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• Customer journey map: How to visualize ...

Customer journey map: How to visualize the buyer experience

El customer journey o recorrido del cliente es el camino que realiza el cliente desde que tiene una necesidad hasta que compra el producto o servicio. Mientras que el customer journey map es una representación visual de este viaje del consumidor. Sigue leyendo y aprende cómo crear un customer journey y utilizar un customer journey map.

If you skip to the end of a book, you’ll know where every character ends up. But without reading the middle, you won’t understand what took place. A story can’t occur with just a beginning and end—you need the journey between. The buying process is like a story. Analytics show you where each customer ends up, but to understand why they got there, you must examine the buyer journey. 

A customer journey map helps you visualize a customer’s experience from point A—their pain points—to point B—their purchasing decision. When you know what leads people to one decision versus another, you can tailor your business strategy accordingly.

What is a customer journey map?

A customer journey map is a tool that helps you track a customer’s behavior through the buying process. The map includes the customer’s thoughts and feelings about their problem, as well as the corresponding actions they take. 

Simply put, customer journey maps help you:

1. Identify and understand which customers are interested in your product or service.

2. Tailor your messaging so customers understand the benefits of your product or service.

What are the 6 components of a customer journey?

A customer journey map has six components that—when observed together—give you a clear picture of why a customer behaves the way they do. While these components are all relevant to a customer journey map, they don't necessarily happen in order.

The buying process: Start by outlining what you know about your customer’s buying process. How do they move from awareness to interest to eventual purchase?

Customer actions: Customer actions focus on the specific actions your customers take. This can include actions like reading an article, downloading an ebook, or requesting a sales demo.

Customer touchpoints: Different from user actions, touchpoints are company-focused. What does your company do to engage with your customers? These may include posting an ad on social media or distributing an email newsletter.

Emotions: For every action your customer takes, they’ll have a specific thought or feeling tied to that decision. Knowing these emotions provides the “why” for customer behavior. 

Pain points: Pain points drive a customer to purchase your product. They either have a problem to solve or want to fill a need in their life.

Expectations: Customers looking to fix their pain points will have certain expectations for what they’re seeking. This is how they narrow down their product search. 

When you analyze customer actions, make sure you’re taking all six elements into account. For example, emotions happen throughout the entire process, whereas pain points and expectations typically influence the buying process. 

How do you map a customer journey?

You’ll map the customer journey by working through each action your customer takes and assigning emotions to accompany them. Marketing and sales teams often use customer journey maps to assess their current strategies and improve them. You can also use customer journey maps when developing new marketing or sales campaigns. That way, your customer stays front of mind. 

Use the steps below to build a customer journey map. Consider the different stages of the user experience, from their first interaction with your company to their last. 

1. Set your map objectives

Any time you begin a new project or build a new tool, you’ll need to set objectives . When you know what you want to accomplish with your map, you can move through the development process with clarity. Your customer journey map objectives may include:

Determining why customers abandon their carts

Understanding what makes a customer commit to a purchase

Identifying areas where you can influence the customer journey

When setting objectives, pull together a cross-functional team to provide insight. Make sure to ask individuals on the sales, customer support, and marketing teams about how they perceive customer behavior. By incorporating everyone’s viewpoints, you can round out your goals and achieve greater success.

2. Create buyer personas

Buyer personas—also called customer personas—are fictional customers that represent your target audience . The persona profiles who the customer is, what they like and dislike, and their general motivations or frustrations. By looking at a buyer persona, you’ll have the information you need to tell your customer’s story. 

Target market: Women

Target audience: Mothers 

Buyer persona: Daniela Vargas, 32, married with one child.

The target market for your product may be women, but if you serve all women, you’ll still have various audiences. By building out a fictional persona, your team can more easily empathize with your potential customer and create messaging that’s relevant to them. 

Your marketing and sales teams likely have multiple buyer personas—one for each type of person who buys your good or service. After all, people have unique buying experiences depending on who they are. Therefore, you’ll need a unique journey map for every persona.

3. Label customer actions and touchpoints

Customer actions focus on every action the customer takes, while touchpoints are the vehicle for those actions. Touchpoints can include interactions before a customer finds your website or once they’re on your website. Use analytics from past customers to assess how the buyer from your target audience might interact with you online. 

Customer touchpoints outside of your website:

Social media posts

Email newsletters

Customer actions outside of your website:

Searches for your website on Google.

Navigates to your website from a paid ad on Google.

Clicks your website link from a social media post.

Navigates to your website from an email.

Opens your email but doesn’t take action.

Likes your social media ad but doesn’t go to your website.

Customer touchpoints on your website:

Website landing pages

Customer actions on your website:

Puts items in their shopping cart.

Stays on a page for a specific period of time.

Clicks an ad on your website. 

Leaves your website.

Abandons their shopping cart.

Completes a purchase.

Make a timeline of these touchpoints to use as the foundation of your buyer’s story. With this visual representation, write down each customer action associated with the touchpoints.

4. Map the customer journey

You should now have a timeline of how your customer got from their awareness of your product to their final action—whether they decided to purchase or something else. Divide the timeline into stages based on the buyer’s journey.

Stages of the buying process

Awareness: The customer realizes they have a problem that needs solving and determines that your product or service may be the solution. 

Consideration: The customer considers whether to buy your product or service.

Comparison: The customer may compare your product to others on the market.

Decision: The customer decides that your product is best. 

Purchase: The customer buys your product or service.

Retention: The customer likes your product or service and returns for another purchase.

Advocacy: The customer likes your product or service so much that they recommend you to others.

Your first three touchpoints may fall into the awareness stage, while the next two may move into the consideration stage. Not every customer will move through these stages seamlessly, but these transitions can show you where to improve. 

Fill in the story

To complete your journey map, write a step-by-step storyline to fill in the gaps between your touchpoints. Since you know the background of your persona, use what you know to explore what they were thinking when they initially searched for your product. If the customer abandons their cart, consider how they went from being interested to jumping ship. 

Add customer emotions

Your customer will have unique thoughts to accompany every action or situation of their journey. Put yourself in the customer’s shoes and try to understand how they feel. Emotions are hard to determine, but with support from your buyer persona, their touchpoints, and your storyline, you can make confident assumptions.

5. Evaluate your marketing strategy

Your completed customer journey map will show you turning points where a customer hesitated to buy your product or abandoned it altogether. For example, a customer that goes to your website but bounces quickly has made it to the awareness stage but may not move into the consideration stage. 

Assess what customers need to move between these stages and adjust your marketing strategy accordingly. In this scenario, ask the following questions:

How long did they stay on our website?

Did they move past the homepage? If not, why not?

What are the weaknesses in our homepage?

How could we improve our homepage to engage customers?

If a customer bounces from your website after viewing the homepage, then the first impression you’re giving them may not be strong enough. It’s possible that your homepage design isn’t intuitive or your content doesn’t stand out. By examining the turning points in your map, you can find ways to make the next customer’s journey more linear.

Customer journey map example

In this customer journey map example, Sally’s pain points are that she struggles to stay organized at work. As Sally makes her journey from problem to solution, there are various touchpoints that guide her. For example, she decides task management is a good solution because she’s heard success stories from friends. She then sees a social media ad for a project management software company that influences her to consider the company’s brand. Sally’s emotions throughout the buying process explain how she processed each step.

Company: Project management software company

Scenario: Sally needs a task management solution to get organized and improve her work performance. 

Expectations: Easy-to-use tool, holds her accountable at work, affordable solution 

1. Realizes she has an organization problem at work

2. Determines task management can solve the problem

Touchpoint: Word of mouth, radio/TV/print

Corresponding emotion: “I need to solve this problem.”

Consideration

3. Sees social media ad for task management software

Touchpoint: Online ads

Corresponding emotion: “This product looks interesting”

Comparison:

4. Compares software to others on the market

5. Reads user reviews of software

Touchpoint: SEO, blog

Corresponding emotion: “What tool best fits my needs?”

6. Decides your product is worth trying

Touchpoint: Customer reviews

Corresponding emotion: “Did other users like this product?”  

7. Goes to software website and signs up for trial offer

Touchpoint: Blog, website

Corresponding emotion: “This looks like the best option, I’ll try it."  

Retention/Advocacy

8. Purchases software once trial period is complete

9. Recommends software to coworkers

Touchpoint: Email, website, word of mouth

Corresponding emotion: “This tool is worth the investment. I should tell my team.”

What are the benefits of customer journey mapping?

Customer journey mapping is beneficial because it gives you a new perspective on how customers act, think, and feel when interacting with your brand. Other benefits include:

Inform your customer service: When you can see your customer pain points clearly, you can use them to better support customers and improve their experience. 

Eliminate ineffective touchpoints: The customer journey map will show you which touchpoints aren’t working. If a customer interacts with your brand but doesn’t move forward in the buying process, then you may need to adjust that touchpoint. 

Focus strategy on specific personas: The customer journey map helps you find a strategy that works best for one group. When you create a map for each target audience, you can customize your strategies for each one.  

Increase understanding of customer behavior: Understanding your audience is crucial to selling products or services. The journey map shows you how customers behave and gives you insight into why they behave that way. 

You can make maps for the current state of your customers or a predicted future state. Both types of customer journey maps can help you learn the customer’s perspectives.

Use a customer journey map to better understand your audience

Your maps can serve as a resource for marketing and sales teams. Once you create one, store it in an accessible place so others can reference it. When you keep your map digital, you can also change it as your audience changes. 

Work management software provides a central source of truth for your team and stakeholders. Whether you’re sharing your customer journey map or putting your improvements into action,  Asana  will keep your team on the same page.

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Buyer Journey Mapping in 7 Easy Steps [EXAMPLES + TEMPLATE]

Apr 15, '22 / by Beth Carter

Editor’s Note: This blog post was originally written by Christina Bockisch and published in 2018. We have refreshed and updated the post to include more helpful examples!

I had just moved to Boston. In November. My legs were freezing, cold air was whistling up the back of my jacket and I couldn’t stop shivering.

I recognized I had a problem, so I turned to Google to do some research. I read a couple of articles and browsed some different styles of jackets. Soon I realized the best solution for me was a parka, instead of the warm-but-too-short jacket I currently had. So, I braved the Boston cold, went to multiple stores all over the city, and found a thick The North Face parka that saved me from freezing.

In other words, I completed my buyer’s journey.

In the story above, my buyer’s journey began the moment I realized I had a problem: I’m cold. I then went on to define my problem: My short jacket doesn’t keep my legs warm enough. Next, I identified a solution: I need a parka. And finally, I chose the right brand to solve my problem: The North Face.

It’s a simple example, sure. But whether you’re selling something as straightforward as winter jackets or as complex as SAP cybersecurity software, it’s important to understand how your potential customers think about their pain points as they move through this buyer’s journey and make their buying decision. This enables you to create content that directly aligns to each stage in that journey, which in turn enables you to deliver a far superior customer experience. And yet, it’s surprising how many B2B marketers ignore the buyer’s journey in their content strategy process.

What is the buyer’s journey?

The buyer’s journey describes the process your buyers go through as they become aware of a problem, evaluate potential solutions to their problem, and ultimately decide on the specific solution that’s right for them.

In marketing terms, we think of these stages of the buyer’s journey as:

• Awareness stage
• Consideration stage
• Decision stage

Awareness Stage

In the awareness stage, a person is experiencing symptoms of their pain point, but they don’t quite understand exactly what their problem is. Their goal at this stage is to help your customer more clearly define the problem they’re experiencing.

• I have a sore throat. Am I getting sick?
• I’m not getting enough traffic to my website. Why?
• Our production machinery is getting old. Is it time to replace it?

To create content that helps buyers in the awareness stage, focus on addressing pain points, challenges and goals at a relatively high level. Make sure the content is informative and resist the urge to start selling the buyer on your particular solution to their problem. Keep it low pressure.

Useful content like guides, blog posts, infographics, and quizzes will help your buyers wrap their heads around their pain points, so they can figure out what their next step should be.

Consideration Stage

In the consideration stage, the person understands what the problem is and begins researching possible solutions.

• I have all the symptoms of strep throat. Should I see a doctor, or should I try a home remedy?
• My website is not properly optimized for search engines. Would it help to start a blog?
• We should begin planning now to replace our machinery next year. What features of a new model will be important for us?

Businesses often struggle with creating consideration stage content because it feels like the right time to start promoting your business as the best solution. Don’t! Instead, the consideration stage is the perfect opportunity to serve up in-depth content that acknowledges different approaches that could possibly work for the buyer. Among these options, you can still (subtly) position your company as the best solution.

Consideration-stage content is also a terrific way to identify potential good-fit leads – the buyers who are right for your business and can benefit from product or service you sell.

Decision Stage

In the decision stage, the person has settled on a specific approach and is putting together a short list of vendors to possibly buy from. Their goal here is to narrow down that list and ultimately make a final buying decision.

• I think I should go to urgent care. Here are the urgent care centers near me that also accept my insurance.
• I would like to blog, but I need help. Here is a list of three agencies that might be a good fit for me.
• We need better production automation capabilities. Here are the models on the market today that offer what we need.

With decision-stage content, you can finally openly promote your product or service. Show how you solve your buyer’s problems and explain why your option is the best approach. Be honest yet humble, and wherever possible back up any claims with data. For example, rather than unprovable statements like “We are the best in the market,” instead try to be more specific: “We have a 4.9 out of 5 rating on this industry site” or “We helped Company XYZ grow by 50% last year.”

Data sheets, comparison blog posts, case studies, ROI calculators, and buying guides are powerful content for the decision stage.

An important note about the buyer’s journey stages

In an ideal world, every person would move through the buyer’s journey exactly the way I described above – in a straight line from awareness to consideration to decision. And as they move through that journey, they’d have all the information they needed to make a purchase decision once they arrive at the decision stage.

Unfortunately, real life is rarely so neat and tidy.

People today don’t always move through this journey in a linear fashion. Buyers are human. They’ll jump around, skip stages, and sometimes go backwards rather than forward. They can even get all the way to the decision stage only to realize they misidentified their pain point, which means they have to start the whole buying journey process all over again.

Your job as a marketer is to plan for as many of these situations as possible. The best way to do this is to create a content strategy that covers all the stages of the buyer’s journey. This will ensure that no matter where someone is in their specific journey, when they find your brand, they’ll find all the information they need to make an informed buying decision.

Related Content: Content With Purpose: How to Align Content to the Buyer’s Journey

7 steps for mapping the buyer’s journey.

Now that you have a better understanding of what the buyer’s journey is, here is a helpful buyer journey framework for you to follow when building your content strategy.

1. Define your buyer personas.

I think I say this every time I write a blog, but if you haven’t already created your buyer personas, stop what you’re doing and create them now. Seriously.

If you don’t know who your buyers are – and specifically if you don’t know your buyer persona’s challenges, questions, and goals they’re trying to accomplish – you’ll have a hard time creating a buyer journey map and accurately aligning your content to that journey.

For guidance on getting started with buyer personas, check out this post that highlights specific questions to ask during buyer persona interviews.

These sample buyer persona templates may also be helpful.

Okay, so let’s assume you have your buyer personas fully identified and documented. Now you’re ready to start building your journey map.

2. What are your most important buyer persona challenges?

To map the awareness stage of the buyer’s journey, first, identify the obstacles and problems that prevent your buyer from accomplishing their goals.

Next, think about how your buyer first begins to realize this obstacle or problem even exists. What challenges begin to emerge? What concerns do they begin to have? What puts this on their radar?

There will be a lot to think about here, so write it all down. (Side note: Now would be a good time to download the Buyer’s Journey Toolkit we provided above. Trust me, it’ll help tremendously.)

3. What are all the possible solutions to these problems?

To map the consideration stage of the buying journey, think about the different approaches your buyer might consider as they try to figure out how to solve their problem. After all, there’s usually more than one way to skin a cat. Is there a do-it-yourself approach? Are there off-the-shelf solutions? Or does the problem require something more specialized or customized?

As the buyer explores these different solutions, what questions will be top of mind for them? What concerns will they likely have?

4. What other companies offer your type of solution?

To map the decision stage of the buying journey, list the other companies that offer a type of solution comparable to yours. (I’ll admit that thinking about your competitors is no fun, but it needs to be done.)

What questions will your buyer have when they vet each of these competitors? How will they evaluate these options? Which features will be most important to their decision?

For example: Your buyer might quickly cross “do nothing” off the list. But they’ll also probably look closely at all their software options, looking at things like cost, functionality, and ease of use. They might conduct a few demos to get a feel for how the different software options work.

Similarly, they might start building a short list of IT service providers. They might look for case studies to see how the different service providers work. And they might even contact you for a consultation to see if you’d be a good fit for them.

5. Identify points of friction along the buyer’s journey.

Whew – you’ve mapped out the awareness, consideration and decision stages of the buyer’s journey. Congratulations! But your work isn’t done quite yet.

What might prevent the buyer from moving smoothly from one stage to the next? What challenges do they encounter during their journey? What might cause them to move backward? What might prevent them from making a purchasing decision?

And what can you do to ensure this doesn’t happen and that you’re providing the smoothest customer experience possible?

This is going to require you to think hard about what your buyers are actually doing rather than what you hope they’re doing. But by identifying these possible points of friction that might prevent a buyer from becoming a customer, you’ll be able to create content that truly helps and sells.

6. How does your existing content fit into this buyer’s journey?

You likely already have some content on your website, like blogs, ebooks, guides, consultations and more. Audit your existing content , and think about where each piece falls in in this customer experience map. Which content addresses pain points and challenges at a high level? Which content is focused on specific solutions? Which content proactively sells your business as the right partner?

Don’t rush through this step.

Once you have a good handle on what role your content can play, map each piece of content to the corresponding stage of the buyer’s journey.

7. Create new content to fill in the gaps.

Now that you know where your existing content fits into the buyer’s journey, identify any gaps. Many B2B marketers find they have a lot of awareness-stage and decision-stage content but that they don’t have enough consideration-stage content. Don’t stress – this is totally normal.

As you strategize how to fill in these content gaps, we recommend starting at the end of the buyer’s journey and moving backward. In other words, first create your decision-stage content, then consideration, and then awareness. This accomplishes two things: First, it helps you keep your eye focused on converting buyers into customers . And second, it ensures that for every new content piece you create, you already have a “next step” to point to.

For example, if you first create a decision-stage vendor comparison checklist and then you create a consideration-stage ebook, when a buyer downloads the ebook you're able to share your vendor comparison checklist with the buyer as a natural next step. But if you start by creating the ebook, you won’t have any next-step content ready to share with those buyers.

As you’re creating all this new content, continually refer back to your buyer journey map. Make sure each piece of content addresses the specific questions, challenges, and goals your buyers have at each stage of the game.

When you do this, you’ll provide helpful, valuable and relevant information that provides your buyers with the information they need when they need it and reduces friction along the way – ultimately leading to happy, satisfied customers who will turn into promoters of your brand.

Now that you know what the buyer’s journey looks like for your customers, it’s time to create content for each stage of this journey. Download our free editorial calendar template and start planning your content today!

Topics: Content Marketing , Strategy

Written by Beth Carter

I love to write and I'm a total grammar freak. I also passionately believe that conversational, approachable and insightful content can help people solve real problems and can make a real difference in the world.

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Customer Journey Maps: How to Create Really Good Ones [Examples + Template]

Updated: April 17, 2024

Published: May 04, 2023

Did you know 70% of online shoppers abandoned their carts in 2022? Why would someone spend time adding products to their cart just to fall off the customer journey map at the last second?

The thing is — understanding your customer base can be very challenging. Even when you think you’ve got a good read on them, the journey from awareness to purchase for each customer will always be unpredictable, at least to some level.

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While it isn’t possible to predict every experience with 100% accuracy, customer journey mapping is a convenient tool for keeping track of critical milestones that every customer hits. In this post, I’ll explain everything you need to know about customer journey mapping — what it is, how to create one, and best practices.

Table of Contents

What is the customer journey?

What is a customer journey map, benefits of customer journey mapping, customer journey stages.

• What’s included in a customer journey map?

The Customer Journey Mapping Process

Steps for creating a customer journey map.

• Types of Customer Journey Maps

Customer Journey Mapping Best Practices

• Customer Journey Design
• Customer Journey Map Examples

Free Customer Journey Map Templates

Free Customer Journey Template

Outline your company's customer journey and experience with these 7 free templates.

• Buyer's Journey Template
• Future State Template
• Day-in-the-Life Template

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The customer journey is the series of interactions a customer has with a brand, product, or business as they become aware of a pain point and make a purchase decision. While the buyer’s journey refers to the general process of arriving at a purchase, the customer journey refers to a buyer's purchasing experience with a specific company or service.

Customer Journey vs. Buyer Journey

Many businesses that I’ve worked with were confused about the differences between the customer’s journey and the buyer’s journey. The buyer’s journey is the entire buying experience from pre-purchase to post-purchase. It covers the path from customer awareness to becoming a product or service user.

In other words, buyers don’t wake up and decide to buy on a whim. They go through a process of considering, evaluating, and purchasing a new product or service.

The customer journey refers to your brand’s place within the buyer’s journey. These are the customer touchpoints where you will meet your customers as they go through the stages of the buyer’s journey. When you create a customer journey map, you’re taking control of every touchpoint at every stage of the journey instead of leaving it up to chance.

For example, at HubSpot, our customer’s journey is divided into three stages — pre-purchase/sales, onboarding/migration, and normal use/renewal.

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8 best practices to create a successful customer journey map

Customer journey mapping can be a challenge—there’s no one-size-fits-all solution to understanding the customer experience across every single touchpoint.

You need an organized, strategic approach to take the guesswork out of mapping the buyer journey. Apply best practices to ensure your customer journey map helps you better understand your users and what they need.

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This article outlines eight customer journey mapping best practices to help you optimize every stage of the buyer journey—and start building a brilliant product experience (PX) your users will love.

Discover how your customers interact with your website

Use Hotjar's tools to understand how your customers behave—and why—so you can improve their journey.

8 effective customer journey mapping best practices

Put these eight proven strategies into action to create an amazing buyer journey map that helps you elevate the user experience (UX):

1. Set clear goals

Before taking any action, define what you hope to achieve from your customer journey map. Following specific objectives throughout the process of user journey mapping will ensure your map is aligned with your customer and business goals.

Jamie Irwin , director & search marketing expert at Straight Up Search , emphasizes the importance of goal setting when mapping out the customer journey:

The most important part of the process is to define your goals. Before you begin mapping out your customers' journeys, it's important to know what you're trying to achieve. What are your goals? What are your KPIs? Once you have a clear understanding of your objectives, you can start designing a map that will help you meet them.

To set clear, effective goals, start by asking yourself a few questions:  

What do I want to achieve with this customer journey map? Maybe you want to get to know your users better to understand their needs; maybe you want to optimize your website for increased conversions by determining where users drop off in the customer journey.

What are my specific KPI goals? Decide on the most important customer journey metrics to monitor based on your overall customer and business goals: this might be customer satisfaction metrics, conversion rates, or engagement statistics, like time on page, the number of click-throughs , or social media shares. Setting specific KPIs will help you keep track of key customer journey touchpoints and determine the success of your efforts once you start using your map to optimize UX.

2. Understand your customers

Because every user is unique, you need to prioritize doing customer journey map research to understand each distinct buyer persona. 

To develop your customer personas , interview different categories of users with a tool like Lookback . Be sure to diversify your interviews by focusing on several different demographics—like age, location, gender, and socioeconomic status. 

Katerina Kondrenko , content marketing manager for the user persona creation tool UXPressia , warns that “fitting your entire audience into one or two personas means merging the needs of different people into a ball of contradictions.” Avoid this pitfall by speaking to a wide range of users and developing as many diverse personas as you need.

Pro tip: use Hotjar's Ask tools to get a better idea of what your users are looking for. Feedback and Survey tools let you hear firsthand how customers are experiencing their journey on your website—giving you valuable insights to improve UX.

Check out Hotjar’s bank of survey templates to get started. 

Learn what your users think of your website and the customer journey by asking the right questions with Hotjar Surveys.

3. Create a different map for each type of buyer

Once you’ve envisioned your main buyer personas, design a unique map for each of them. Different buyers operate in different ways depending on their roles and demographics—if you try to generalize every user persona under one broad customer journey map, you’ll miss out on the opportunity to create an enjoyable product experience for different buyers.

Maybe some Gen Zers find your brand through social media, and value these touchpoints more before and after purchase, while a sub-group of millennial buyers connect more through paid ads and organic search, and want email followup.

On your website, some sub-groups of users may scroll past the paragraphs of text on your homepage and jump immediately to a more engaging element, like a video or gif—while others want to find written content. Use Hotjar Heatmaps to identify the popular and unpopular elements on your pages, then adjust your website to help all users get to wherever they need to go, no matter what their journey looks like.

4. Collaborate with stakeholders 

Including a range of perspectives from relevant stakeholders is key to successfully creating any customer journey map. 

Jamie Irwin of Straight Up Search emphasizes the importance of “collaborating with stakeholders across your organization to ensure everyone is on the same page when it comes to delivering a great customer experience.”

For effective cross-functional collaboration , consult all teams that have insights about customer interactions and touchpoints, from sales and marketing to operations, design, customer service, and devs. 

Involve high-level decision-makers to get their buy-in on your final customer journey map and any corresponding actions.

Coming up with an actionable plan is only half the battle: you’ll need the approval of high-level management to implement it, and it’s much easier to sell your user mapping initiative at the initial stages than later on by engaging bosses throughout the process.

5. Track every step (including the ones in between) 

When building your map, be thorough: track every single phase a customer moves through in their journey, from the moment they find your product until long after they make their purchase . This could start when they see an ad for your product on search engines, continue to the first time they click on your homepage, extending all the way until after they check out.

Pay attention to touchpoints within customer touchpoints: map out specific touchpoints across your website—for example, from your homepage, landing page, and checkout pages to specific site elements like CTAs, signup forms, and media elements. 

Lisa Schuck , a marketing lead at Airship , reminds us that “aside from defining your touchpoints, you need to track how customers enter and exit each stage of the journey.” 

When you understand how users move between touchpoints, you give buyers the tools they need to move freely through their customer journey, making their experience smoother so they convert more and churn less. Pay attention to entry and exit points for each stage in your map: how do users begin engaging with each touchpoint, and when do they stop?

Pro tip: watch Hotjar Session Recordings and see exactly how potential customers move around key website touchpoints. What steps do they take before buying? Where do users that don’t convert drop off? Use these insights to improve your users’ purchasing experience.

Hotjar Session Recordings let you see your user's product experience as you watch exactly how they navigate your website to improve the customer journey.

6. Measure the outcome

Monitor the customer journey mapping KPIs you set in step one of this article to measure the overall outcome of your users’ journey and understand how different touchpoints impact your users—and conversions. Measure the following KPIs to see how effective your customer journey is at every stage:

Awareness stage: track impressions, reach, SEO ranking, bounce rate , and time on page to check whether customers are understanding the problem you solve and finding your solution.

Consideration stage: track clicks, click-through rate (CTR), engagement rate, and cost-per-click (CPC) to see whether customers are strongly considering your product solutions.

Decision stage: track conversion rate, sales, and cost-per-conversion (CPC) to analyze how customers make decisions about whether to purchase your product or service.

Customer retention: track customer loyalty, customer satisfaction, and customer lifetime value (CLV) to review whether customers are engaging with your product long-term.

Customer advocacy: track referrals and Net Promoter Score ®(NPS) to evaluate whether users speak about your solution to others.

7. Make it cyclical

Most customer journeys aren’t linear and your customer journey map should reflect this.

If you want high customer lifetime value (CLV) and strong brand advocates, mapping out a cyclical customer journey is essential: the journey doesn’t end when a user gets to know your product and makes a purchase.

Returning customers or long-term subscribers won’t return to the awareness stage, but they might hop between the consideration or decision stage several times as they make new conversion decisions. 

To maximize customer satisfaction, and, in turn, loyalty, you need to understand these different pathways to purchase. 

8. Create a living document

A static customer journey map won’t give you real insights into what your buyers need. Customer journey mapping is an ongoing process: review and update your customer journey map as you add new products and features to your business or change any key touchpoints.  

You should also adjust your customer journey map when there are changes in the market or customer behavior. 

Use Hotjar tools to spot changes in how users interact with your business and inform your living map. For example, if you notice a drop in conversions on your website, use Session Recordings to watch your users navigate and identify what’s going wrong so you can address the issue and update your customer journey map if needed.

Also, get customer feedback with Hotjar's Ask tools like Feedback widgets and Surveys to understand whether your map accurately reflects the experience users are having on your site.

Draw on best practices for a great customer journey map 

Though it requires some time and planning, a well-designed customer journey map helps you understand your buyers' behavior and needs so you can optimize their product experience. 

Implementing user-centric best practices will ensure you map out an effective map and turn curious prospects into happy repeat customers.

Use Hotjar tools to understand how your customers behave—and why—so you can improve their journey.

FAQs about customer journey mapping best practices

Why is it important to create a customer journey map.

The benefits of customer journey mapping include increased sales, improved key performance metrics, and happier, more satisfied users. It’s important to create a customer journey map to get a concrete idea of how to improve potential customers’ experience with your product or service at every touchpoint.

When should you implement customer journey mapping best practices?

Consider the best practices that should be used during each of the customer journey mapping stages . Certain best practices, like setting your goals and getting to know your users, should happen before mapping out the customer journey. 

Use best practices like collaborating with stakeholders and tracking the whole journey during the mapping process.  Follow-up practices, like measuring outcomes and keeping a living document, fit in after you create your user journey map.

What happens if you don’t follow customer journey mapping best practices?

If you don't follow customer journey mapping best practices, you’ll end up with a customer journey map that doesn’t give you the helpful insights it otherwise could.  

Plus, you may miss key steps in the mapping process, fail to keep all relevant stakeholders involved, and be unable to measure the success of the customer journey— which will result in unhappy customers, low customer retention, and overall decreased performance.

Previous chapter

CJM tips and how-tos

Next chapter

How to Create a Customer Journey Map That Connects

Nov 17, 2023 | Read time: 14 min.

Mike Rotella , Senior Marketing Specialist

• A customer journey map is a marketing tool that visually represents the journey customers take to reach a purchase decision, including the touchpoints and stages throughout that path.
• Customer journey maps help brands get the average consumer’s perspective to create a personalized research and buying experience.
• The customer journey mapping process takes stock of your assets and customer touchpoints, provides optimization opportunities, reveals gaps, and lets brands deliver value to consumers wherever they start their journey.

Contents Jump to

If you’re a marketer for a billion dollar retailer, you probably know your customers pretty well. No doubt you have dozens of buyer personas that describe when they wake up, their favorite foods, and where they shop. But, do you have a customer journey map?

Customer journey maps allow you to get a better understanding of the customer’s perspective so you can craft a more personalized shopping experience. The more you understand your customers, the better you can serve them and the more likely it is that they’ll come back again and again.

Read on and uncover the what, why, and how of customer journey mapping.

The traditional customer journey

At a high level, the customer journey is traditionally broken down into three stages:

• Awareness – The person is aware of a problem or opportunity, but they need more information so that they can fully understand the issue and specifically name it.
• Consideration – The person clearly understands the problem/opportunity. They are now thoroughly researching options so that they are aware of different methods for addressing the issue.
• Decision – The person is making a final decision as to which product/service to purchase.

The above describes the old customer journey, one that struggles to reflect the real customer lifecycle . It’s becoming outdated. With the advent of search intent-derived consumer insights and newer understandings of human behavior, updated models are required.

Today’s realistic customer journey:

• Acknowledges that journeys are non-linear, with consumers entering at many different points
• Divides consumers into two categories: the 95% researching, and the 5% who are ready to buy
• Better reflects consumer behavior and aligns with today’s customer needs
• Leverages touchpoints and assets to deliver substantial value at each step of the journey and before asking for a transaction

To get the most out of this article, we recommend checking out Rethinking the Buyer’s Journey for a full discussion on the real path consumers are taking.

What is a customer journey map?

MARKETING TERM DEFINITION Customer Journey Map A customer journey map is a visual guide illustrating the customer’s experience. It pinpoints key moments, showcasing customer needs and emotions, while also identifying brand touchpoints, gaps, and areas of friction.

Journey maps are like roadmaps for your customer personas. They go beyond demographic information and help marketing team members and stakeholders walk in your customer’s shoes. As a result, you’ll set more customer-focused business goals, and create a more seamless omnichannel experience.

Journey maps also give marketing teams a customer-centric visualization of how your target audience thinks. They encourage you to ask important market research questions like:

• What caused them to identify a frustration, problem, issue, need, or new goal or opportunity?
• What do they do when they realize this problem/opportunity?
• Where do they turn?
• What sources of information do they use?
• Where do they visit online?
• Whose advice do they seek?
• What frustrations do they encounter along the way?
• What are their questions at each step of the journey?

Think of all the different ways prospects experience your brand in real-time: email, social media, video, search engines, your website, TV, etc. The customer journey map helps you take stock of all these different customer touchpoints , optimize them, and fill important gaps.

Get Terakeet’s free customer journey map template below!

Customer Journey Map Template

Create better journey maps to reveal consumer needs.

Benefits of customer journey mapping

Creating a customer journey map is one of the most important visual tools brands can leverage to connect with their customers, truly understand their needs, treat them like real people, and ultimately, detect gaps and friction points that damage conversions.

Reveals audience insights

Customer journey mapping reveals how different types of customers move through your marketing funnel, which helps brands understand their customers’ needs in order to improve the user experience for each demographic. It also creates opportunities to optimize your marketing strategy across your buyer personas. 

For example, millennials will interact with your company differently than baby boomers. C-Suite executives have different priorities than small business owners, and each will take different steps before arriving at the purchasing decision.

Journey mapping unlocks the many paths to a purchase that your audience travels on, and lets you optimize with deep audience insight in the driver’s seat.

Delivers value

When you understand the customer journey and have a map in place, brand marketers can zero in on each individual touchpoint or asset to ensure that each delivers a unique value to consumers. With each touchpoint optimized, brands establish a network ready to help consumers reach solutions and achieve customer satisfaction. 

The value provided at each engagement gives consumers what they want, building the relationship way before they’re ready to buy. This helps boost the trust needed for transactions and puts the brand in the forefront of the consumer mind into the future. 

Creates connections

All the effort of customer journey mapping pays off because it enables marketers to connect with consumers at all journey points. This eases friction points, and removes roadblocks that could lead to lost sales, increased churn, or a poor reputation. As a result, you’ll shorten the buying cycle, improve conversion rates, and increase customer retention.

Creating a great customer journey is the key to authentic connections. When you make authentic connections, the KPIs and metrics that indicate success necessarily move in the right direction.

How to create a customer journey map in 8 steps

This is how you can create a customer journey map (plus a few high-performance upgrades):

1. Set your goals

Before launching a journey mapping project, it’s important to have clear goals and objectives. 

Determining your goals and measurement metrics will likely involve a cross-departmental team in order to understand the relevant needs of the project. What are you trying to improve? How will you measure it? What is your current conversion rate? Answering these questions can guide the process. 

2. Define audience segments and buyer personas

First, define your audience segments based on the different types of customers that you serve. Then, create buyer personas within those segments.

If you sell consulting services, you may have one segment for healthcare clients, another for financial services, and yet another for technology. Or maybe you segment your audience by the number of employees or geography.

Perhaps you instead segment your audience by age group — an ecommerce fashion brand may target pre-teens, teens, and women separately. Or, if you’re a fashion brand like Athleta, you target by activity — yoga, running, hiking, cold weather training, tennis, golf, swimming, etc.

Once you segment your audience, build personas of your ideal customers in each segment. Here are some examples of buyer personas to get started.

Obviously, persona information will vary depending on whether you’re B2B or B2C and the price of your product/service. Some information you may want to include:

• Income / revenue
• Job to be done (JTBD)
• Pain points
• Products desired
• Features desired

The objective is to thoroughly understand your ideal customers. When you have clarity on what they want and what their struggles are, you can create a customer journey that resonates with them, guides them through the process, and moves them to take action.

3. Identify customer pain points with empathy maps

The next step in creating your customer journey map is to clearly identify customer pain points at each step of the journey. 

In the initial awareness stage, what are they feeling? What frustrations are they experiencing? What is motivating them to start exploring solutions to their problem? Do they need a certain type of educational content?

During the consideration stage, what information do they need? What is keeping them from moving forward?

In the decision stage, what is hindering them from pulling the trigger? Do they have sufficient comparisons with alternatives? What are their fears, and how can you alleviate those fears? Have you provided them with sufficient social proof and assurances.

During the retention stage, gather Voice of the Customer feedback such as a net promoter score (NPS) from long-term customers.

Remember, the buying process is both factual and emotional. People’s decision making is based on a combination of concrete information and subjective emotions. To truly understand your customers, deploy an empathy map to address both types of potential roadblocks.

4. Use search intent data to deeply grasp customer desire

“How do I find out what questions and searches potential customers are performing?” you might ask.

The answer: search intent data from what we call the world’s most honest focus group — Google. 

The searches of millions of users are available to marketers to really understand consumers, their motivations, and how to help them solve their biggest pain points.

Consumers who need to find solutions go to Google and seek out exactly what they want. Search-derived consumer insight answers the what and lets brands prepare a journey that aligns.

Brands that strategically leverage this revealing, honest customer data can use it at every point across the customer journey map to deliver what people want. Then tools like the MACH-6 can be used to provide structure to customer journey touchpoints through your network of assets (more on that in step 6). This builds authentic connections and ensures your map actually reflects reality.

Boosting customer engagement

At each step of the customer journey, you need to have specific, effective ways to engage with your audience. You need to be able to speak to relevant pain points, thoroughly answer questions, and help prospects take the next step in the buying journey. 

There are dozens of ways to engage your audience. You need to choose the ones that will best serve your potential customers in contextually relevant ways through their journey. At each step in the customer journey map, determine what the potential customer wants or needs most and how you can provide that for them. 

It’s about creating the best possible customer interaction by delivering on customer expectations. Search intent data makes this achievable.

5. List the customer touchpoints

What are customer touchpoints ? They’re all the different ways a prospective customer interacts with your brand during their journey. This includes, but isn’t limited to:

• Your website
• Third-party websites
• Social media
• Search engines
• Review sites
• Influencers
• Product demos
• Sales team interactions
• Customer support/customer success interactions

Include each touchpoint in your customer journey map. Seeing the different touchpoints gives you insight into the different steps customers take before finally making a buying decision. 

By understanding their state of mind at each step in the customer journey, you can uncover psychological triggers that can help them feel more confident in taking the next steps. You can then optimize each brand touchpoint, or even reduce the number of touchpoints required.

Audience actions

When identifying touchpoints, focus primarily on ones where people take action. Whether they click on a Google search result, interact on social media, or respond to an email, look for all the different ways your audience takes action. 

Once you have a list of actions, determine the underlying motivations and reasons at each step in the journey. Then, look for ways to reduce the number of actions a person must take along their customer journey to increase conversion rates.

Questions throughout the customer journey

It’s also important to identify the questions potential customers ask at each touchpoint in your customer journey map. Confusion, jargon, and uncertainty can hinder prospects from moving forward in the buying journey.

Document the actual questions running through the minds of your prospective customers at each step of the journey. Do this, and you’ll likely be ahead of many of your competitors.

If you don’t know the questions they are asking, start interviewing them and conduct surveys. You can also get insight from live chat sessions, your salespeople, and support teams. Even better, use search intent data — see step 5.

The more questions you can answer at each touchpoint, the less friction potential customers will feel and the more likely it is that they’ll move on to the next phase of the journey.

6. Organize your touchpoints by degree of control

The MACH-6 , an asset organization tool, can help you arrange your touchpoints across the customer journey in a more strategic manner. Instead of a big list of brand-owned and unowned properties, the MACH-6 arranges touchpoints based on degree of brand control. 

You start with your owned assets , those you fully control, move into those you manage, then focus on those you merely influence.

Using this framework, you can assess all the assets you have, where they land on the MACH-6, and determine what linkages are missing, need development, or require optimization.

7. Re-assess your current state customer journey and develop your future state

Next, determine how your current journey looks. This will help find gaps, friction points, and alignment opportunities.

Start with an audit of your current traffic sources and referral channels. This data is available in analytics platforms. Where are your consumers coming from? Social? Organic search? It’s likely a mix of many sources.

Assess the existing touchpoints that support the journey your audience is on. Take inventory of everything you have — corporate site, blogs, social media accounts, and more — and map it out. 

When you know what your asset landscape looks like, you reveal the areas that miss the mark, and the assets that need refinement—more on that next.

8. Finalize your customer journey map

Next, create a final blueprint for your customer journey map. Based on the above you now understand your consumer and what they want, you know how to solve their pain points, and most important, you know where you’ll deliver solutions across the customer journey.

Use all of that for your mapping process and you’ll create a strategic customer journey map that reflects how real consumers behave in the modern digital marketplace.

Customer journey map example

For example, let’s look at Ember , which sells temperature-controlled coffee mugs. What does their customer journey look like and how should they engage their audience?

• A potential customer realizes how often they have to reheat their coffee because it gets cold.
• They become frustrated and Google terms like “coffee warmer” or “how to keep coffee hot”.
• They find lists of hacks to keep their coffee warm, including cup sleeves, scarves, lids, and metal coffee beans. However, there are few mentions of Ember or temperature-controlled mugs.
• They don’t find Ember in the first two pages of Google organic results.
• Ember is included in the product ads in the search results. But banner blindness causes most people to scroll past the ads. 
• Ember could use interactive assessments to discover when users search for hot coffee (e.g., the weekend at home, during the workday while at the office).
• Where Ember does better is in the middle of the content marketing funnel . After coffee lovers discover Ember, they check out the brand. 
• This is where Ember’s videos make a difference. Ember’s videos cover everything from product introductions to recipes to the brand’s focus on “putting time back”. Some videos have thousands of views, while others have millions.
• While on the Ember website, the brand shares its purpose, commitment to exceptional design, and its technology. On the product pages themselves, they seal the deal with video, customer reviews, product details, a CTA for the help center, and a FAQ.

How to get the most out of your customer journey map

Anyone can create a customer journey map but there are a few ways to ensure your map actually works, and actually represents reality. Here’s how:

Achieve audience alignment with search intent – a reminder

Customer journey maps are only as effective as the data you use to build them. If you misunderstand what people want and fumble that moment of value delivery it erodes audience alignment. Each time you serve something the consumer does not want, is not asking for, or is not ready for, this erosion strengthens. With the wrong approach, it’s easy to produce a misaligned map. 

For this reason — we want to reiterate — search intent data is the key to truly understanding real people and helping them in real ways. That’s what alignment looks like.

Create a consistent, superior customer experience

A major goal of creating a customer journey map is to ensure that you provide a superior digital customer experience (DCX) from start to finish. Set this as a central goal from the jump, along with your business goals.

A user journey map clarifies each step a customer takes so you can make them as pleasing and painless as possible. Outstanding experiences leads to more customers, orders, and revenue. 

Need proof? Look no further than Amazon.

Known for their obsessive focus on the customer’s experience, they’ve spent billions to make online purchasing as easy as possible. One-click ordering, free two-day shipping, ultra-personalized recommendations — the list goes on and on. The result of creating such a fantastic experience is millions of customers and hundreds of billions in revenue.

Focus on authentic consumer connections and the rest will follow

Obviously, brands want to create a customer journey that results in leads and transactions. And while this may define the ultimate success of your efforts, reaching that goal requires a focus elsewhere; a focus on building authentic consumer connections.

From start to finish, brands that build customer journey maps around a reception marketing paradigm and customer-centricity achieve bigger wins when it’s time to buy. So rather than building some linear, basic map aimed at making sales, create one to make connections with consumers by providing upfront and consistent value.

The evolution of customer journey maps

Customer journey maps are still a vital tool in the modern marketer’s arsenal, but as we’ve noted above, things have changed and continue to evolve. 

The biggest learning over the past several years is that traditional marketing models have simply not kept pace with the consumer. Nor have interruptive techniques. And, as discussed, even the way customer journeys look has changed, making it more difficult than ever to build authentic connections .

With this in mind, by augmenting the standard customer journey map with a few new elements — owned assets, search intent, and the MACH-6 — they become more effective in the context of today’s consumers.

This approach builds your strategy on a strong owned asset optimization (OAO) foundation, one in which:

• You really understand your consumer and their needs
• You have a sophisticated touchpoint network to deliver solutions
• You are prepared to deliver value when audiences actually want it

We recommend reading the following article to see how these three elements create a marketing paradigm shift, and how your brand can capitalize on it:

Owned Asset Optimization (OAO) | The Foundational Guide

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The Buyer Journey Map: How to Chart Your Customers’ Course

In the bustling marketplace, understanding the path your customer travels from awareness to purchase is vital. That's where a buyer journey map comes into play.

This detailed guide serves as your customer's road map, charting their course from initial interest to ultimate loyalty. Let's delve into the intriguing world of the buyer journey map.

What Is a Buyer Journey Map?

Essentially, a buyer’s journey map is a visual representation of a consumer's experience with your brand, from initial awareness to making a purchase. It outlines the various touchpoints and stages a buyer goes through during the purchasing process.

A buyer journey map helps businesses understand what their customers are experiencing and how to improve their overall journey. It's an essential tool that should be used by all businesses to design a seamless and engaging customer experience.

In this article, we will further explore the importance and benefits of creating a Buyer Journey Map.

The Difference Between Buyer's Journey & Customer Journey

Understanding the difference between the buyer's journey and customer journey is crucial for any marketer. The buyer journey map focuses on an individual's path from being a potential customer to becoming a loyal customer.

In contrast, the customer journey map illustrates the entire experience of a customer, including their interactions with the company before and after the purchase. Both maps are critical in enhancing customer experience and optimizing customer success. Also, the customer journey metrics are quite different from buyer journey’s metrics.

Creating buyer journey maps involves analyzing the buyer persona, considering the potential customer needs, identifying touchpoints, and understanding customer behavior at each stage of the buying process.

On the other hand, mapping the customer journey involves mapping all interactions a customer has with the company, from the awareness stage to post-purchase follow-up. By identifying and analyzing customer pain points, expectations, and feedback, marketers can optimize customer retention and create loyal customers.

Read this article c ustomer journey analytics to understand the customer journey better.

Ultimately, understanding the difference between buyer journey mapping and customer journey management is a key step for B2B marketers to enhance their marketing automation, net promoter score, and customer service.

What Are The 5 Stages Of Buyer Journey?

Awareness stage.

The buyer journey map outlines the different stages that a consumer goes through when making a purchase. These stages include awareness, consideration, decision-making, retention, and advocacy.

The first step in the buyer's journey is the awareness stage. At this stage, consumers become aware of a problem or need that they have and begin to seek out information about it. They may conduct online research, ask friends or family members for recommendations, or visit stores to gather information.

As a result, marketers need to create content that will capture the attention of potential customers and provide valuable information to help educate them about their needs. This stage is crucial as it sets the foundation for the rest of the buyer's journey.

Consideration Stage

The Consideration Stage is the second stage of the buyer's journey, where the potential customer has shown some interest in the available products or services.

In this stage, the customer is interested in learning more about the products and is considering whether they fit their needs. The customer is actively researching and seeking information about the features, benefits, and pricing of the products.

The Consideration Stage is critical for businesses to provide valuable information and answer any questions the customer may have. The business should focus on building trust and relationships with the customers while providing them with relevant content and high-quality services so that the customer feels comfortable in making a purchase.

Decision Stage

The Decision Stage represents a crucial phase in the buyer journey map. At this point, customers are faced with a plethora of choices, with each option representing a different brand. Informed by their research, they make their selection from a shortlist of products or services.

However, the buyer's journey does not culminate with the decision to purchase. Rather, it extends into the equally important stages of Retention and Loyalty.

After the initial purchase, businesses aim to maintain a relationship with the customer, fostering their loyalty and, ideally, turning them into brand advocates.

Thus, the Decision Stage is not the final step but a transition into the ongoing stages of customer relationship management and loyalty building.

Retention Stage

The Retention Stage is an important segment of the buyer's journey, focusing on maintaining and deepening the customer-business relationship post-purchase.

It involves ensuring customer satisfaction by delivering consistent product quality and excellent customer service. Businesses may employ various strategies such as personalized communication, loyalty programs, and exceptional after-sales service.

The ultimate goal is to encourage repeat purchases, implying that the customer sees value in maintaining a relationship with the brand.

By successfully implementing retention strategies, businesses not only enhance customer loyalty but also improve their profitability, as retaining existing customers is generally less costly than acquiring new ones.

Loyalty Stage

The Loyalty Stage is the ultimate phase in the buyer's journey, where customers become more than just repeat buyers—they become brand advocates.

This stage is marked by customers' deep trust and emotional connection with the brand. They are not only loyal in their purchasing behavior but also willingly recommend the brand to others, amplifying its reach and reputation.

Businesses nurture this loyalty through continued exceptional service, valuable reward programs, and consistent engagement.

This stage significantly contributes to a business's growth and stability, as loyal customers not only bring in repeat business but also act as brand ambassadors, attracting new customers through their recommendations.

How To Create A Buyer Journey Map?

Define your target audience.

The first step in creating a buyer journey map is defining your target audience. This process involves determining who your potential customers are, what their needs and wants are, and how your product or service can meet those needs.

Detailed personas should be developed, covering demographic information, psychographic factors, motivations, and behaviors. These personas should be as specific as possible, as they will guide the rest of the journey mapping process.

Understanding your audience is fundamental because a well-defined target audience can illuminate the specific steps a prospective buyer may take when considering your brand.

Identify Stages of the Buyer Journey

Once you've defined your audience, the next step is to identify the stages of the buyer journey. Typically, these stages include Awareness, Consideration, Decision, Retention, and Loyalty.

However, these stages may vary based on your industry, product, or service. The key here is to outline a journey that accurately reflects your customers' experiences.

Each stage represents a unique mindset and set of actions taken by the customer. Identifying these stages allows you to tailor your marketing efforts to meet the needs and expectations of customers at each point in their journey.

Conduct Research

The final step is conducting thorough research. This could involve surveys, focus groups, interviews, or analyzing customer data .

Research should be aimed at understanding your customers' experiences at each stage of the buyer journey. This includes determining the actions they take, the challenges they face, and the emotions they experience.

Additionally, it's important to identify the touchpoints, or moments of interaction, between your business and the customer during each stage.

Comprehensive research is essential for developing a buyer journey map that is both accurate and useful. It provides the insight needed to create strategies that enhance the customer experience, leading to higher retention and loyalty.

Map Out Customer Touchpoints

Mapping out customer touchpoints is a vital component of creating a buyer journey map. A touchpoint refers to any point of interaction between your business and the customer.

These interactions could be direct, such as a customer visiting your website or speaking with a sales representative, or indirect, like seeing a social media post or a review about your product.

Begin by listing all possible touchpoints in each stage of the buyer journey, from the customer's initial awareness to their loyalty to your brand.

For each touchpoint, consider the customer's potential experiences, their needs, and their likely emotions. This can help you identify opportunities for improvement or further engagement.

Remember, touchpoints should be viewed from the customer's perspective, not the company's. This focus ensures that the buyer journey map remains a useful tool for enhancing the customer experience and fostering long-term relationships.

Identify Pain Points and Opportunities

Identifying pain points and opportunities forms the next crucial step in the buyer journey map creation. Pain points are any challenges or frustrations that a customer may encounter throughout their journey with your brand.

They could relate to product features, pricing, customer service, or any other aspect of their experience.

Identifying these pain points is vital as it allows you to address any areas where the customer experience may be lacking. You can then work on solutions to alleviate these challenges, enhancing the customer's journey.

Simultaneously, this process also uncovers opportunities. Opportunities are moments where you can exceed customer expectations or differentiate your brand.

They could involve creating more personalized experiences, streamlining processes to make them more efficient, or introducing new features or services that enhance value.

By addressing pain points and leveraging opportunities, you can provide an improved customer experience that fosters loyalty and advocacy.

Align Marketing and Content Strategies

The final step in the buyer journey map process is to align your marketing and content strategies with your newfound insights. Each stage of the journey calls for a specific approach that best meets the needs and preferences of your customers at that point.

For instance, in the Awareness stage, your content strategy may involve educational blog posts or informative social media content to engage potential customers. In the Consideration stage, you might focus on producing comparison guides, case studies, or customer testimonials.

Furthermore, your marketing strategies should also reflect the journey. This could involve targeted ad campaigns in the early stages or personalized email marketing as customers move towards the Decision stage.

By aligning your strategies with the buyer journey map, you ensure your efforts resonate with your audience, ultimately leading to increased engagement, conversions, and brand loyalty.

In essence, your content and marketing strategies should be integral components of your customer's journey, providing value at each step along the way.

Test & Refine The Journey

Once your buyer journey map is complete, the work isn’t over yet. It's essential to continuously test and refine the journey map based on actual customer feedback and evolving market trends.

Start by sharing the map with your team, especially those who interact directly with customers, like sales and customer service representatives. They can provide valuable insights that can further enhance the map.

Then, measure the effectiveness of your strategies. Are customers moving smoothly from one stage to the next? Are they engaging with your content as expected? Surveys, customer interviews, and data analysis can provide these answers.

Remember, the buyer journey map is not a static document; it's a dynamic tool that should evolve as your business and customer behavior changes. Regularly revisiting and refining the map ensures it remains an effective guide for driving customer-centric decisions and strategies.

3 Examples Of A Successful Buyer Journey Map

Example 1: starbucks.

Starbucks offers a perfect example of a successful buyer journey map, with customer experience at its heart. The journey starts with the Awareness stage, where Starbucks attracts potential customers through social media campaigns and word-of-mouth from existing customers.

In the Consideration stage, they leverage their reputation for quality coffee and comfortable ambiance, matched with detailed product descriptions and customer reviews.

The Decision stage is facilitated by their friendly staff and quick service, leading to the Retention stage where Starbucks keeps customers coming back through its popular loyalty program.

Finally, the Loyalty stage is fueled by their exceptional customer service and consistent product quality, turning regular customers into brand ambassadors.

Example 2: Amazon

Amazon's buyer journey map is a masterstroke in customer-centric strategy. In the Awareness stage, they reach potential customers through robust SEO strategies, targeted advertising, and extensive product selection.

The Consideration stage is marked by user-friendly website navigation, comprehensive product descriptions, and a multitude of customer reviews.

The Decision stage is streamlined by their one-click ordering system and competitive pricing.

Post-purchase, Amazon excels in the Retention stage with easy returns, prompt customer service, and personalized product recommendations.

The Loyalty stage is amplified by the benefits of Amazon Prime membership, including expedited shipping and access to exclusive content, creating devoted brand advocates.

Example 3: Apple

Apple's buyer journey map is a testament to its user-focused approach.

The Awareness stage is fueled by their innovative product launches and compelling advertising campaigns.

In the Consideration stage, Apple's distinct brand image and reputation for high-quality, design-forward products come into play, supported by detailed product specifications and reviews on their website.

The Decision stage is enhanced by their seamless online and in-store buying experiences. The Retention stage is marked by excellent after-sales service and regular software updates, ensuring customer satisfaction post-purchase.

Lastly, the Loyalty stage is nurtured through the ecosystem of Apple products and services, encouraging customers to stay within the brand for additional purchases, and leading to strong brand advocacy.

Final Thoughts In conclusion, crafting a detailed buyer journey map is integral to understanding your customer's experience and optimizing your marketing and service strategies accordingly.

Through examples like Starbucks, Amazon, and Apple, we see the power of a well-executed map in guiding customers from awareness to loyalty, ensuring a successful business trajectory.

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By Ahsan Zafeer

Buyer journey mapping is a strategic process of visualizing the path taken by your buyers from their initial awareness of your brand to the ultimate purchase decision. This map reveals fundamental interactions, emotions, and decision points your buyers experience.

It’s not merely a storyline but a powerful tool to understand and predict customer behavior, enabling you to tailor your sales approach for increased conversions.

Why is Buyer Journey Mapping Important?

In today’s competitive market, understanding your buyer’s journey is more crucial than ever. It allows you to:

• Personalize your sales approach: By understanding your buyer’s needs at each stage, you can tailor your messaging and solutions to their needs.
• Identify gaps in your sales process: Mapping the buyer’s journey can highlight touchpoints where potential customers may be dropping off, enabling you to take corrective measures.
• Enhance customer experience: By aligning your sales process with the buyer’s journey, you can significantly improve their experience, leading to higher satisfaction and loyalty.

Mastering Buyer Journey Mapping in 7 Steps

Navigating the complex sale scene requires a deep understanding of the buyer’s journey. This journey is your customers’ path from recognizing a need to purchasing. Mapping this journey effectively can significantly enhance your sales strategy and content alignment. Here’s a seven-step framework to master buyer journey mapping:

1. Define Your Buyer Personas

Begin by creating detailed buyer personas. Understanding your buyer’s challenges, questions, and goals is essential for an accurate buyer journey map. This involves deep research and possibly conducting interviews to gather rich insights. These personas are the foundation of your journey map, guiding every step of the process.

2. Identify Buyer Persona Challenges

In the awareness stage, identify the obstacles preventing your buyer from accomplishing their goals. What triggers their realization of a problem? Document all potential challenges and concerns that bring this issue to their attention. For instance, if you’re selling IT services, a buyer persona like an IT Director might become aware of a need for better cybersecurity after experiencing a breach.

Adapting to Sales Personality Types: The Key to Closing More Deals and Elevating Your Sales Game

3. Explore All Possible Solutions

During the consideration stage, think about various solutions your buyer might contemplate. What different approaches could they consider? Address the buyer’s top-of-mind questions and concerns regarding these solutions. For example, a buyer aware of their cybersecurity needs might explore different software solutions or consider partnering with an IT service provider.

According to the 2019 Gartner Customer Experience Management Survey , organizations employing customer journey maps are twice as likely to surpass their competitors in performance compared to those not using them.

4. Analyze Competing Solutions

In the decision stage, list competitors offering similar solutions. What factors will the buyer consider when evaluating these options? For instance, when considering cybersecurity solutions, the buyer might assess costs, functionality, and ease of use in software or evaluate the expertise of different IT service providers.

5. Identify Friction Points

After mapping the awareness, consideration, and decision stages, identify potential hurdles in the buyer’s journey. What challenges might they encounter that could impede their progress or decision-making? By pinpointing these friction points, you can create content that helps and effectively sells by smoothing the buyer’s journey.

6. Audit Existing Content

Examine the content you already have, like blogs, ebooks, and guides. Determine where each piece fits within the buyer’s journey. Does it address high-level pain points, focus on specific solutions, or sell your business as the right partner? This audit is crucial in understanding your existing content’s role in each stage of the journey.

7. Create Content to Fill Gaps

Identifying gaps, especially in the consideration stage, with understanding where your existing content fits. A strategic approach is to start creating content for the decision stage first, then move backward to the consideration and awareness stages. This ensures a focused approach to converting buyers into customers and provides a clear “next step” for each new piece of content.

Implementing the Framework

I mplementing this framework requires careful planning and a deep understanding of your buyer’s needs. Continuously refine your journey map based on feedback and changing market conditions. Use this map as a guide to create relevant, helpful content that reduces friction in the buyer’s journey. This approach leads to satisfied customers more likely to promote your brand.

In conclusion, mastering the buyer journey mapping is not just about understanding your customer’s path to purchase; it’s about aligning your sales and marketing strategies to meet their needs at every step. By following this seven-step framework, you’ll be well-equipped to navigate the sales verse effectively, leading to improved customer relationships and increased sales success.

You might be wondering, “What’s the next step? How do I apply all these insights practically?”

Well, that’s where the Business Bootcamp comes into play.

Think of it as your hands-on guide to bringing those buyer journey maps to life. The Business Bootcamp’s effective sales training ensures that  we don’t just talk theory; we walk you through applying these concepts to real-world sales scenarios. Over two engaging days, you’ll learn how to:

• Fine-tune your approach to finding and nurturing top talent with a keen eye on the personas you’ve mapped out.
• Tailor your training methods to address the specific stages of the buyer’s journey, ensuring your team knows how to engage effectively at each point.
• Create a motivating, rewarding culture that mirrors the insights and anticipations you’ve gathered from understanding your buyers’ paths.

Reserve your spot now and leap from mapping to mastering the buyer’s journey with us.

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What are Buyer Journey Maps and Why Are They Important?

Consider what happens when you buy a new product.  You probably start with a certain awareness of the product. Maybe you had it recommended to you by a friend. Or you found out about the product during a google search.

  62% of customers start with a search engine query when they evaluate a new purchase. 

Or you just came across it in a product listing on Amazon or another eCommerce site.

Do you just make the decision to buy the product right then and there, based on your gut? Occasionally, maybe. For small purchases at the grocery store or similar transactions.

But if it’s an expensive product, you aren’t going to throw away your hard-earned money without doing a little due diligence first.

So you start with a little research. You might look at similar products and compare prices. You may read customer reviews online and learn more about the benefits and issues that people commonly run into after buying the product.

Maybe you’ll scour social media for conversations about the product to see what others have thought.

Even if you end up going to a brick-and-mortar store to make the purchase, there is a good chance that you will do some online research first, as 67% of consumers do at least some online research before in-person purchase.

That is the buyer’s journey. It may not be a fully conscious decision on our part. It’s just a part of the risk/reward analysis that we all cognitively go through when we are making an expensive purchase.

All buyers do it. There are certain stages that buyers consistently go through on their way toward making a purchase.

A buyer’s journey map is the process of defining and mapping out the process that your customers go through on their way toward buying your product.

Building out an effective buyer’s journey map puts you in a position to better understand your customers and deliver a better experience.

Why Create Buyer Journey Maps?

A buyer’s journey map is a visual representation of the steps that your audience typically goes through on their way to becoming your customer and buying your product.

In the most effective buyer’s journey maps, you’ll include information about things that your prospects would like to know at a given time and pair that up with different types of content that you will deliver to fill those informational needs.

Mapping out these processes provides direction and transparency for your marketing team.

It creates value for your bottom line. In a recent study from the Aberdeen Group, they found that businesses that use buyer journey maps average a 79% increase in cross-selling and upselling revenue , compared to organizations that do not.

This just goes to show that companies that create, integrate, and use buyer’s journey mapping seriously have a better understanding of what their customers want and when they want it.

So why create buyer journey maps?

Because it helps you to understand your audience. It provides a simple way to pay more attention to the actions that your customers take that actually have an impact on whether or not they buy your product.

It can help you to hone in on what they want to know and when they want to know it. Then, you can prioritize the content and conversations that have the most impact on their decision to purchase.

What is the Standard Buyer’s Journey?

Source: HubSpot

Although you can always custom-tailor your buyer’s journey map to the specific route that your customers typically take in engaging with your business, there is a standard buyer’s journey that is common in most B2B purchases, known as the ‘hourglass model.’

The hourglass buyer’s journey model has been a staple in B2B marketing for decades.

The different stages include:

• Awareness stage
• Consideration stage
• Decision stage
• Retention stage
• Advocacy stage

This is the process that a majority of customers go through on their way toward buying a product. 

In each stage, there are different actions that a customer may take, information that they may look for, and content that they will want to engage with as they make their decision.

By mapping out the different processes and content that you will share with prospects in each stage, you begin to map out the process of walking your customers through the buying decision.

By being that source of information that they need throughout the process, you create trust with the customer as they compare you to your competition.

A better buying experience means more loyal customers, higher-value customers, and a better reputation among your prospects.

Let’s take a look at each stage in the buyer's journey.

Awareness Stage

In the awareness stage, the buyer first realizes that they have a problem. They are able to identify the issue and are beginning their search for a solution.

Here, they may not even fully be aware of the type of solution that they are going to need to solve the problem, that is just a part of their broader research.

Pay careful attention to how your customers talk about their goals and challenges when they first discover your product and begin engaging with your team. What problems are they looking to solve?

They may well think their problem is one thing, only to discover that the problem is bigger than they originally considered. It’s during this stage that they are still feeling out whether their problem is a big enough priority to warrant an investment from their business.

Here, you want your prospects to consider the effect of inaction on their part. You want them to see that without a solution, their problems will only continue.

You’ll also want to answer common misconceptions that they may have at this point in the process — both about the issue that they are experiencing as well as about your solution, or other potential solutions.

Hone in on what considerations ultimately make them decide whether or not they should prioritize their problem. When you know what changes their mind, you can craft marketing materials that help to drive that point home.

Here, you’ll deliver several different types of content to your prospects to help them educate themselves on their problem and potential solutions.

Content types that are common in the awareness stage include:

• White papers
• Analyst and research reports
• Educational content

Consideration Stage

In the consideration stage, buyers have defined a clear goal and have decided that it needs to be addressed. Your solution will be one of a number that they are considering and looking at. They are committed to addressing their problems at this point.

Here, they will begin to evaluate several different solutions in earnest. They are looking at features, benefits, pricing — anything that they need to help them make the right decision for their business.

But remember that in the consideration stage, your prospects may still be figuring out what types of solutions will give them the best results. There are multiple different ways to skin a cat, and your job is to show your prospects that your way is the best way.

Understand how your buyers typically educate themselves on the different solutions available to them. Knowing how they learn about them is just as important as knowing what the solutions themselves are.

How do they typically view the pros and cons of each category? What categories do they typically lean toward in the beginning? What solutions push them in another direction?

Position yourself as an authority and deliver marketing content that walks them through the process.

These are the questions that you want to answer in the consideration stage.

The types of content that you will typically deliver during this stage include:

• Expert guides
• Product category comparisons
• Longform content

Decision Stage

Now it's time to come to a conclusion. In the decision stage , buyers have settled on a solution category. If they are still engaging with your business, congratulations, because they have settled on your category.

Now they have to narrow things down. They may have several different solutions that they are considering in your category. In order to effectively communicate with your prospects in the decision stage, you have to key in on a few different things surrounding their purchase.

First, know their criteria. How did they evaluate solutions? What are the exact features or benefits that they were most interested in as they looked at the options that were available in front of them?

What do they like about your offering? What do they like about the competition? Ultimately, you’ll need to convince them that you are the best choice for the things that they care most about.

Another consideration is who needs to be involved in their decision. Are there going to be multiple stakeholders? If there are, are they all at the same point in the buyer’s journey? Or do they need further education as well?

Understanding what drives each individual stakeholder inside of an organization is critical. Today there are an average of 6.8 stakeholders involved in the enterprise decision-making process.

The types of content that you should be delivering to prospects that are in the decision stage of the buyer's journey map include:

• Product comparisons
• Case studies
• Trial downloads
• Product spec sheets

Retention Stage

Now your customer makes a purchase. That doesn’t mean the customer journey ends. In fact, the most important part of the customer journey is just beginning, particularly if you want to turn them into lifelong customers.

For subscription businesses, the retention stage is arguably the most important part of the process. You’ve already invested in acquiring the customer, now you have to focus on keeping them.

In this stage, it’s all about learning about your customers and their needs. How can you improve? What has the experience been like from their perspective? Are they getting everything they can out of your solution? Are they applying it right?

Retention is critical. It’s so critical, that customer success departments have become increasingly common as an additional customer-facing wing to your customer support reps.

In inbound marketing, this stage is known as the “delight” stage. Your goal should be to provide an exceptional experience to your customers and cater to their needs to the best of your ability.

To do that, you’ll need to have ongoing conversations that make your customers feel heard. Additionally, you’ll need to continue to deliver valuable content that helps them to make the most out of their investment in your solution.

Content delivered in this stage includes:

• Product usage guides
• Feature spotlights
• Customer success content

Advocacy Stage

Once you have delighted your customers, then you can focus on turning them into advocates. Give them opportunities to share your solution with like-minded individuals.

If your customers love you, they will love sharing your solution with others.

Providing benefits through referral programs can be a great way to incentivize advocacy, but the best way is to ensure that you are providing a stellar service to each and every customer that comes through your door.

Source: Business 2 Community

Buyer Journey Maps Critical to Understanding Customers

Using buyer journey maps to better understand your customers is a necessity for modern companies. The more that you can know and learn about your prospects and customers, the better that you will be able to serve them throughout the buying process.

Ultimately, creating these maps is about giving yourself a visual tool that you can use to better understand what information your customers will need to aid their purchasing decision and when they will need it.

Refining your buyer’s journey will help you to increase marketing qualified leads and sales qualified leads, improving conversion rates over time.

Here at RiseFuel , we use the buyer’s journey to inform the inbound marketing strategies that we put together for our clients.

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The Buyer Journey: Creating a Customer Journey Map

Do you know the specific touchpoints your customer has in order to make a purchase decision? Can you confidently say that your website is optimized for sales, your social media is building trust, and your PPC ads are high converting?

Or, like many B2B businesses, are your marketing efforts a lot of moving parts that never quite seem to fit together?

If you can relate, you probably haven’t spent the time buyer journey mapping. And you’re alone, only around 39% of companies have a dedicated customer journey map.

This is a simple yet highly effective strategy for streamlining your marketing, understanding your customers better, and boosting your ROI. 

In this post, we’ll show you how to create your own customer journey map and give you examples to help you get started. 

Want to know how to grow your business faster with cold email outreach? Check out our cold outreach guide to find out how. 

What’s included in a customer journey map?

Customer journey mapping is the visual representation of the stages a lead goes through to become a paying customer. 

Each touchpoint your leads have with your business forms the customer journey that takes them from being unaware of your brand, to making a purchasing decision. 

Buyer journey mapping allows you to see your marketing efforts from the customers’ perspective and figure out where you’re experiencing client drop off. 

There are different kinds of customer journey map and each will look different depending on your business, but there are four main components that are always included:

• Customer actions
• Pain points

Each significant milestone a potential customer reaches in the buying journey will be a new stage on your map, with routes and strategies to get them to the next step. 

What is a touchpoint in a customer journey map?

A touchpoint is any instance where a customer has the opportunity to form an opinion about your business in the decision stage. 

Whenever your brand or sales team or marketing efforts come into contact with a customer, that’s a touchpoint. 

Touchpoints aren’t always positive, and they come in a range of forms including:

• Website pages
• Google reviews
• In-person recommendations
• Outreach campaigns
• Social media posts
• Email marketing

When mapping out your buyer journey, you need to consider all the touchpoints your customer could hit and figure out how you can improve on each one. 

From the initial contact with your brand to customer reviews and social media contact and your website, each touchpoint should be a positive user experience for your customer and build trust as they move through the journey.

Types of Customer Journey Maps and Examples

There are four different types of effective customer journey map and the right one for you will depend on what you’re trying to achieve by creating a customer journey. 

• Current State

This is the most popular type of client journey map. It gives a visual representation of the actions, thoughts, and emotions of your customers while they interact with your brand. 

This type allows you to understand customer behavior and see how your customer feels and reacts in their current state, wherever they may be on the client journey. This then allows you to tailor your marketing to speak to them more directly. 

• Day in the Life

This type of customer journey map has a wider lens and focuses on the client as a whole, rather than narrowing in on their interactions with your brand specifically. 

You’ll map out the thoughts, feelings, and actions of potential buyers on a day to day basis, whether or not that includes your brand. 

This type of customer map allows you to get a better understanding of who your target audience is, what is important to them, and how to tailor your marketing to feel more personalized. 

• Future State

This type of map focuses on the future interactions of your target customer with your business. You’ll map out the likely interactions that clients will have with your brand based on their projected thoughts, feelings, and actions. 

This type of map is useful when you’re planning your future goals and vision for your business and need to figure out what customers will need from you in the future. 

• Service Blueprint

The service blueprint is almost an add-on to the above journey maps. You’ll start with one of the first three options, and then layer on the services, technologies, and processes you need to facilitate movement through the planned out journey. 

This type of map helps to identify gaps in the journey or potential problems that are stalling progression you need to work on. 

Customer Journey Mapping Best Practices

When you’re planning your customer journey map for the first time, here are a few key tips to keep in mind. 

•  Know your goal

Do you want to improve the overall buyer experience? Launch a new product? Get to know your target demographic in the awareness stage?

All of these are good options, but start with one main goal in mind to help get more specific when creating your journey map. If you have too many goals, the map will become too cluttered and complicated to be of any real value.

• Survey existing customers

No one knows your customer experience better than previous customers. Set up a short survey and ask previous customers to fill it out. An incentive such as a discount code for their next purchase will help secure respondents, but make it clear you want honest answers, even if they’re negative!

• Ask your customer service reps

If you have dedicated staff working in a customer service role, ask them what questions come up most frequently. You might find the same customer pain points, confusion, or questions coming up over and over again.

If this is the case, you know it’s something that needs to be addressed when mapping the B2B buyer journey.

• Create multiple maps for different buyers

If you’re targeting different demographics or you have different services that appeal to different buying personas, make different maps for each. In fact, over half of companies that use maps have at least three to five different versions. 

Not all customers operate the same way, so your journey map needs to be tailored to the specific buyer persona who is looking for a particular product or service. 

• Review and update your journey map

Whenever you have a new launch or your business goes through a change, you should revisit your customer journey map and update it. 

Even something small like adding a new page to your website or changing your contact form could become a new obstacle for your customers. So take the time to review the customer journey map and know how they will be affected by change. 

How to Create a Customer Journey Map

Now you know the importance of a customer journey map and best practices, let’s look at how you create one for your business to help turn cold leads into buying customers . 

Set your objective

As we talked about before, begin with a clear objective in mind. What is the goal of the map? What are you trying to achieve by making one? 

Make your objective clear and singular so it’s clear to see if your map is straying off course during creation. 

Conduct customer research

Next, put together your questionnaire to send out to loyal customers for feedback. You can also reach out to ideal customers to gain insight into their pain points and what is stopping them from making a purchasing decision.

What you ask will be tailored to your business and offer, but some general questions you can add include:

• How did you hear about our brand?
• What did you like/dislike about our website?
• How easy do you find our website to navigate?
• What problem were you trying to solve with our product/service?
• If you didn’t make a purchase, what was the obstacle(s) in your way?
• How helpful would you rate our customer service on a scale of 1 to 10 and why?
• What can we do to improve our business to make buying from us a more enjoyable experience?
• Have you ever seen us on social media? Do you enjoy our content?
• What would like to see us share on social media that you would find useful?

Your questionnaire can target any of the customer journey touchpoints you have with your customers to find out how they feel about each step and what they would like to see improved. 

List out all your touchpoints

The touchpoints are all the places your customers interact with your brand from your website to your social media channels. 

List out all the areas they interact with you so you know what to include on the buyer journey map. This will include:

• Your website
• Contact forms
• Landing pages
• Social media platforms
• Third-party review sites
• Print marketing

List out the actions customers take

Now you have your touchpoints, list out the specific actions customers take at each one. This will show you if your customers are expected to take too many steps at a given touchpoint. 

For example, on your website, they may have to click to a service page tab, scroll down, enter information into a contact form, hit submit, etc. 

The more you can simplify the actions at each step, the smoother the buying process will be. 

List the obstacles & pain points

At each stage of the journey, list out any obstacles or pain points that are preventing the customer from moving forward. 

For example, at the very beginning of the journey, a common obstacle is lack of recognition and trust in your brand.

When it comes closer to the point of sale, a more common obstacle might be the cost or delivery time. 

Highlighting the pain points in the journey will help you mitigate them as much as possible and will give you a clear direction in your marketing strategy.

Figure out what resources you need

As soon as you have the touchpoints and obstacles mapped out, it will become clear where you need new systems and technology to improve your current system. 

Take inventory of the resources you already have, and research what you’ll need to improve the buyer journey. 

For example, you may find that your sales team isn’t following up quickly enough with customers who reach out on your website. 

A fix for this would be Bant’s customer acquisition dashboard which allows sales reps to track conversations with leads, automate cold outreach, and more, all in one easy to use software.  

Take the customer journey yourself

Once you have your map with new and improved processes, go on the customer journey to see if it works in practice. 

You might find parts of your website are still complicated to navigate or there are gaps in your FAQ that need to be filled. 

Giving your journey map a test run is an easy way to spot any glaring holes still in the customer journey before you begin your real-time analysis.

Analyze results

Once you have your customer journey as optimized as possible, keep track of your Google analytics to analyze your progress. 

This can be done by tracking: 

• Website visits
• Bounce rate
• Button clicks
• Social media engagement
• Contact form submissions

Ultimately, you should see an improvement in engagement and customer retention when you have nailed your buyer journey. 

But if you’re still seeing high drop off or low engagement, analyze the journey again and figure out where you’re going wrong.  

Even if you do see good results, regular analysis and tweaking to improve will help you optimize the customer journey map and make the buying experience as positive as possible. 

Creating a customer journey map is a crucial step in any B2B business. It’s important to get inside the mind of the customer and know what their pain points are in order to help them overcome obstacles and make that buying decision. 

Once you have an optimized customer journey, you can be much more confident in your marketing and outreach efforts. 

That’s where Bant comes in. With an all-in-one lead generation and customer acquisition dashboard, you can get a steady stream of new leads that move through your customer journey that much faster. 

Automate your customer acquisition by scheduling a demo today with one of our representatives.

Nick Biggs is a content marketer from Denver, CO. He helps B2B companies develop awesome content to connect with their audience. When he's not working on content strategy, you might catch him out in the mountains, attempting a home reno project, or planning his next adventure.

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How to map a SaaS buyer journey + free template

More and more people choose SaaS products as an alternative to traditional on-premises software and offering greater access flexibility and ease of collaboration. As a result, there are lots of SaaS fish in the ocean. So, it’s not enough to fulfill three wishes like a goldfish to win SaaS buyers' hearts. SaaS tools must run forward simply to stay in place. And the better experience users have with your platform, the more chances for a happy ever after you have with them. 

But how do you tell whether users love your software or suffer and accumulate negative feelings if they are gigabytes away? Customer support agents can give you a hint or two, as well as salespeople, researchers, and other teammates of yours. You will better understand your audience by uniting efforts and visualizing the way your customers go through when interacting with your service. Their goals, pains, channels they use, interactions with your product and team, and other things that make sense in your case. That is to say, you need to build a SaaS buyer journey map. 

And we are ready to back up your company or business. Want to learn how to approach creating a SaaS buyer journey map? What typical stages or important customer milestones do users go through? What common problems do they face? Which channels do they choose? It’s all there. 

• 1 What is a customer journey in SaaS? Why is it important?
• 2.1 Create persona(s) for a SaaS buyer journey
• 2.2 Define SaaS buyer journey map stages
• 3.2 Research
• 3.3 Registration
• 3.4 Trial period
• 3.5 Live demo session
• 3.6 Billing
• 3.7 Support
• 3.8 Feedback
• 3.9 Cross-selling
• 3.10 Prolongation/leave
• 4 The SaaS buyer journey map

What is a customer journey in SaaS? Why is it important?

A customer journey in SaaS refers to the entire lifecycle of a user's experience, from the initial awareness of a software solution to becoming a loyal, satisfied customer or leaving you for good. It encompasses all customer touchpoints and interactions between the user and the SaaS product, from discovery and onboarding to product usage, support, and potential renewal or upsell.

There are many reasons why knowing a SaaS buyer journey is important, and some of the major ones are listed below.

1. Understanding user needs

Picture planning a road trip without knowing the route, potential stops, or when your vehicle might need fuel. Will such a trip be successful? Certainly, it won’t. Similarly, in SaaS, understanding the journey means comprehending user needs at different stages. By analyzing this journey, SaaS providers can understand and address user requirements, jobs, and expectations effectively.

2. Enhancing user experience

Consider your favorite mobile app—intuitive, easy to use, and tailored to your preferences. This is the result of developers studying how users navigate through the app. For SaaS, mapping the user’s journey allows companies to enhance the overall user experience by optimizing interfaces, features, and interactions.

3. Optimizing onboarding

When you download a new app, a smooth onboarding process guides you through its features. In SaaS, onboarding is like a friendly tour guide, ensuring users understand and utilize the software efficiently from the start. Understanding the journey helps refine this process for maximum user engagement.

4. Building customer loyalty

Think about your favorite coffee shop where the staff remembers your name or offers a great loyalty program. In SaaS, understanding the journey allows for personalized interactions. This personal touch, be it through tailored communication or special offers, contributes to building a loyal and satisfied user base.

5. Troubleshooting and support

If your go-to app suddenly crashes, prompt and effective support is crucial. By analyzing the journey, SaaS providers identify potential pain points and ensure their support systems are equipped to address issues swiftly. This contributes to an overall positive experience, even in challenging moments.

6. Renewal and upselling opportunities

Consider your streaming service offering an upgraded plan just when you're thoroughly enjoying their content. Understanding the customer journey allows SaaS companies to pinpoint moments where users might be open to exploring additional services or upgrades, presenting renewal and upselling opportunities.

7. Feedback and iteration

Just as your favorite restaurant might adjust its menu based on customer feedback, SaaS companies use the illustration of the customer journey for insights. Analyzing the entire user experience helps in gathering valuable feedback, enabling continuous improvement of the product based on real user interactions and preferences.

In essence, each aspect of the customer journey contributes to creating a seamless, enjoyable, and valuable experience for users, fostering a long-lasting and mutually beneficial relationship between customers and SaaS providers.

How to build a SaaS buyer journey map? 

First, you need to decide on your map scope and whether you're going to focus on an existing or desired experience. Then, you proceed to outlining your persona(s), conducting research, and collecting all available information about your customers. That’s a crucial step that can’t be dismissed ‘cause, without credible data to rely on, you will end up with a fictional journey map with no actionable insights. 

To guide you through all the mapping steps and give you a visual example, we are going to build a SaaS buyer journey map for a project manager who wants to organize work processes inside a distributed team. Read further to see what will come out.

Create persona(s) for a SaaS buyer journey

Depending on your capacity and goals, you may have many, several, or just one persona you will build a SaaS buyer journey around. Be sure to create your persona’s profile with goals, motivations, frustrations, background information, and other relevant information. 

Once your persona is done, it may look like this:

Meet Emelie. She’s a project manager in an IT company and has to manage lots of people who work in the office and remotely. Emilie spends a lot of time trying to manage the distributed team, which is hard. She’s a kinda control freak and is used to doing everything herself using many tools and means like Excel, Google Docs, different messengers, and even physical notebooks. 

Emilie knows that there are different SaaS products but never gives it a second thought. Until the conference, where a representative of a specific SaaS for project management presents their service so engaging, it sticks in Emelie’s head.

Define SaaS buyer journey map stages

Now, when our persona is ready for her SaaS customer journey, we can define their journey’s stages using the data we have. Each SaaS journey stage potentially contains lots of insights and can show us what to highlight and what is better to be fixed if we aren’t planning to lose users. 

Group actions your persona takes throughout their journey into stages and name them. You may end up with something like this:

What you may cover at any stage of the SaaS buyer journey

User’s goals. What do they try to achieve at each stage? Highlight what they want (e.g., "to keep docs organized and easily shareable" instead of "to buy a subscription"). This information will give you hints on how to satisfy your user’s needs and come to success as a business.

User’s expectations. To guess what users may expect from your SaaS business or company, keep your eye on what people say about your service on the internet and offline. Your reputation matters. But sometimes, it has nothing to do with the user's expectations ‘cause they are guided by their previous experience with similar services. So take this into account too.

User’s actions. What do they do at this or that stage? Try to capture each step to see what can be optimized, what is missing, where the user takes too many steps because they have no guidance, and so on. 

User’s channels. What means and mediums do they use at a particular stage? How can they contact you? On what device do they open your software? Are you sure they are comfortable with the channels you offer for communication? What if your users prefer mobile versions to desktop ones while you focus on the latter?

User’s problems. Here you can define any barrier or negative thing your customer meets at the stage, and that is critical for SaaS companies. Don’t sugarcoat: the more troubles you identify, the closer you are to customer experience improvement.

User’s emotions. Here, you follow your user’s emotional journey. It’s their emotional experience of interacting with your service. Think of how they feel about people with whom they talk, channels they have to use, steps they take, problems they might face during, say, SaaS product adoption or buying process, and so on. It's a good metric to track customer satisfaction.

Sometimes, emotions are louder than words when it comes to creating a perfect SaaS customer journey and way more honest. So don’t miss important insights. In UXPressia, you can use the Quotes section to list your customer’s thoughts or identify the key emotion and create an emotional graph to see at what stages your customer’s emotional experience requires immediate attention. 

User interactions. With whom do your users interact during their SaaS customer journey? Include everyone who affects their experience and whose behavior can make a change. 

Ideas and opportunities. This is the point of building a journey map. Be sure to involve your teammates in brainstorming sessions and collaboratively decide how to enhance your users’ contentment and make them less discontent. This section will be the ground on what actionable strategies grow. 

It’s far from everything you can cover when filling in the SaaS customer journey map’s stage. You can also identify touchpoints .

Or use a storyboard to tell your user’s story with just a few images:

Or specify KPIs that matter at different stages:

Now, you have a general overview of a journey mapping process and what information it may contain. How about checking out the stages we chose for our SaaS buyer journey map and what else can be addressed at each? In many cases, your persona will go through the same, but feel free to tweak the following information.

SaaS buyer journey stages

Let's take a closer look at the stages of a SaaS buyer journey.

Emelie understands she has a problem and starts searching for a solution. Here, you can check how easy your SaaS is to find, among other options, what first impression you make, and how accurately you aim at potential clients’ pains and goals. In our example, Emelie learns about the SaaS tool at the conference. It’s not that she’s never heard of any SaaS before, but this particular presentation hooks her and motivates her to move to the next stage. 

At this stage, Emelie does research. It’s very important what reputation your tool has as it will definitely impact a person’s decision whether to sign up. Also, pay attention to how achievable and accessible information is on your official pages. How many questions can a user answer just by checking out your website? Emelie talks with her friends from the IT industry to be sure the tool is really great and to check other options, just in case. 

Registration

Emelie decides to sign up. What's essential for her at this stage? What about the registration process? Is it painfully long? Does it require too much information? Maybe you have to provide an opportunity to sign up via social media accounts. In our example, Emelie’s annoyed with filling in her payment information ‘cause many services stopped asking for it at the very first steps of a user’s journey, and she doesn’t plan to pay with her own card. 

Trial period

Emelie is excited about the trial period. She wants to understand whether the service eases her work, whether it’s handy, and fits her teammates. Yet, the trial period is rather short. 

Emelie also would like more short tips instead of long articles in the Help Center. Think of your support agents’ availability in different time zones. Can Emelie ask a question anytime she wants or just in particular hours? And how can she solve a problem if there's no one around to guide her?

Live demo session

Emelie calls her teammates and somebody from top management to watch the Live Demo together. The decision to pay for the tool is often a collective one. So you have to impress not only Emelie but all who attend the demo. Ensure that your salespeople know the tool better than anyone else and treat users well. 

Emelie’s team says ‘yes’, but Emelie isn’t happy. What happened? She forgot to delete her payment information and request the invoice. Moreover, it turns out that this option isn’t available. How flexible are you when it comes to collecting payments?

At this stage, you can also analyze how diverse your paid plans are. Is it clear what is included in each? Do you provide special conditions for teams? Or discounts for startups?

It’s an essential part of your persona’s SaaS customer journey. Just like the Live Demo stage, where users directly communicate with your SaaS’s representatives. For instance, Emelie spends a lot of time getting her answers from the support service. She can’t say that somebody acts rude or disrespectful, but can’t help her anger. Are your support agents ready for all possible cases and questions? Are they provided with everything necessary, like calling SOP and cold calling scripts (just in case)? How fast do they answer and react? Does your persona enjoy this interaction? How to sweeten unexpected hiccups? These are the opportunities to improve the customer experience at this stage.

Sometimes, you don’t need to ask somebody to leave feedback, but more often you have to do it. Emelie gets an email from a Customer Success agent who asks her to write a review. She also sees a pop-up notification with a short NPS form when using the SaaS. Both “invitations” hit the target, and Emelie shares her opinion. Yet, she has some problems with submitting her review on a third-party site. 

In our example, the channels to contact the persona were chosen right. But when you ask users to write reviews on third-party sites, try to do it yourself. The challenges of other platforms aren’t your fault, but the emotional outcome of a user will affect your customer experience. 

Also, think of how to simplify internal feedback collecting. How often should you do it? How to establish more trust between you and your persona to get honest answers instead of a formal reply?

Cross-selling

When you practice cross-selling, you should know how your persona feels about it. What if you’re annoying and force them to leave your service for good? Or what if they don’t mind additional functionality, but you’re too humble to offer some? What channel is the best to do it? What touchpoints work out well? 

Emelie’s experience with cross-sales is controversial. On the one hand, she’s annoyed with the functionality she expected to be in the paid plan and that she has to buy separately. But, on the other hand, she, as a currently paid user, gets an opportunity to buy new features with a huge discount, and that cheers her up.

Prolongation/leave

During any user’s journey, there’s a moment when they face the choice and must decide whether to pay again or say goodbye. Emelie’s curious about other SaaS platforms, but she doesn’t want to get back to the start and go through the same SaaS customer journey with no guarantees that another tool will be better. But other customer personas may come to this point with another mindset.

You have to consider your users’ experience not only at this stage but at the previous ones too. What general impression does your SaaS make? Can it maintain high standards, compensate for negative moments, and highlight strong points? What about pricing changes and feedback from brand representatives? 

Everything matters, even when the persona prolongs the usage. There always can be a place for doubts, as well as for opportunities for improvement.

The SaaS buyer journey map

After all, you may end up having a map looking like this:

When checking out our examples, make sure to turn your attention to the Interactions section. You can do the same, putting the processes, channels, and interactions of your persona together.

So, now you have an idea of how to build a SaaS buyer journey map and won’t be overwhelmed approaching this initiative.

And you know what day is the best to start doing it? Yeah, it’s today. We are happy to share with you our SaaS buyer journey map template, so you can build your case upon it:

PS: We also have a source for inspiration in case you need to build a map for a particular SaaS buyer journey’s part, which is SaaS support .

Related posts

This is an updated version of the article that was first published in 2021.

Rate this post

What SaaS customer journey stages would you say are most important? We can’t build an end-to-end map at the moment, we only have the time and resources to focus on a couple of aspects. Pls advise on how we can prioritize

Hi Javan, great question! In an ideal world, you would build an end-to-end SaaS customer journey map and fix all the pain points it uncovers. But in reality, we often do not have that luxury.

So there are three ways to approach the mapping exercise with limited resources:

• Look for parts of the journey where you already have the most data. These are usually the Support and Feedback stages. Working with what you already have often saves a lot of time.
• Identify the high-impact issues for your business. You can do it with an impact map before you dive into creating a journey map. I know, seems like I’m suggesting even more work, but with our impact mapping guide , you can do it in 7 easy steps.
• Talk to your customers: what do they find the most frustrating? Find out what their expectations are, and the areas where you don’t deliver on those. Make a few quick wins: issues that are easy to resolve and can bring instant results.

Hope this helps!

How to understand, use, and build customer journey maps

A customer journey map is key to building a solid marketing strategy. We cover everything you need to know about customer journey maps, their different types, examples, and the steps to making your own.

What is a customer journey map?

Why do you need a customer journey map, characteristics of customer journey maps.

• What are touchpoints?
• Different types of customer journey map

Journey map variations

• How to create a customer journey map

Customer journey map tools

• Return to top

The customer journey is a long and often unpredictable road. Understanding it can be even more complicated. 

That’s why customer journey maps were invented: to understand the roadmap of a customer, from the very first touchpoint throughout the lasting life of their relationship with your business. 

Customer journey maps (or user journey maps) can be an invaluable resource for companies, from marketing to sales to UX, and are known to help businesses increase their ROI by 13–22% if done correctly. 

Below we cover journey maps from top to bottom, their importance, characteristics, and review examples, along with what you need to make your own. 

>> Jump to get started learning how to create a customer journey map

Key takeaways: 

Customer journey mapping is a strategic (and successful) approach to truly understanding your customers.

There are real and valuable business reasons to journey map.

There are six basic types of customer journey maps.

Customer touchpoints are every instance of interaction or engagement that happens along the journey. 

There are current- and future-state customer journey maps that can help predict future behavior .  

A customer journey map (sometimes called a user journey map, UX map, or CJM) is a visualization of the steps and experiences a customer has with a brand, from first contact to ongoing engagement, revealing both seen and unseen interactions.

User journey mapping lets you create personalized experiences across all touchpoints —for every individual—across all channels.

Companies can use this shared understanding to identify opportunities for innovation and improvement.

These maps can be simple or complex, depending on what you're looking to gain from them.

For any company, a customer journey map helps to enhance the customer experience and increase customer loyalty. 

A customer journey map can prove invaluable for optimizing across multiple departments—marketing, sales, product, and customer service—in many, many ways. Mapping your customer journey can help you:

Promote a customer-centric culture internally and externally 

Identify your ideal buyer and connect with customer needs

Glean customer journey insights into your audience that can drive revenue

Improve sales funnels & conversion rates authentically 

Amplify customer experience by understanding the customer’s perspective 

Reduce customer support tickets by locating customer pain-points 

Aid in marketing campaigns

Generate repeat business

Decrease customer churn and increase customer lifetime value

Together, these advantages translate into higher sales for your business.

A typical customer journey map includes: 

Actors—or potential profiles of customers—usually align with personas and their actions in the map are rooted in data . These actors will be the foundation of your map, and they will dictate the actions needed to create the desired outcome. 

Customer personas and buyer personas: What’s the difference?

A buyer persona is a profile that showcases your ideal customer based on existing customer data and market research. Buyer personas help humanize the ideal customer you are trying to attract, which helps you understand them better and pick the right marketing strategy to convert them.

A buyer persona is your ideal customer—they’re in research mode. You can have more than one buyer persona for your company, and understanding this buyer is the key to creating a successful customer experience. This buyer will turn into your customer.

Here’s what makes up your buyer persona: 

Demographics —including personal, professional, and specific (age, gender, location, education, income, marital status, skills, routines, etc.) 

Goals —including personal and professional, priorities, and challenges

Values —including personal and professional, and what they find to be important in products and companies

Preferences —including the content they consume, their communication choices, communities, groups, or associations, and how they spend their day, on and offline

All of these characteristics make up customer journey maps on the buying path. 

Customer journey stages

Journey phases are the different high-level stages in the customer roadmap. They provide organization for the rest of the information in the journey map (actions, thoughts, and emotions).

The stages will vary from scenario to scenario, and each organization will usually have data to help it determine what these phases are for a given scenario. Often you will see awareness, research, evaluation, and decision making in the customer phases. 

Customer expectations

Journey maps are best for scenarios that involve a sequence of events, describe a process, or might involve multiple channels.

Pain points are a specific problem that customers or prospective customers of your business are experiencing in the industry.

Scenarios can be real (for existing products and services) or anticipated—for products that are yet in the design stage. 

Actions, mindset, and sentiment

Every customer has a particular action that they take, because of a mindset that they have and will express it in their own sentiment. 

Actions: When a customer engages with your brand with a purpose. 

Mindset : Correspond to users' thoughts, questions, motivations, and information needs at different stages in the journey.

Emotions : How customers feel about your brand, whether positive, negative, or neutral. Plot these emotions in a single line across the journey phases, signaling the emotional highs and lows of the experience.

Opportunities

Opportunities of a customer journey map are desired outcomes. Maps should include key components, which can depend on the goal of the user journey mapping initiative.

Opportunities are also insights gained from mapping—they speak to how the user experience can be optimized.

To create a customer journey map, identify the personas, map the triggers that lead to desired outcomes, and discuss opportunities.

What are customer journey touchpoints?

Customer journey touchpoints are individual transactions through which the customer interacts with a business. 

There are about 5–7 minimum touchpoints along a customer journey. Customer journey touchpoints for omnichannel brands are everywhere:

social media posts

product demos

advertisements

brick and mortar visits

website(s) clicks

You’ll also have the added returning customer touchpoints to consider—like how engaged they are with your product, if they are returning to your website or if they are attending your events for the second or third time. 

Examples of customer touchpoints 

Identifying each touchpoint is crucial for creating a customer journey map that will drive a better customer experience. Once you’ve identified the touchpoints, list out possible customer actions for each. 

Some actions that derive from customer touchpoints might be: 

Downloading an eBook

Clicking on your FAQ

Requesting a demo or call

Subscribing to your blog

Clicking a paid ad

It’s important to know which touchpoints to invest time and resources into. Your map maps out the areas you can improve, retain and scale. 

Types of customer journey maps

Each customer journey map has a different objective and business focus. There are six types to familiarize yourself with:

Current state —These illustrate what customers do , think, and feel as they interact with your business currently. 

Future state —These illustrate what customers will do, think, and feel as they interact with your business in the future. 

Day in the life —These examine everything that customers or prospects do, think, and feel (within a specific area), whether that involves your product or not. 

Service blueprint —This is a diagram that usually starts with a basic version of an existing or future state journey map. 

Circular —These are used for subscription-based models to visualize the customer journey as a circle or loop. This helps reinforce the importance of customer retention and lifetime value.

Empathy —These are used to create a shared understanding around the wants, needs, thoughts, and actions of a customer.  

Journey maps are meant to be used as a strategic planning tool. Use these definitions to guide you towards aspects of other methods that your team has not previously considered.

Journey map vs. experience map

A journey map is specific to a product or service, while an experience map is more general and can be used outside of a business's scope.

Since experience maps are more generic in nature, they can also be used to find pain points in a product or service for a future journey map.

Journey map vs. service blueprint

If journey maps are a product of experience maps, they will need a blueprint to direct them there. 

Service blueprints are a continuation of journey maps in the service industry. They lead the roadmap for service-based customer journeys. 

Journey map vs. user story map

User stories are used in Agile to plan features or functionalities, much like a future customer journey map.

In the user story map case, each feature is condensed down to a deliberately brief description from a user’s point of view. The typical format of a user story is a single sentence:

“As a [type of user], I want to [goal], so that [benefit].” 

How to create a customer journey map 

When you set out to create your own journey map, try drawing everything out on a whiteboard or digitizing it on a spreadsheet to get the big picture. The goal is to find and resolve any customer pain points. Here are eight steps to creating your own customer journey map.

Step 1: Set your objectives for the map

Before the whiteboard comes out, it’s important to set up clear objectives for the map. How do you do this?

Collect customer feedback from all company stakeholders, your team, and your customers. You can do this by forms, surveys, interviews, spotlights, or good old-fashioned conversation.

Ask questions like:

How do you feel about this feature?

How easy was it to find us?

Were there any points of frustration during your interaction with us?

Set goals within the customer journey map like seeing your product through your customer’s eyes, ways to improve your product or service, and how it all impacts your future.

Step 2. Define your customer persona

Your customer is the core of your journey map, so the first step is defining your target customer persona.

A customer or buyer persona is an in-depth understanding of who your customer really is, what they are trying to solve, and how they interact with your business.

The first thing you need to decide is which type of journey you’re going to map:

Persona —a profile of a specific customer type

Target —a profile of a potential customer

Market —a segment of customers

If you're creating your first map, it's best to pick your most common customer persona and consider the route they would typically take when engaging with your business for the first time.

From the point of interest to the product lifeline, track each step along the way to get a true sense of your target persona.

Once you've created distinct personas, you can use them to dictate customer journey maps that describe each persona's experience at various points during their lifecycle with your company.

Step 3: Highlight your target customer personas

Take your journey map persona list and pinpoint your target customer. To do this, dig deep and understand what each customer wants to achieve as they go through the customer journey.

A great way to go about doing this is to first identify the paths that your customer may take on your site.

For instance, if your customer is a member, the first thing that they might do is to log in. These instances will help you determine engagement for each customer.

Here are some different ways to obtain and understand customers' goals:

Survey or interview different customer groups

Conduct user testing feedback

Study customer support correspondence

With this insight, you can then determine where your customer will go along their journey.

Step 4. Determine customer journey stages

Journey maps are organized by customer stages (sometimes referred to as phases ).

Each stage represents a goal your customer is trying to achieve in their journey. You should build a customer journey map with stages that represent your customer's goal-oriented journey, not your internal process steps.

Based on the persona, define the stages that your customer experiences with you over time. To figure out your stages, answer this question:

What does it take for a customer to start from awareness to decision throughout the buying process?

The typical customer journey stages are:

Awareness —how they found out about you

Research —how you can solve their problem

Evaluation —how you compare against others

Decision —how they chose you

The goal : to determine how, when, and where they discover you, choose you over competitors, purchase from you, and maintain a relationship with you.

Step 5. Identify customer touchpoints

Your buyer journey map will be built off of customer touchpoints. Customer touchpoints are your brand's points of customer contact, from start to finish.

For example, here are a few ways customers may find you:

Search inquiry

Customer review

Social media post

These are just a few touchpoints; there are many more. Identifying these customer touchpoints is an important step towards creating a journey map and ensuring your customers are satisfied every step of the way. It’s also a pivotal part of how you will define your map.

Step 6. Map the current state

It’s time to conduct customer research for your map. This will include information about your customer’s intentions, motivations, digital footprint, and interpretation of your brand.

Most customers are happy to help if they believe you are genuinely interested in their experience and will use your feedback to improve things for others.

For each stage of the journey, try to identify:

What are my customer’s goals?

What type of experience do they want?

What steps are needed to complete that process?

How do they feel during each touchpoint?

What other thoughts, feelings or frustrations do they have during certain stages?

Beyond this information, be sure to look at patterns of how they conduct themselves online, where they frequent, and what they share.

Step 7. Understand motivations, frustrations, and resources

This step involves looking at the totality of the customer experience (CX) with your company.

Every business will look through the lens of its customer personas uniquely. Walking through each journey map stage with your team will help you identify any friction points within the customer experience.

You know your customers best. Here are a few example questions to get you started:

Where could friction appear in this particular touchpoint?

Are people abandoning purchases because of this?

Are customers unaware of this solution that you've provided? If so, why not?

These questions can be answered with customer behavior data, using a behavioral data platform like Fullstory , which delivers a complete, retroactive view of how people interact with your site or app. By finding out how visitors engage with your product and service, you can understand what resources you will need for growth.

Examine customer emotions and motivations.

Every action your customer takes is motivated by emotion. The emotional driver of each of your customer's actions is usually caused by a pain point or a problem.

So, get to know what roadblocks are stopping customers from making desired actions (again with digital intelligence) and get in front of motivation.

Overcome obstacles like cost, product friction , and onboarding frustration with customer experience intelligence.

Take the customer journey yourself.

Follow the customer journey yourself. Analyze the results to show where customer needs aren’t being met by seeing it through your customer’s point of view.

Pro tip: Document the customer journey for each of your personas and make note of the differences. It will help for future user journey maps.

Determine the resources you have and the ones you'll need.

It's important to take inventory of the resources you have and the ones you'll need to improve the customer's journey.

Using your map, you can advise leadership to invest in the right tools that will help your team manage customer demand. Do you have what it takes to solve the customer’s problem?

Step 8: Evaluate, adjust and scale

As with any process, you’ll need to test it over time. Data analysis is used to identify customers’ behavior and pain points that need changing along the way.

Use digital experience and customer intelligence to keep you informed on the user journey. This means relying on a solution to let your customers show you what’s actually happening. With features like session replay , you can understand exactly what they are going through and proactively fix it.

Always include your team and keep stakeholders involved to keep the roadmap clear.

Your customer journey map checklist

This guide on creating a customer journey map should help you truly understand the impact of your product or service. By stepping into your customer’s shoes, you will gain the insight needed to improve the entire experience.

Now, you’re ready to create your map. Here are the questions you will ask yourself while creating a customer journey map:

☑ Set clear objectives for your map ☑ Define your customer persona ☑ Highlight your target personas ☑ Determine customer stages ☑ Identify customer touchpoints ☑ Map the current state ☑ Understand motivations, frustrations, and what tools you’ll need ☑ Evaluate, adjust, and get ready to grow

Use the data and let your customers do the rest.

6 customer journey map templates 

Having a template is a great way to get started. There are a few different templates to choose from: 

Current state

The current state journey map visualizes the current experience with your product or service. It involves defining the scope of the customer experience with customer touchpoints.

This type of customer journey map is designed with the considerations, thoughts, feelings, and actions of your customers in mind. Current state mapping is a practical approach to identify existing pain points and create a shared awareness of the end-to-end customer experience. 

Day-in-the-life

A day-in-the-life journey map is another simple grid map based on time, created especially for the daily grind of the customer. Instead of different journey stages, it represents times in the day related to actions based on decisions in the path of purchasing. 

This template helps you visualize your customer’s daily routine even if these actions are outside your company. It typically is organized chronologically to systematically show the course of the habits of the day.

Day-in-the-life's are great for giving you insights into all the thoughts, needs, and pain points users experiences throughout their day. You can use this type of map to evaluate when your product or service will be most valuable in your customer’s day. 

Future-state 

With a future-state journey map template, your goal is to learn how your customers feel about a new product launch or about how they will require your service in the future. 

Future-state journey mapping is a useful approach to explore possible customer expectations and to create new experiences. Mapping out a future customer journey helps to align your team around a common goal—the betterment of the customer experience.

Service blueprint

A service blueprint helps you design a roadmap of your service process—much like building a house. The goal is to be able to make projected changes to the service where needed and to be able to visualize each step in the eyes of the customer. 

Service blueprint maps reflect the perspective of the organization and its employees and visualize the things that need to happen behind the scenes in order for the customer journey to take place. 

Service blueprints are created when making procedural changes, or when trying to pinpoint solutions to roadblocks in the customer journey on a website.

A circular customer journey map is just that—circular instead of linear or graph-like to showcase a different type of business model. For instance, a SaaS company may find it more useful to visualize the customer journey as a loop or wheel. 

This subscription-based journey map does a nice job of portraying both the customer interactions and sentiments, as well as their journey from awareness to purchase. 

The empathy journey map is a bit different because it aligns with the customer's feelings and emotions. Empathy is a big factor in the customer journey and this template is designed to help teams align their customer journey mapping exercise with these types of needs. 

With empathy, you can get into your customer’s shoes and truly feel what they feel as it pertains to your product or service. 

As with anything, you’ll need customer journey mapping tools to help you . The key is to find the right tool that works with your team and workflow. 

Here are a few tools to consider:

PowerPoint or Google Slides

With the right map and the right tools, you can overcome roadblocks and open a path to scalability and success.

Enhance your journey mapping process with customer intelligence. Look at behavioral data points like heatmaps , scroll maps , and other insights you can glean from session replay . Combining these quantitative and qualitative insights will help you in your journey-mapping process.

Using journey maps to drive organizational change

It may not be easy to get buy-in to support the changes in strategic planning that result from customer journey mapping. 

You can use what insights you’ve gleaned from the current state journey map in these beneficial ways:

Align your organization around the customer viewpoint. Engage with each department and set up a commitment to put the customer experience moments top of mind with an initiative for growth.

Enlist team members and partners to generate empathy for customers. Use your journey map to bring together relevant teams to train on customer experience best practices. 

Supplement a new strategy with internal communications that encourage better customer service. As new initiatives roll out, use internal channels to communicate how you’re improving the experience of the customer, and how team members can help.

Optimize your user journeys with Fullstory

Understanding your users' digital experience and optimizing your most important touchpoints can be make-or-break.

With Fullstory Journeys, you can easily see how users explore your site or app and see step-by-step page navigations and other key interactions along the way. This lets you identify if users are using your site how you intended; what the most common navigation paths are; and how users typically arrive at your most critical pages. 

It's no longer a guessing game—it's data-driven and actionable.

Fullstory's behavioral data platform combines the quantitative insights of customer journeys and product analytics with picture-perfect  session replay  for complete context that helps you uncover opportunities.

Sign up for a free 14-day trial  to see how Fullstory can help you combine your most invaluable quantitative and qualitative insights and eliminate blind spots.

Frequently asked questions about customer journey maps

Who uses customer journey maps.

For any brand or company that wants to learn their customer, from the point of motivation to the turning point of frustration, a customer journey map is the best tactic to do so. Journey maps are best for scenarios that describe a sequence of events. You might want to map multiple scenarios for one persona, depending on your project goals.

How often should I update a customer journey map?

If business goals change, so could your customer’s goals. If you roll out a new product or service, you may want to edit or update your customer journey map. Keeping your maps updated can help you reach your goals as a team. 

How many customer journey maps do I need?

The number of different customer journey maps needed all depends on your target audience. If you have multiple customer personas, it would be best to create different journey maps to suit each one. 

At the very least, be sure to create a customer journey map for the current and future state so you can aid in predicting future trends of the customer journey in alignment with your product and service.

Who should be involved in the mapping process?

Anyone that is involved in making your product or service successful should have a hand in the mapping process. Sales, marketing, customer success, and product teams all should be involved in customer journey mapping. Every team member will benefit from truly understanding their customers to make for a better customer experience. 

What is a user journey map in design thinking?

User journey maps for design thinking is an iterative process of studying the user so that they can engage with a system with more agility. It redefines customer problems in an attempt to identify alternative solutions that might not be obvious with the initial level of understanding.

Related posts

A/B testing is the process of comparing two versions of the same product to determine which is the most compelling for users.

Session replay reproduces your user's online experience. But how should you use it? And how can you learn from it?

Customer Journey Map Guide: Your Mapping is Missing One Key Element

August 26, 2024

John Abbasi

Customer journey mapping is an essential process for marketers to deliver a great experience that converts. But the modern customer journey map needs to consider what happens when visitors go off the rails of the curated path and beyond.

Redefining How to Build an Effective Customer Journey Map

Customer journey maps give organizations a chance to understand and improve the key touchpoints, channels and digital pathways their customers take to conversion. Learning how to map the customer journey is a great first step, but going beyond the basic mapping process is essential to staying agile and on top of your customers’ needs.

Consider a typical customer. No matter how well your brand is established, and no matter how you present your website content, will the customer take your ideal path to conversion every time?

Almost never.

Most often, they’ll jump right to your search bar to find exactly what they need.

The solution is to build a customer journey that fits their needs and is optimized to deliver an exceptional website experience even when visitors stray from the planned path to your search bar. We want to help you see your journey differently and give your mapping an edge over the competition.

What is a Customer Journey Map?

A customer journey is the series of steps and engagements a person experiences before, during and after becoming a customer of a service, brand or product. The customer journey encompasses the entirety of a customer’s interactions with an organization, be it through a digital ad, exposure on social media, reading a guest blog or otherwise. The variations of touchpoints are virtually endless.

A customer journey map is a complete overview of all the interactions the customer experiences in their journey. The journey map provides important insight into the efficacy of a company’s marketing touchpoints and highlights moments when a visitor moved closer or further from becoming a customer.

Why is Customer Journey Mapping so Important?

Creating a customer journey map, when done correctly, can completely change the way you interact with customers. Here are some of the most common benefits that come from mapping:

• Provides organizational insight about customer lifecycles. Mapping offers connectivity within a company/organization, bringing interdepartmental adherence as each team understands the steps of their typical customer journey – including pain points, areas for improvement and more.
• Results in higher quality leads. It’s crucial to target the right types of people with your marketing campaigns, those more likely to become leads and then customers. Because mapping shows customer behaviors, it gives marketers a way to address the needs of their customers at specific points in the funnel, producing more qualified leads.
• Reduces churn rate. The best mapping process illuminates patterns of current and previous customers, including the patterns that occur right before or at the moment of the customer switching to a different company’s product/service. This informs strategy to reduce churn.

Understanding the Customer Journey

The traditional customer journey isn’t a mystery at this point; it has well-defined key stages and necessary elements for success that marketers should consider when mapping their journey.

At this point, you’re likely familiar with the 5 stages of the journey : Awareness, Consideration, Decision, Retention and Advocacy. Rather than focusing on those well-defined stages, we want to zoom in on the tactical elements for how to build the base of your customer journey map and then discuss the layers that can elevate the experience.

Key Elements of a Customer Journey Map

Before we consider the optimal way to build a customer journey map, let’s look at some of the most important elements that make it up:

• Touchpoints. Touchpoints are interactions between customers and your organization. These can range from communications on social media, offline event interactions, website visits and more.
• Customer emotions. Though not the most concrete element, there are methods to gain insight into a customer’s emotions that arise as a result of their experiences with your brand. For example, a questionnaire could help reveal the ways customers are enjoying the overall experience.
• Pain points. Pain points drive customers toward or away from a company; your customer journey map should identify and correct them as soon as possible.
• Access considerations. Part of any good mapping will consider the types of access customers have, including things like the devices on which they access your company websites, products or services. There may be drastic differences between customers who exclusively use mobile devices, for example, compared to those who don’t.
• Customer personalities and demographics. Customer journey maps should highlight the different customer types your organization will encounter, giving a better understanding of how to connect with customers.

Creating a Customer Journey Map

The best process for creating a customer journey map includes 5 steps:

• Gathering materials
• Defining goals
• Highlighting touchpoints
• Including pain points
• Testing and iterating

1. Gather all Prerequisite Materials

Before starting the mapping process, you’ll want to gather all necessary information and materials and put them in order.

Gather customer data/analytics

First, take account of your current customer data situation: what types of data would be important, what information do you already have and what data would be helpful to collect? Make sure you have a process or tool in place to easily analyze and segment your customer data.

Identify customer personas

Part of a successful map is the ability to narrow customers down into different categories. That way, you’re able to see the paths they take and what works best for them on a more personalized level. To kick off this process, you’ll want a clear understanding of the many different customer personas and demographics in your customer base.

Take into account their specific goals in using your product or service. What are they trying to achieve or solve? 

2. Define Detailed Mapping Goals

The mapping process can be a nebulous process without clearly defined goals. Before starting one, record the most important reasons a customer journey map would be beneficial for your company.

What would a highly successful map look like and what types of decisions would it ultimately open up to you? How would the customer experience improve as a result of your new mapping?

3. Highlight Touchpoints and Channels

Your customers are each unique, so identifying the different touchpoints they encountered along their journey is crucial to map and learn from. It’s also important to know the channels and devices your customers use to connect with your brand. The more this is recorded, the better you’ll be able to improve customer experience.

4. Include Pain Points

It’s not always easy finding pain points without direct communication between customer and organization. But there are other ways to go about pinpointing patterns where customers may struggle within your systems. During your planning stage, you can ask team members to test out the proposed follow to see where they experience friction.

Once you’ve implemented your customer journey, look for places where customers experience bottlenecks or roadblocks in achieving the goals you identified above. The pain points you hypothesize will often not be what your customers experience when moving through the funnel; it’s important to stay agile and to keep up with your customers’ pain points.

5. Test and Analyze Results for Iteration

Your customer journey map isn’t finished once you complete the first iteration. If you don’t test and analyze it, you’ll leave a lot of potential improvement on the table. Be sure to periodically evaluate your customer journey maps to ensure they’re up to date with your current data and strategy in mind.

Also remember that a map usually applies to a specific customer type. There will be different maps for different customer profiles.

Map-Building Best Practices

Though you’ll have different customer journey mapping processes based on your ideal customer, there are some universal best practices to follow.

Leverage Internal Collaboration

This is something that often goes overlooked in a mapping process, as it can be easy to get caught up in your own team’s construction and application of a customer journey map.

It’s important to:

• Request and implement insights from cross-functional teams.
• Ensure extensive collaboration with customer-facing teams.

Conduct Data Analysis

A customer journey map without comprehensive data analysis is bound to fall flat. Incorporate high-quality customer data into each mapping process to ensure your map points to the right issues to correct. When including data, remember to use both qualitative and quantitative data, as well as incorporate customer feedback and analytics.

Build Mapping Visuals

A strong visual representation helps teams get a better feel for the overall structure of the map, which helps them better address any issues it uncovers.

Here are a couple examples of visuals that helped simplify complex customer journeys.

As you can see in this example journey map, a higher education institution would want to carefully map out the most important touchpoints and phases of a prospective student’s journey to attending their school.

The map is easy to follow and helps with planning thoughtful follow ups and personalized communication at each stage of the journey.

It’s great to start with a flow of the main touchpoints and moments for a customer (or student in this example).

Additional mapping layers could include:

• Pain points that prospective students may encounter
• Types of devices they may be accessing information on for each stage
• Forms of communication between the institution and the student along the way

Next we have a journey map for a typical patient who is on the road from content discovery to becoming an ongoing patient with a healthcare provider. This maps out all critical touch points and moments in the journey when the healthcare provider would need to optimize to deliver an exceptional experience.

Some of those moments may seem like smaller, expected processes but have a major impact on the patient’s experience and perception of the healthcare company.

For example, receiving and filling prescriptions in a digital format needs to be optimized for the smoothest process possible. Not only is it essential for people’s healthcare needs, but it’s also critical to optimize the digital experience so that people know they can rely on the company’s website or app. It’s a worthy touchpoint to note on a customer journey map like the example above.

Update Journey Maps Regularly

Lastly, no customer journey map will be relevant forever. Ensure your mapping is a dynamic process that adapts to changes in product, service, website and customers.

The Missing Link for Customer Journey Maps: Site Search

Customer journey mapping involves planning and curating for the ideal pathways to content and pages people need to navigate in order to convert to customers. But that’s just it; it’s an ideal scenario that you optimize for, but can’t guarantee your visitors will follow.

One of the most common ways visitors break the expected customer journey path is by searching exactly what they need to find on the organization’s website.

When a customer uses your website’s search bar, you want to be confident that they won’t exit the site out of frustration with the search results. Additionally, site search should be an asset to your customer journey, bringing them a better experience, even when they deviate from your original curated path.

Prioritizing site search means equipping your marketing team with the ability to understand common search queries, the means to identify content gaps and the agility to make changes to search outcomes to best fit your visitors’ behaviors.

From a mapping perspective, site search gives companies the power to analyze detailed data and optimize for this commonly overlooked aspect of the customer journey. Many visitors will inevitably use your search bar; it’s up to you to connect them with the content they need through a great search experience.

If you’re looking for a site search solution to improve search outcomes and performance on your site, check out our Site Search solution .

How Well Do You Know Your Customers?

If you’ve taken the time to build extensive customer journey maps, your team will get to know your customers on a deeper level and be able to personalize the journey. You’ll be able to better identify pain points and bottlenecks in the journey and fine-tune the experience.

It’s almost like a superpower for organizations, and it starts with understanding stages of the customer journey, building out a map, including analysis from site search and putting it all together to deliver an elevated experience.

By John Abbasi

Editorial and content manager, "if you’ve taken the time to build extensive customer journey maps, your team will get to know your customers on a deeper level and be able to personalize the journey.", you might also like:, what is site search a marketer’s guide to better website search, site search data unveiled: 7 key insights into your website visitors’ behavior, how to improve your website click-through rate, get the latest content first.

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How to Create a Buyer Journey Map: A Complete Guide

A buyer journey map is the right way to improve user experience without much effort. It acts like a blueprint to understand what conflicts, conversations, and comparisons a lead goes through before making the final purchase decision.

According to research , B2B buyers are generally 57% of the way toward purchasing a service before actively engaging with sales. It implies marketing plays a vital role in pushing a brand’s customer acquisition.

A promotional campaign planned according to the potential customer’s concerns like price, quality, and competitors make leads’ sales cycle simpler and shorter. Buyers’ journey maps help brands be ready to solve any customer query or issue with the utmost efficiency.

Marketers must aim to develop a buyer’s journey from tested data. It should not get hindered by assumptions or gut feelings. Otherwise, it might affect the overall sales pipeline.

But how to create a data-driven buyer journey map?

In this blog, I will share a step-wise technique that any business can use to create a buyer journey map successfully.

Let’s start by understanding the topic in focus.

What is a Buyer Journey Map?

Statistics show that 80% of customers consider the quality of interactions with a company as crucial as its product or service quality. A buyer journey map is a proactive approach to understanding what goes on in a customer’s mind throughout the sales process.

It is a visual representation of the many touchpoints and exchanges a lead can have with a brand before becoming a client. Such a map demonstrates the fields that affect prospects’ actions and decisions.

Though a sales funnel only has four stages: awareness, consideration, decision, and retention, all leads do not follow the same path to purchase.

For example, while some leads can arrive at a landing page through SERP, other prospects can get redirected from social media. A buyer journey map helps identify channels that bring in leads. It becomes easier to optimise the sales cycle for better interactions and conversion rates.

Importance of a Buyer Journey map

Unorganised marketing efforts might fetch brands some leads but fail to generate a dependable sales pipeline. How will a customer interact with a web page or offer? What are the different steps leads can take that move them closer to becoming a client? What will be the customer queries at every touchpoint? A buyer journey map answers all such questions. It helps predict various purchase paths a prospect can take.

Be it B2C or B2B, a customer’s journey is complex. A B2C purchase is short but involves emotions at every step. In contrast, a B2B sales cycles are long as it involves many stakeholders in the decision-making process. Buyer journey maps help proactively understand what the lead would love to see at every sales funnel stage.

According to reports , 99% of marketers say personalisation helps advance customer-brand relationships. But 78% say they struggle with not having quick data about their customers to launch swift, personalised campaigns.

Such personalisation problems are also solved with the help of data-driven buyer journey maps. Customer data collected from various resources and then organised to create a buyers’ journey assists in creating optimised and personalised campaigns for the target consumers.

Now let’s understand how we can create data-driven journeys.

How to Create a Buyer Journey Map

A thing to remember while creating a buyer journey map is though it is specific to a buyer’s persona, it will not be linear and can crossover with other personas. It might sound messy. Brands use excel sheets, mindmaps, boards, infographics, etc., to create clear visual journeys.

Phase 1: Research

Extensive research is key to understanding everything about a brand’s marketing. It heavily involves data research about paying customers, site visitors, etc., to figure out what attracted the paying clients in the first place to a company’s services. Some of the best ways to collect such data are:

• Going through the existing database The existing database contains information about all the valuable touchpoints a lead can have before becoming a customer. The info reveals what channels and content a buyer’s persona prefers.
• It helps crack the basic pattern users from similar backgrounds might follow in the sales funnel. Though it is true that every prospect will not follow the same path, the database helps create a rough image of the possibilities and allows brands to be prepared with optimised campaigns.
• Organising surveys Brands can also organise surveys and get real-time information about the good and bad of their marketing strategies . The survey can have simple questions regarding the brand and its services, which is crucial for creating a buyer journey map. For example, the questions can be:
• What type of content does the customer prefer?
• How did they come to know about the brand?
• If they have made any purchases, what was the deciding factor?
• On a scale of 1-10, how was their brand experience?
• Analysing heatmaps Heatmaps are an excellent way to gain visual insights into how users interact with a brand’s digital assets. It has many options like session recordings, scroll maps, click maps, etc., that showcase where the user clicked the most, scroll depth, and much more.
• If you want to know more about heatmaps, check out this blog: Heatmap for UX: Your Complete Guide for Better Conversions
• Taking help from the sales team The salespeople are critical touchpoints in bringing in customers. They have apt information about the consumers’ most crucial and frequently asked questions. Marketers can address such queries through content to make the pitching process easier and the buying journey smoother.

Phase 2: Organising Data

Marketers can have all the data in the world, but without the correct organisation strategy, it will be futile. The management tactic of big or small databases in the marketing sector is consumer-focused. It generally has two aspects, which are:

• Attributes Attributes refer to the qualities a user has. For example, age, location, salary, job title, etc., all such information comes under the attributes. It helps determine the background of the active audiences that easily connect with a brand’s product or services. Marketers use this info to understand how every segment of consumers gets introduced to their brand.
• Online Behaviour Questions like: how many times a user visited the service page or blog page, what is their email CTR, etc., all are a part of prospects’ online behaviour. Determining and analysing the elements that make the leads click helps replicate the results.
• By organising the online behaviour of various customers and leads , marketers can create a personalised benchmark system that specifies the average online interactions a user has before becoming a client.

Suggested Read: Things to do Before Setting Up a Lead Nurturing Plan

Phase 3: Mix and Match

After organising and segmenting the consumer data, marketers will be all set to create the final buyer journey map. By keeping a buyer’s persona in mind, mix and match the various datasets that come close to the particular user profile. List out the multiple touchpoints, attributes, online behaviour, pain points, etc., that customers go through during their journey across the sales funnel .

Also, a particular sales funnel stage can have many touchpoints representing negative or positive customer experiences. Keeping all of them on the buyer journey map makes understanding the prospects’ intent easier.

Important Suggestion: Optimize your sales funnel strategy with and gain a visual representation of each stage of the buyer’s journey, enhance conversions, and maximize revenue. Get the sales funnel mind map now for valuable insights to streamline your approach.

A buyer journey map is a great way to understand how brands can elevate their buying experience. Creating a buyer journey map might be cumbersome, but once established, it can serve as a framework for creating successful personalised campaigns.

Buyer journey maps are data-driven marketing efforts. A brand can push for exponential growth through customer-centric content with the right information and segmentation techniques.

Whether a brand wants to optimise its sales process or search for new opportunities, a buyer journey map assists in discovering hidden customer needs. It becomes easier for companies to build a marketing ecosystem that serves all their audiences.

Related Articles:

Top Of Funnel Marketing: Best Practices to follow How to Nurture Leads With Middle of the Funnel Lead Generation Nurture Bottom of the Funnel Leads With These Strategies Appointment Booking Funnel: Guide To Build An Automated Funnel

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Understanding and mapping the b2b buyer journey.

11 min read Mapping out and understanding your B2B buyer journey is key for understanding the moments that matter for your customers. Learn how to map out your B2B buyer journey and set the stage for the customer journeys that follows.

Your B2B buyer journey is the make-or-break-it sales approach to potential customers. Understanding how to map it and take action on gaps can be the difference between a customer signing on and a potential buyer looking for an alternative partner.

Free eBook: B2B CX for account management

What is the B2B buyer journey?

Your B2B buyer journey is the complete process a buyer will go through, starting from initial awareness of your brand, to the evaluation of your products and services, to finally taking the decision to make a purchase.

It’s most often thought of as initial stepping stone for potential new customers to start their ongoing sales journey with you, but there is also enormous potential for driving organic growth from existing customers through cross-sell and up-sell.

There are many components to an overall customer journey, including things like delivery and customer service , but to ensure there is adequate focus on growth the B2B buyer journey really seeks out those hooks for potentially interested parties and gets them on board to complete their purchasing journey.

How is the B2B journey different to the B2C buyer journey?

In the B2C market , potential buyers are usually individuals or families, with specific needs particular to themselves. They might be most concerned with convenience or their personal financial ability to buy your products or services. Relationships might be formed over a shorter period of time, with sales and marketing targeted at a very broad customer base via market segments or personas.

In the B2B market, the concept of a customer needs to be thought of differently, and often includes multiple stakeholders. They may have varying interests, concerns, and goals. Stakeholders can span from the Executive buyer to the end-user and related functions, such as procurement and legal. Relationships might be formed over a longer period of time, with sales and account management resources targeted specifically at that individual customer. Your relationship will be built with more than just the final decision maker – the aggregated connection you create with all stakeholders will make the account a success.

Why is the journey so important?

As mentioned, the buyer journey generally shapes a customer’s route through to the purchase process. Understanding buyer behavior during this process can greatly improve your chances of upselling and retaining your customers later down the line.

B2B buyer journey stages

The B2B buyer’s journey is often divided into three parts: Awareness, Consideration, and Decision. All three stages require an understanding of buying behavior particular to your customer segmentation and target personas.

1. Awareness

In this stage, the buyer is just beginning to get awareness of your company, your products and your services. This awareness is driven by your marketing team members with support from your sales and customer success teams.

In this stage, it is critical to demonstrate you understand the prospect or client’s real business needs and customer pain points, and can highlight the corresponding ways in which your business can help meet these needs. Here, marketing teams will be in content creation mode, creating content and leveraging digital channels such as websites and social media platforms that your sales and account teams can use as leverage to speak to potential customers.

2. Consideration

This stage is about showing how you can help resolve their pain points in a way that builds confidence in the quality and competitiveness of your offering.

Case studies, expert guides, effective in-person engagement and comparative content can help your sales team in lead nurturing once potential customers are aware of your solutions.

3. Decision

At this stage, your potential customers will be making decisions on which products or services they are most interested in. They might reach out to sales, but to help them along to the purchase process, sales reps might need marketing support with product demos, testimonials and product reviews to push marketing leads into sales lead generation.

B2B customer segmentation

To begin your buyer journey, you’ll first need to gather data and segment your potential customers so you can narrow down who is most likely to make a purchase.

1. Gather your data

In this step, you’re collating all the market research data you might need on potential customers. You might focus on industry, company size, location, technologies used or more. Discard companies that aren’t right for your business, but keep ones who might have a potential interest for further segmentation.

2. Create your tiers

Once you’ve got your list of potential accounts, narrow them down into tiers. These could be divided into your largest Tier 1 customers  – your key accounts that you want to prioritize – and further tiers. This way, you can develop a strategy for the maximum ROI for your marketing output.

3. Separate according to need

Though you can divide the businesses in your tiers by industry, often customer needs will transcend the sector they’re based in. You can often determine needs by what might drive your customer to your business – do they need more efficient software, or are the current products they use at risk of being deemed obsolete?

4. Divide according to customer development and sophistication

Segmenting the businesses you consider potential leads by their sophistication can help you to establish exactly at what level you need to offer your services or products. For example, a highly sophisticated software provider might not need basic cloud hosting services – but they might need your highly secure package. Similarly, offering too complex a service for a basic need is also likely to lose you potential business.

5. Segment according to behavior

Sometimes, needs and sophistication aren’t as helpful as dividing your potential customers according to their behavior. Some businesses prefer working with suppliers for many years, whereas others are more price-focused and will seek the best deal. By segmenting buyers in this way, you can tailor your marketing and sales efforts to really shape your offering to what your leads will want.

B2B target personas

Rather than starting your buyer journey aiming at all potential customers in a particular segment, it’s better to narrow down your focus to those who will find your business relevant and useful.

Before starting to create your B2B buyer journey, creating target personas can help you figure out some key factors:

•         Who is most likely to follow through to the purchase process?
•         What pain points can you solve?
•         Which marketing strategy is best to take your potential customers from knowing nothing about your brand to becoming buyers?

Your B2B target personas should include:

•         Demographics (age, occupation, decision-making capacity)
•         Goals (such as profitability or growth)
•         Their key factors for choosing a supplier
•         Their basic requirements
•         Their pain points
•         Brands they may already be using
•         How they prefer to interact (email, face-to-face, web chat etc.)

Remember, though you might have created one persona per segment, B2B customers often have multiple people involved in the decision making process. You might need to create a group of personas per segment to better reflect the needs you’ll have to fulfil.

Once you’ve built a set of personas, you can begin planning your buyer journey stages.

Mapping and optimizing the B2B buyer journey

The B2B buyer journey is often non-linear, making a map vital for understanding how your potential customers arrive at the decision to make a purchase.

By tracking your potential customers’ journey using data, you can follow their path from your content and your marketing outreach through your platforms, all the way to initial contact with the sales team.

Following the suggested buyer journey stages is a good way to start the process. However, truly understanding what has led customers to the decision to buy involves an understanding of their motives, tracking their arrival to your solutions, and continually optimizing their journey for conversions.

1. Narrow down the reason for their interest

There are many reasons why a customer might be driven to undergo the journey to purchasing your products, but segmenting your potential leads further can help identify them.

•         Looking for a solution to a problem?
•         Scoping out their potential requirements?
•         Searching for a new supplier?

By grouping customers you encounter according to their intent, you can create multiple buyer journeys that are tailored to resolving specific needs.

2. Understand how customers arrive at your content

Your journey might even start earlier than your content, with potential buyers using search engines to look for potential solutions. Tailoring your content to those searches can help to draw the right audience to your top-of-funnel content that starts the B2B buyer journey. By understanding their start point, you can figure out how to guide them to your end point.

3. Track conversions

Data will be the greatest help for understanding how customers arrive at the end point of their buyer journey. By looking at how customers find your content, engage with your content, and move on to the next stage of the journey, you can keep doing what works and discard what doesn’t. You can also quickly identify gaps where you lose customers and provide more content and sales effort to compensate.

4. Continually adapt

Remember, your B2B buyer journey is not fixed, but flexible.

What works for one customer one time might not work a year or two down the line for another. Constantly updating your B2B buyer journey according to your data and insights will help to make sure you’re still meeting needs for each individual customer.

Adding B2B buyer journey optimization into your CX strategy

Your B2B buyer journey is important, but it only forms part of your overall customer experience . Your CX program should ideally include data analysis, win/loss optimization, and customer retention strategies alongside your buyer journey efforts.

Read Qualtrics’ Account Management Solutions eBook now for insights and advice on the reasons for:

• Developing a customer health benchmark score and optimizing over time
• Formulating a customer retention strategy
• Optimizing the buyer journey
• Analyzing your win/loss ratio and taking action

Related resources

B2b customer churn and retention 7 min read, b2b customer service 10 min read, b2b customer experience 21 min read, customer success 8 min read, customer health scores 15 min read, win/loss analysis and optimization 10 min read, request demo.

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