Latest / Customer Journey with Fexingo: Touchpoints, Mapping, and Multi-Channel Marketing / When Customer Journey Maps Miss the Pre-Buying Window
Transcript
- Lucas: There's a blind spot in almost every customer journey map, and it sits right at the very beginning — before the customer ever clicks a thing. Luna: You're talking about the pre-awareness stage? The stuff that happens before someone even enters the funnel? Lucas: Exactly. Most maps start with 'first touchpoint' as the first ad clicked or the first search. But for a lot of purchases, there are weeks — sometimes months — of brand signals that never get recorded. Billboards, podcast ads, a friend mentioning the brand at dinner. None of those generate a cookie. Luna: Right, so the journey map literally starts late. You miss the real start line. Lucas: And that distorts everything downstream. I came across a great example from a home services company — think plumbing, HVAC repairs. They ran a typical attribution model that credited first click. Google Ads looked like the hero. But when they cross-referenced their CRM with offline exposure data — like which neighborhoods had billboards and what radio spots ran — they found that customers who converted had, on average, four brand exposures before they ever searched. Luna: Four exposures? So Google Ads was getting credit for a conversion that was already primed by offline touchpoints. Lucas: Exactly. The click looked like first touch, but it was really a later-stage action. Once they adjusted their map to include that pre-buying window, they realised their cost per lead from Google was actually much higher than they thought — because the offline spend was doing the heavy lifting. Luna: That feels like a tough pill for a marketing team. You're basically saying your digital attribution is lying to you. Lucas: It is. And the home services company made a smart move — they didn't kill the Google spend. They just reallocated some budget to extend the offline reach in the pre-buying window. They saw a 40 percent lift in conversions over the next quarter. Luna: Forty percent — that's huge. And it came from just acknowledging that the journey started earlier. Lucas: Right. There's a broader lesson here. I think about brands like Casper, the mattress company. When they launched, they were famous for digital-first — Facebook ads, retargeting, the whole playbook. But what often gets overlooked is the amount of offline pre-buying they did. They seeded mattresses in hotels, got press in design magazines, and did radio sponsorships. So by the time someone saw a Facebook ad, they'd already heard the name three times. Luna: And that's what made the digital ad work. It wasn't the first touch — it was the confirmation touch. Lucas: Exactly. Another brand that does this well is Liquid Death — the canned water company. They built a huge pre-buying window through insane social media presence and event sponsorships before most people ever clicked a 'buy' button. Their whole strategy is about being unavoidable in culture before you're a purchase option. Luna: So how do you actually measure that pre-buying window? It's not like you can put a pixel on a billboard. Lucas: You can't directly, but you can approximate it. A few approaches: One is survey-based — ask new customers 'When did you first hear about us?' and 'How many times did you see us before you bought?' Another is geo-matched exposure data. If you run billboards in certain zip codes, compare conversion rates from those areas versus control areas. The home services company did something like that. Luna: That's basically a lift study. Measure the incrementality of the offline exposure. Lucas: Exactly. And once you have that, you can model a probability of pre-funnel awareness per customer. It's not perfect, but it's way better than pretending the pre-buying window doesn't exist. Luna: What about word of mouth? That's another huge pre-buying signal that's totally invisible. Lucas: Huge, and almost never tracked. Dropbox, when they launched, famously used a referral program that gave extra storage. That created a measurable word of mouth loop. But for most brands, word of mouth is just a black box. You can infer it — if your NPS scores are high and your organic traffic is growing, word of mouth is probably working. But mapping it as a touchpoint? Very few do. Luna: It feels like the pre-buying window is especially important for high-consideration purchases. A mattress, a home service, a car — things you don't buy on impulse. Lucas: Absolutely. Low-consideration items, like a candy bar or a pack of gum, the pre-buying window might be seconds — you see it on the shelf, you buy. But for anything with a longer decision cycle, the pre-buying window is where brand preference really forms. Luna: So if someone is listening to this and they have a customer journey map that starts at first click, what's the first thing they should do? Lucas: Go survey your recent customers. Ask them: 'How many times did you hear about us before you first searched?' and 'Where did you hear about us first?' You'll probably find that a significant percentage say 'I heard about you from a friend' or 'I saw your billboard' or 'I heard an ad on a podcast.' And those are touchpoints that never show up in your analytics. Luna: And once you have that data, you can start to model the pre-buying window. That's a real competitive advantage. Lucas: It is. And it changes how you allocate budget. If you know that billboards are driving pre-buying awareness that later converts via search, you might actually increase billboard spend — even though your last-click model shows it as zero conversions. Luna: That takes a lot of trust in the data, though. Most marketing teams are still judged on last-click or first-click attribution. Lucas: That's the barrier. But the companies that do this — like the home services company, or Casper — they're the ones that end up with more efficient spend overall. Luna: You know, if these marketing conversations have sparked something you've actually used — maybe you mapped your own customer journey or rethought a channel mix — a handful of listeners chip in monthly through buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo. That's literally what funds making this many of these episodes, keeping them ad-free. Lucas: Yeah, and we don't run sponsors or sell data or anything like that. It's just listeners who find the show valuable deciding to support it. We're grateful for that. Luna: Alright, back to the pre-buying window. You mentioned that high-consideration purchases are the obvious fit, but what about something like a subscription service? Say a meal kit or a streaming platform. Lucas: Same principle applies. The pre-buying window for a subscription can be weeks or months. Think about how many times you saw a Netflix show recommendation before you actually signed up. Each one of those recommendations is a pre-buying touchpoint. Luna: And Netflix doesn't even run traditional ads for the most part. It's all word of mouth and social buzz. Lucas: Exactly. So if you're a subscription brand, you want to measure those pre-buying signals — social mentions, press coverage, referral links. Even if they don't lead to a direct click, they're building the awareness that eventually drives a trial. Luna: One channel that's notoriously hard to track in the pre-buying window is podcast advertising. I've seen studies that show podcast ads drive huge lift in search volume, but it's almost never attributed. Lucas: That's a perfect example. A listener hears an ad for a brand, they like it, but they don't act right away. A week later, they search for the brand on Google. The search gets credited, the podcast gets nothing. But the podcast created the intent. Luna: So if you're a brand using podcast ads, you might want to track branded search volume as a proxy for pre-buying awareness. Lucas: That's one approach. Another is to use unique promo codes or vanity URLs, but those are getting harder to track as people just search for the brand name anyway. Luna: What about the role of retargeting? That's often used to capture people who are already in the pre-buying window. Lucas: Retargeting is essentially a way to insert yourself into the pre-buying window after someone has already shown intent. But if you retarget too aggressively, you can actually push people away. The trick is to map the pre-buying window and only retarget at the right frequency. Luna: So the pre-buying window isn't just about awareness — it's also about timing. Lucas: Exactly. If you know that the average decision cycle is 30 days, you can plan your touchpoints accordingly. First two weeks: broad awareness. Third week: consideration content. Fourth week: strong CTA. Luna: That kind of precision is only possible if you've actually mapped the pre-buying window. Lucas: And that's the point. Most journey maps skip it entirely. But for the brands that take the time, it's the difference between a map that tells a story and a map that actually drives decisions.