A customer journey map is a visual representation of the path customers take when interacting with your brand, from awareness to post-purchase. This map provides valuable insight into the needs, processes, and perceptions of your targets, equipping you with a deeper understanding of what motivates them and why. Ultimately, the customer journey map seeks to provide you with an understanding of why people are choosing your brand (and why not), so you can adapt your sales journey to each individual’s unique needs, and close more sales.

It’s crucial to ensure that everyone has a positive experience with your brand across all touchpoints. A great way to make this happen is by creating a customer journey map. This map provides you with information about a typical customer’s pain points and motivations throughout the buying process, allowing you to respond properly and drastically improving your chances of completing a sale. By mapping out the customer journey, you can identify places where you’ve missed opportunities, create new touchpoints, and craft more persuasive messaging.

The customer journey map should clearly outline significant milestones on the journey from lead to satisfied customer. You’ll want to organize these into touchpoints and stages. Touchpoints represent any time a customer interacts with your brand, from hearing a commercial on the radio to receiving a follow-up email after a purchase. Stages are the goals behind every touchpoint and can be broken down into the following: awareness, consideration, purchase, retention, and advocacy.

It’s essential to remember that customer journeys are not usually linear. It’s rare for a potential customer to follow the steps of the buying decision in exact sequence, moving neatly from problem recognition to information gathering to solution evaluation to purchase. Instead, they’re far more likely to double back, skip steps or switch channels mid-journey. This can make mapping the customer journey a challenge.

To create a customer journey map, first, you need to set your objectives. Before you set pen to paper, you’ll first want to decide what you’re hoping to accomplish with your buyer’s journey map. Next, create customer personas, which are representations of your average customers based on existing customers and market research. You’ll want to include things like demographic information to help you get into the mind of the people you’re trying to sell to.

Your customer journey map should also detail how customers are reacting at each stage of the buying process. They may read online reviews, request a free trial, or speak to friends who have previously used your company. Including this allows you to explore the various ways a customer could interact with you. Moreover, you should also identify the pain points of your customers at each stage of the purchasing process, including what emotions your target audience is feeling. Once you’ve done this, you can implement solutions to reduce or eliminate this feeling.