future.
  • Engagement: This refers to how you can get clients to regularly use your product or services or read your content. Consider using email, social media, in-product messages, and personalization to make your clients’ experience more enjoyable.
  • Advocacy: Make your clients so happy that they will recommend you to others. This is probably one of the best ways to get new clients.

Once you have established the phases of a customer journey, you can plan the touchpoints you will use to connect with clients at the right moments.

Advantages of a customer journey map

Customer journey maps are useful marketing tools that can help you better understand your target audience and use that information to lead them down a path to conversion. All businesses can benefit from having a customer journey map and it is good to know how clients interact with your law firm.

What is the customer journey map?

A customer journey map is a visual representation of the client’s experience with a law firm. It also provides insight into the needs of potential clients at every stage of this journey and the factors that directly or indirectly motivate or inhibit their progress.

The law firm can then use this information to improve the client’s experience, increase conversions, and boost customer retention.

What is UX journey mapping?

A UX journey map represents how the client experiences their journey toward achieving a specific goal or completing a particular action.

For example, the term “UX journey mapping” can be used interchangeably with the term “customer journey mapping” if the goal being tracked is the client’s journey toward purchasing your service. However, UX journey mapping can also be used to map the journey (i.e., actions taken) towards other goals, such as using a specific IP software feature.

Why is customer journey mapping important?

While the client journey might seem straightforward on the surface — the law firm offers a service, and clients buy it — for most law firm, it typically isn’t.

In reality, it is a complex journey that begins when the client becomes problem-aware (which might be long before they become IP-aware) and then moves through an intricate process of further awareness, consideration, and decision-making. Within this process, the client is also exposed to multiple external factors (competitor ads, reviews, etc.) and touchpoints with the law firm.

Keep in mind that 80% of clients consider their experience with a law firm to be as important as its services. By mapping this journey, your business development team can understand, visualize, and gain insight into each stage of the process.

You can then decrease any friction along the way and make the journey as helpful and delightful as possible for your clients.

How to build a customer journey map

Building a customer journey map is easy, and it is an effective way to learn more about your clients.

  • Determine your business goals. You will need to determine your goals before establishing the touchpoints for your customer journey map. Goals can include converting more qualified leads into clients, increasing IP awareness, and so on.
  • Understand your clients. Gather data on your clients to learn about their behavior and uncover new ways to market to them.
  • List opportunities for communication. Consider all the different ways you can communicate with clients, including social media and email marketing.
  • Test your customer journey. Pretend you are the client and test your journey to see how you can make it easy for clients to convert after their initial touchpoint with your law firm.
  • Refine your customer journey map if necessary. Refine your customer journey map when there are changes to your law firm. Breaking down the map into stages can help you meet your client’s needs no matter where they are in their journeys.