How Has The Expansion Of Social Media Changed The Customer Journey?

Customer Journeys used to be simple. People would move from awareness, through consideration and on to purchase, hopefully returning (retention) or, if you had a truly great product, advocating for your product to other people. 

There would be multiple touchpoints along the way; you might have a big awareness-driving advertising campaign on billboards or TV, and if you were forward-thinking you’d have a digital advertising campaign too, though the budgets were never quite as high as newspaper wraps or peak-time TV programme sponsors. If people were buying online, they’d either go directly to your site or they’d search for the product, and either way would make a decision there and then. They may even have checked out a Which article if it was a big-ticket item.

Image: customer funnel before digital marketing and social media took off

These days, Google has a declining share of the search market (although still an impressive 90%), with Bing the next best option at 4%. Not much has changed there. But it’s what happens outside of search where we see the real change. The top of the funnel, consideration and awareness, has got big, and it’s got messy.

Let’s consider someone looking to buy plants for spring.

It all started with an organic article on your Google Discover Feed about how there aren’t quite so many slugs around this spring. That’s a relief—last year was a nightmare! Maybe you’ll give this gardening thing another go.

Then an ad, a couple of days later, with ideas for spring planters and baskets. 

You have a look around their site, but you’re not quite sure what you want, so you put it on your to-do list and, a few days later, head to Pinterest for some scrolling.

Pinterest has some great examples of spring baskets, and you see an ad from Farmer Gracy that made you briefly flick through their products, as well as ads from Crocus.co.uk. Unfortunately, you also got distracted by an ad for bathroom tiles and ended up buying tile samples instead. 

Later, you went on Instagram to catch up on the latest from racheldethame and saw her post about encouraging pollinators to your garden, then scrolled past an ad from www.rhsplants.co.uk highlighting everything you can plant now to help butterflies and bees. 

Or, you went on YouTube or TikTok to watch makeup tutorials, interspersed with gardening videos and that post about archery that made you want a new hobby, and as well as ads from Crocus.co.uk you saw ads for the gym membership that you let lapse in November. Whoops.

Having been thoroughly distracted by social media and still not actually bought anything, a few days later you’re listening to a Spotify podcast—not gardening this time, they’re a treat for Fridays—about getting fit for summer, and you hear an ad from RHS plants. They’ve got alliums in stock, perfect for a “dramatic display”. You Google what an allium is and see ads from half a dozen different brands. 

Eventually you buy alliums, and another six plants that definitely weren’t on your shopping list, from Farmer Gracy. They weren’t the cheapest, but also not the most expensive, and they had good reviews; you vaguely recognise the company name, and there were some cute spring baskets featured on their homepage that you remember from some social media post. 

It’s taken two weeks, and touchpoints—paid and unpaid—across at least seven different platforms, before the vague idea you had about spring planting has finally gone through the awareness and consideration stages and formed into a purchase. 

Not every advertiser had a presence on every platform, but each touchpoint pushed you further along the funnel to purchase, and when it came down to the final purchase the choice was made based on how you’d been influenced along the way, as well as the specific products available.

Image: customer funnel, with digital marketing and social media included – bulking out the awareness and consideration phases

Of course, offline touchpoints also have a role—I’d go and ask my mum, for starters—but in today’s increasingly complex digital world, advertising has to be digital first, and that no longer just means Google first.

That said, there are an awful lot of touchpoints out there, vying for people’s attention and advertising budgets, and you can’t be everywhere at once. You’ve got to be selective about where you put your budgets, based on the profile of your target audience and what will give them the best experience, increasing the chance of brand recall at the key moment. 

If your business or your video creation skills don’t lend themselves to TikTok, no problem! Focus on Facebook, or LinkedIn, or anywhere your business already has a following or can reach the right person. Every business has its strengths and weaknesses, you just need to be clear about what yours are and what your audience responds best to.

For more help planning your next campaign, get in touch here to speak to one of the team.

PS—If you weren’t counting, the platforms were Google Discover Feed, Pinterest, Instagram (Meta), TikTok, YouTube, Spotify and finally Google search. Not mentioned (but probably featured somewhere along the line) were Facebook, Reddit and Amazon.