Customer Journey Map: What It Is, How to Create One, and Examples
The customer journey map is a tool used to improve products, marketing, sales, and decision-making in any company.
This technique was “imported” from the User Experience (UX) sector and adapted for other areas as an intelligent way to enhance processes and results.
This article will deepen your understanding of the customer journey map, explaining the concept, providing examples of how to apply it, and offering a guide to help you use this tool in your company.
What is a Customer Journey Map?
A customer journey map is a tool designed to analyze consumer behavior and outline the entire user journey—from the first doubt or motivation to purchasing a product or solution, including the post-purchase process.
To create your customer journey map, you need an in-depth understanding of your audience, investment in both quantitative and qualitative research, and knowledge of marketing and sales psychology.
The entire process revolves around two key focal points:
- Motivations – Companies must understand the motivations that drive consumers through each stage of the buying process. What are the pains, desires, needs, emotions, and rational thoughts behind each transition point?
- Moment of Truth – These transition points are the most crucial moments in building a customer journey map. After all, they are decisive. At each one, the consumer will either continue building a relationship with your brand or abandon it.
What Are the Stages of the Customer Journey?
The path a consumer takes from the emergence of a doubt or need to purchasing a product or service that resolves the issue is called the Buying Journey or Sales Funnel.
This journey includes multiple stages, each with specific ways to attract attention and communicate with potential customers.
Awareness and Discovery
In the first phase, the consumer is not yet thinking about making a purchase.
They begin to identify questions, and the company positions itself as a guide to help them understand the problem behind their uncertainties.
Here, marketing and communication focus on visibility, reach, and impressions.
It’s time to capture visitors’ attention by providing educational content and running awareness-driven campaigns.
Problem Recognition
Once they understand and recognize their problem, the consumer starts searching for solutions to specific questions (now that they know what to research). This is where the brand can begin creating a need for a solution.
At this stage, the brand is not yet the focus of attention. Instead, it should assist and provide in-depth, specific content addressing the problem.
Consideration of Solutions
Now aware of their problem, the consumer begins looking for solutions.
At this stage, companies showcase the unique advantages of their solutions and encourage decision-making, qualifying leads.
This is when users are directed toward specific events, such as converting through landing pages, and when businesses nurture relationships with their lead base.
Content should be more persuasive and focused on highlighting product or service benefits.
At this stage, the consumer is convinced by the solution rather than the brand itself.
For example, a buyer might decide to purchase an ergonomic office chair after realizing that poor seating is causing back pain. Only after this realization do they begin researching different brands.
This leads to the next phase.
Purchase Decision
By now, the consumer knows what they want and even the specifications they are looking for.
Now, they seek the best brand to make their purchase.
Brand choice happens at this point.
Besides conversion-focused ads, remarketing strategies and lead nurturing flows guide the prospect through the buying journey.
At this stage, content becomes more sales-driven.
Often, consumers are already in direct contact with the sales team.
Why Do Companies Create a Customer Journey Map?
Using a customer journey map as a tool can completely transform how you engage with leads and consumers. It also helps improve customer retention and reduce marketing and sales costs.
Understanding Customer Perceptions
A company’s perception of what customers want is often inaccurate.
This misalignment can be highly damaging and usually only becomes evident when a company starts investing in more strategic marketing efforts.
A customer journey map helps understand real needs, consumer thought processes, and how to offer even better solutions and experiences.
Identifying Gaps and Improving Communication Channels
Even if you already have a solid marketing strategy, a customer journey map can help your team identify areas for improvement, determine which strategies yield the best returns, enhance communication channels, and optimize resource allocation (time and money).
Reducing Costs
By better understanding consumer desires and improving marketing and sales processes, investments become more strategic.
This results in cost reductions by eliminating ineffective actions.
Additionally, applying the customer journey approach increases the chances of customer loyalty since relationships are nurtured at every stage.
And as you know, acquiring a new customer is more expensive than retaining an existing one.
Boosting Sales
With the right stimuli, consumers tend to progress more naturally through the buying journey and, as a result, close more deals since they are nurtured throughout the process.
This is one of the best ways to increase conversions and raise the average ticket value (the total amount spent per customer).
A customer journey map will significantly enhance your sales results!
🔎 Read also: How to Create a Budget for Clients and Close More Deals – Essential Tips and Steps
Improving Customer Satisfaction
When we have a great experience and strong relationship with a brand, we’re much more likely to recommend it to someone facing the same problem.
Satisfied customers become the best brand promoters.
How to Create a Customer Journey Map?
Ready to start building your customer journey map?
Here’s a step-by-step guide to help you:
Define Your Persona
Before anything else, you need to understand who your customer is!
Creating brand personas is essential for this planning phase.
Personas are representations of your ideal customer, based on research and data, that help you understand how each audience segment behaves and consumes content.
With all these factors in mind, it becomes much easier to define the strategies and investments needed to achieve your goals.
Set a Timeframe
Another important aspect is defining the length of the buying journey.
From the first interaction with your company to the final purchase, how long does the process typically take?
For example, the decision-making period for ordering a pizza is very different from purchasing real estate.
Analyzing this total duration will help you estimate the time needed for each stage.
Choose the Right Channels
With your timeframe and personas defined, it’s time for the next step: choosing the right channels.
By analyzing your audience, you’ll identify which types of content they consume and where they are most active.
Selecting the right channels ensures that your offers reach the right consumers at the right time.
The First Action
The beginning of the journey is the first contact a consumer has with your brand.
Within the defined channels, how will you start this relationship?
Consider the different customer needs at each stage, as we previously explained, to avoid offering content or an offer that won’t generate interest.
Your communication must align with the customer’s purchasing maturity from the very first contact.
The Last Action
Before making a purchase, what triggers will finally convert your potential customer into a client?
Think about the type of irresistible offer you will present and how you will create certainty that your solution is exactly what they need.
Between the first and last action, you must fill the entire journey with new content, interactions, offers, and relationship-building actions.
Customer Contact
At the end of the journey, your sales team should be involved, either receiving contact or reaching out to the consumer who is most inclined to make a purchase or contract.
All the strategies and definitions worked on should also guide this contact, as it is crucial for conversion and customer loyalty through a positive experience.
How to Define the Journey Stages?
Defining where each stage begins and ends is also important for planning how actions and content will be distributed.
There are several tools that can help you with both planning and executing these actions.
Check out how to gather the necessary information to put the strategy into practice.
Results of Acquisition Strategies
To define the stages, you need to understand how customers currently reach your brand and whether you want to change (or not) this dynamic with the new strategy.
Through tools like newsletters, landing pages, and conversational marketing, you can obtain valuable information from your leads at the beginning of their relationship with your brand.
User Engagement
After the first contact with your channels, how do you build a relationship and motivate users to continue consuming the content your marketing team produces?
Analyze your company’s current engagement rates on social media, email marketing, and shares.
Keep monitoring these metrics throughout your communication efforts.
Content Marketing Results
If your brand wants to build a relationship with consumers throughout the journey, investing in content marketing (via blogs, offering materials like e-books, and nurturing emails) is an excellent strategy.
Additionally, offering this type of material is a way to collect important data that will help in lead qualification.
Consider your customer profile when determining topics and formats to be offered.
Tracking and Analyzing the User
Here, two options are interesting for understanding user behavior when interacting with your communication channels and website.
The first is using tools that show user behavior within your pages.
Which pages does your site visitor browse, for how long, and which links do they click?
All of this can be tracked.
Another interesting strategy in this context is remarketing and retargeting.
This consists of directing ads to those who have already visited your site and thus have already had some exposure to your brand.
Contact Before, During, and After Purchase
The channels and ways your customers contact your company are also useful for mapping the customer journey.
This applies to all purchase stages: how they ask questions, how they finalize the purchase, and how they contact support or post-sales service.
Motivations are also important—always keep that in mind!
Feedback and Post-Purchase Surveys
You should not wait for your customer to contact your post-sales department only when they have a question, problem, suggestion, or complaint.
Take the initiative to reach out and gather valuable information to continuously improve the purchasing experience for your customers.
How to Increase Retention with a Customer Journey Map?
Beyond mapping lead acquisition points and all transition triggers between journey stages, you should also focus on customer retention.
This goes hand in hand with ensuring customer satisfaction throughout the process.
Here are some factors that ensure a healthy relationship:
- Avoid channel competition: Communicating through multiple channels increases brand reach, but it must be planned carefully. Channels should be tailored to each stage and persona, offering different content rather than competing with each other.
- Listen to customers: We’ve mentioned this many times, but it bears repeating—the strategy’s focus must be on the consumer. Listening to customers is the best way to avoid working based on assumptions and superficial perceptions.
- Maintain brand identity across channels: Use your channels to expand your presence, but ensure that your brand’s message and identity are consistent across all of them. This creates a strong presence and quick consumer recognition.
- Keep it simple: We encounter countless ads and brand-created content every day. To capture consumer attention, keep your communication clear and simple. If visitors do not immediately understand your message, they will simply move on.
- Always innovate: Stay alert to new tools, channels, and ways to communicate with your consumers. Marketing and information consumption are constantly evolving, and your brand needs to keep up.
- Build a highly skilled team: As your marketing efforts improve and expand, demand for your products and services is likely to increase. Your team structure must be prepared to handle this demand while staying aligned with your brand’s messaging throughout the journey.
- Create a Customer Success department: Customer relationships don’t end at the moment of purchase. If possible, consider investing in Customer Success. This department anticipates customer needs and ensures that potential requests are addressed efficiently.
Conclusion
Creating a customer journey map is a complex process.
As you’ve seen throughout this article, there isn’t just one path or model to follow.
Just like your brand’s personas, journey maps require research, analysis, strategy, and adaptation to your company’s and customers’ needs.
Additionally, journey maps should not be static—they need to be continuously monitored to update and improve models and objectives.
We hope this article inspires you to create the best version for your company!
