Your brand is built in the mind of your customers, one experience at a time. They come into contact with your brand in a manner that is a far cry from the discover – evaluate – purchase path that we would want them to take.

So how do we map out their experiences and ensure that we have a comprehensive approach to building our brands in their minds? Here are a few tips.

1. Understand the market territory.
   Do your homework on your competition and the disruptive forces that may be impacting your market. Look for places to interact with your customers and add value to their purchase paths in other places.
2. Inventory your entry points in the market.
   Your customers are not sitting around waiting for you to reach out to them. They are information seeking machines with complex decision making criteria and are taking a non-linear path to get there. They look for reviews, especially the negative ones, to determine what your other customers are saying about your products or services and are looking to see how you respond. They care about openness, honesty and hard work. They want to see different levels of information and data and they are most interested in what is relevant to them. The more specific, the better.
   
   Engineer your engagement loops and make sure they are impactful, memorable and valuable. Instead of trying to figure out where your customers are looking and interrupting them, map out how your customers might come to a decision. How can you add value to the conversation and influence their decision with good, old-fashioned hard work?
3. Inventory your service points.
   The most valuable marketing investment that you can make is in your existing customers by turning them into brand advocates. Identify and improve the following:
   • Make it easy to recover from a failure.
   • Streamline your systems and focus on reducing the effort that your customer has to go through to achieve resolutions.
   • Find ways to empower seamless customer feedback.
   Brand loyalty is built or broken by how fast and how robustly you respond when there is a service or product failure. Brand advocacy is earned when your customers learn that they can trust your brand promise at every turn. Make sure that every service point is continuously improved upon and enabled by technology
4. Determine where your touch points are.
   Draw a diagram of your customers’ experience web that includes all of the external and internal systematic touch points and where they inter-relate. A visual tool will help your teams see the complexity of the work they are doing and craft better, more aligned solutions. It will also help you realize just how important technology is to the brand experience that you are creating for your customers.