Written by: Rob Talbot and Bob Finlayson 

A customer journey map is a powerful tool for understanding and influencing customer behavior. Yet many marketing executives do not create, update, or effectively use this valuable tool.  

In this post, we’ll explain what a customer journey map is, why it’s important, how you can use it to enhance your marketing and sales programs and customer-acquisition campaigns dramatically, what you’ll miss if you don’t create a CJM, and how you can get started building and using this essential tool.

What is a Customer Journey Map?

A customer journey map is a visual representation of a prospective customer's journey from initial brand awareness to post-purchase engagement. It outlines each stage of the customer experience, highlighting key touchpoints, actions, emotions, and pain points that influence their perception of the brand along the way.

By capturing every interaction—from initial motivation to brand awareness, purchase, and advocacy—the map provides a detailed look at the customer’s path, helping brands understand how and why customers make decisions.

Customer journey maps typically have six stages: motivation, awareness, consideration, purchase, retention/expansion, and advocacy. Each stage may involve multiple steps as customers move from one stage to the next. However, the journey isn’t always linear; customers may jump ahead or regress as they consider their options or are influenced by competitors, detractors, and advocates.

Different customer segments, defined by demographics and psychographics, may respond to a brand differently. Understanding these personas is crucial when building a customer journey map.

Why is a CJM important?

At its most basic level, a customer journey map is a strategic asset that empowers companies to proactively shape experiences that draw customers to them, drive purchase decisions, and meet and even exceed customer expectations.

Customer journey maps help brands understand the customer mindset and need state at all stages of their journey so the brand can develop content, design experiences, and create interactions to influence customer behavior at every stage of that journey.

Specifically, customer journey maps:  

1. Enhance Understanding of the Customer: By detailing the customer's experience, a journey map provides insights into customer motivations, needs, and challenges. This deeper understanding allows businesses to create more personalized and relevant interactions.
2. Identify Pain Points and Opportunities: A journey map helps pinpoint moments where customers experience frustration or unmet needs. By identifying these obstacles, companies can refine existing processes to improve customer satisfaction and design content and touchpoints to capture the customers' attention and drive them to make a purchase. Pain points and obstacles can also be leveraged to drive product updates and new product development.
3. Align Departments: Customer journey mapping brings together departments such as marketing, sales, and customer support, fostering a unified approach to the customer experience. This seamless alignment increases sales and customer satisfaction.
4. Inform Strategic Decisions: With a clear view of the journey, businesses can make data-driven decisions, optimize processes, allocate resources effectively, and prioritize improvements that drive customer loyalty and retention.

What you can learn from a CJM

A customer journey map offers many insights that can transform customer interactions. Here’s what marketers can learn: 

1. Understanding Customer Emotions and Motivations: A journey map highlights where customers interact with a brand and how they feel at each stage. By mapping these emotions, marketers can identify moments of excitement, frustration, or uncertainty that influence customer decisions. Understanding these emotional triggers allows marketers to adjust messaging, tone, and timing – helping to build a more empathetic and trustworthy relationship with customers.
2. Identifying Key Touchpoints: The journey map reveals all the points where customers interact with a brand, from digital ads, text, and video content to social media to in-person events and store visits to customer service and support. By analyzing these touchpoints, marketers can see which channels are most effective for driving awareness, which interactions lead to higher engagement, and which experiences convert casual interest into purchase and, ultimately, loyalty. This allows for optimized resource allocation and focused strategies that strengthen the customer experience at every journey stage.
3. Creating Opportunities for Personalization: With a clear view of the customer journey, marketers can identify when and where personalization can add the most value. By tailoring interactions based on individual preferences, previous behaviors, and specific touchpoints, marketers can create relevant and meaningful experiences that resonate personally.
4. Developing Insights into Customer Preferences: A journey map reveals patterns in customer preferences, helping marketers understand what types of content, offers, and interactions are most appealing. For example, if a journey map shows that customers respond best to interactive content during consideration, marketers can prioritize these formats in future campaigns. Such insights into customer preferences guide content and campaign strategies, ensuring that marketing efforts align with what customers genuinely find valuable.

By leveraging insights into emotions, motivations, key touchpoints, and preferences, marketers can create a cohesive strategy that meets customer needs, deepens engagement, fosters loyalty, and drives long-term revenue growth.

What you’ll miss without a CJM

If we haven’t convinced you of the importance of creating a customer journey map, consider what you will miss without one. Without a CJM, marketers risk overlooking critical insights and strategies directly impacting customer experience sales and business growth.

Specifically, you will:

1. Miss Opportunities for Optimization: Without a precise map, it’s challenging to pinpoint where improvements in marketing programs will have the most impact. Marketers may overlook moments when customers are ready to take the next step, missing chances to engage, convert, or retain them. For instance, if a journey map shows that customers tend to drop off after visiting a particular webpage, marketers can optimize that page to keep customers engaged. Without this insight, small inefficiencies and obstacles in the customer’s journey can go unnoticed, leading to diminished results.
2. Risk Inconsistent Messaging Across Channels: A journey ensures consistent messaging across various customer touchpoints. Without it, marketers might send mixed or conflicting messages, causing confusion and eroding customer trust. For example, if the brand’s tone is professional on the website but casual on social media, customers may have a fragmented experience. A journey map aligns messaging across channels, creating a unified and memorable brand presence that builds credibility and trust.
3. Lack of Insight into Customer Pain Points: A journey map highlights where customers encounter friction or frustration. Without it, marketers miss these crucial pain points, leading to customer dissatisfaction and increased churn. For example, a map may reveal customers find the checkout process overly complicated, prompting marketers to streamline it. When these pain points go unnoticed, customers are likelier to abandon the journey, leaving marketers unaware of the reasons behind low engagement or conversion rates. Understanding customer pain points also helps identify opportunities for product improvements and new products or services that meet those pain points.
4. Jeopardize Effective Allocation of Resources: Journey mapping clarifies the most impactful touchpoints. Without it, marketers may over-invest in less effective channels, wasting budgets. For instance, if a journey map reveals that customers are more responsive to email than social media in the decision phase, resources can be reallocated accordingly.
5. Limited Ability to Personalize Experiences: A cornerstone of modern marketing, personalization requires a deep understanding of customer behaviors, preferences, and emotions. Without a journey map, marketers are left guessing what customers want at each touchpoint, making it challenging to deliver the relevant, customized experiences that customers expect. This lack of personalization can make the brand feel generic or out of touch, reducing engagement, consideration, and loyalty.
6. Fail to Anticipate Customer Needs: Journey maps allow marketers to anticipate customer needs and proactively tailor experiences. Without it, marketers lack the forward-thinking perspective necessary to create proactive strategies. This results in reactive marketing that addresses issues only after they arise. Sadly, this type of reactive marketing has resulted in the demise of many CMOs.

Conclusions & Next Steps

A detailed customer journey map, informed by data and in-depth customer personas, provides invaluable structure and clarity, enabling consistent, relevant, and personalized experiences. Without it, marketers risk delivering fragmented, uninspiring customer interactions that undermine trust and loyalty.

In today’s competitive market, where customer experience is often a key differentiator, journey mapping has become an essential practice for any customer-centric organization.

If you have a customer journey map, update it regularly with data across the stages. If you don’t have one, start by developing customer personas gathering data at each stage of your customer’s journey. Then, build out the map, identifying the content, touchpoints, and channels most likely to attract and engage customers, turning interest into sales and customers into advocates.

About the Authors

Rob Talbot is a Partner and CMO at Chief Outsiders, a consulting firm that helps companies grow by providing fractional, highly experienced marketing executives. Chief Outsider CMOs work directly with the CEO, as part of the company's leadership team, to reestablish or accelerate growth through strategic planning, identifying consumer and market insights, developing effective and disciplined marketing plans, and then execution and measurement of results. 

Bob Finlayson is co-founder of Bold Marketing & Communications. Bold provides a broad slate of marketing and communications services including developing and updating customer journey maps and customer personas. Bold also help clients with demand generation programs, account-based marketing, got-to-market strategies, branding, and data-driven content marketing that engages target audiences and drives awareness, thought leadership and sales.