How to Make a Customer Journey Map

A customer journey map is an incredible tool to increase traffic and revenue in your online business. But what is a customer journey map and how do you create one? Have no fear. We have the 7 steps of how to make a customer journey map, to help guide you through creating your own.

Let’s go!

Benefits of Customer Journey Mapping

Before we head into the nitty gritty, you might be asking yourselves who do you need a customer journey map in the first place.

Oh, my friend, there are so many benefits to customer journey mapping. Here are just a few:

1. Deepening understanding of your target consumer
2. Understanding where customer pain points might arise
3. Finding gaps in the consumer touch points you might be overlooking
4. Refocusing your company towards generating leads
5. Improving customer retention
6. Discovering where the customer pain points are & fixing them 
7. Increasing sales & revenue! 

Pretty valuable info to have, right?

To start, pull out a template to help organize your thoughts. Here’s a free customer journey map template we developed at Marketing Growth Lab to get you started. Feel free to print this out to start filling in your own map.

Now let’s dive in!

Step 1: Create Buyer Personas 

First off, what are buyer personas?

Essentially, a buyer persona is an outline of your target customer. They help you understand your user’s goals, needs, and what’s important to them.

The more detail you can include, the better. This usually starts with outlining two key elements: customer demographics & customer psychographics.

1. Demographics – this is the who behind your customer. Things like:
   1. Age
   2. Gender
   3. Location
   4. Education
   5. Occupation
   6. Average income
   7. Marital & parental status
   8. Etc.
2. Psychographics – this is the why behind your consumer’s actions. For example:
   1. Their hopes
   2. Their dreams
   3. Their fears
   4. Their aspirations
   5. What keeps them up at night
   6. What they want more than anything
   7. Their goals
   8. Etc.

Compiling target customers can take a little time – but really understanding your customers inside and out is essential to almost every element of your business.

Every piece of content you create, every image you curate, every blog post you write, every interview you give, should be talking to your exact buyer.

And having great buyer personas?

They’re super important to getting your customer journey map right. So, if you haven’t thought about building these yet, do yourself a favour and take some time to do so.

Step 2: List Our Customer Touch Points 

Step 2 of how to make a customer journey map is to start thinking about the various touch points where your target customer comes in contact with your brand.

How do they hear about you? Where do they interact with your brand? Where do they see you, hear you, or interact with you?

For example:

• Your website
• Blog
• Social channels – Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, TikTok, Snapchat, LinkedIn, etc.
• Emails
• Referrals from other brands or websites
• 3rd-party reviews
• Amazon
• Paid advertisements
• In the media
• On Podcasts
• Etc.

As you’re going through this list, think about how customers are interacting with you in each of these interactions, as well as the quality of the engagements.

If your target consumer came across any of these touch points, what would they think, honestly?

Is every single one representing your brand the exact way you want to be perceived? Could any be optimized? Are there any gaps?

Organize It

Next up, you’re going to want to bulk these into four sections:

1. Awareness – this is where people are just finding out about your brand for the first time
2. Consideration – this is where people already know about your brand, but are not yet purchasing. Often, this is the biggest part of the map.
3. Purchase – Cha-ching! Here, people are ready to pull the trigger and pay you for your goods or services.
4. Referral – This is where people are not only buying from you, but also referring their friends to also buy from you. This is the magic zone where growth accelerates.

Below is a sample I did for a client, where you can see the various touch points on their customer journey map.

Note: It’s okay if you don’t include every single touch point you have. For example, if you have a TikTok account, but have barely any engagement there and an average user wouldn’t see you there, it’s okay to not include it on your map.

Step 3: Identify Customer Actions 

Great job pulling together your customer touch points!

Next up, you’re going to want to flag where customers take action with your brand.

Think through each touchpoint from your list above and outline what a user is doing at each of these touchpoints. For example:

• Where are they finding your brand in the first place? Do you come up in a Google image search, in an Instagram post, on Pinterest, mentioned in a Podcast, etc.?
• What phrases are they searching that might be bringing them to you?
• If someone goes to your website, what do they do while there?
• At what point do they sign up for an email newsletter?
• When do they follow you on social media?
• How do they engage with your brand on social media? Like, comment, respond to polls, repost, etc.
• At what point do they start to considering making a purchase with you?

Plot these actions against the touch points for your brand under the Awareness / Consideration / Purchase / Referral sections, and you’ll start to get a picture of how an average customer’s journey might look like.

When I add customer actions on top of the touch points, here’s what it looks like:

Step 4: Identify Customer Goals, Thoughts & Feelings

When your target customer comes across a touchpoint or takes an action, what’s going through their minds?

Be honest here.

Sure, there’s a (tiny) chance every single customer who interacts with your brand loves every single interaction you offer. But if that were the case, you’d be converting 100% of your target customers into purchasers, and have no use for this post. I’m going to be that’s not the case.

Where are they getting surprised & delighted? What touch points are they loving and being pleasantly surprised in?

Conversely, is there a spot they might be getting let down? Where might they get frustrated, or lose interest? Finding these areas is important – if you don’t highlight them, you can’t create a plan to overcome them.

Because by really putting yourself in their shoes, you’ll be able to highlight opportunities for improvement – and that’s where the real wins happen.

Here are the thoughts & feelings layered onto the customer journey map:

Step 5: Look for Patterns & Data

Now that you have a good chunk of the intel assembled (great job!) it’s now time to look for patterns and opportunities to improve your customer’s journey.

Start by layering in any data you have. For example:

• Do you have stats showing how long an average user has followed you?
• Do you know what percentage of carts become abandoned?
• Your conversion from website visitors to becoming leads (i.e., giving you their email address in exchange for getting a freebie)?

There are a few ways you can get this super valuable intel.

First: look to your tools. Look at the stats on social media, dive into your email stats, look at your website analytics, and explore any other tools you may have at your disposal (like Salesforce, etc.). Google Analytics is a great free tool that can give you tons of data.

Second: explore qualitative data by talking with your customers directly. You can do this through polls, surveys, direct messages, or 1-on-1 interviews. Email & social media are great places to do quick, informal polls.

For example, I set up a survey for a business that became part of their email onboarding series. After a user received three emails (each spaced a week apart) offering freebies & tips, I included a short 7-question survey asking people specifics about what was working for them, what resources they’re looking for, and what products might make their life easier.

This company now has four years’ worth of data directly from their customers, helping give them incredible insight.

Step 6: Identify Pain Points & Opportunities

In looking at your list so far, of brand touchpoints, customer actions, customer thoughts, and patterns, you now have what you need to identify what might not be working as well as it could.

It’s time to highlight the pain points that your users might be experiencing.

Be real with yourself here. Not everyone will follow you forever, and not everyone will convert to a paying customer – so where are they falling off? Where are people getting frustrated? What’s an area that could be working better than it is?

 
Step 7: Create Solutions & Add New Touch Points

Now that you have your pain points highlighted, here’s where the real value in customer journey mapping comes in.

It’s time to start thinking about what you can do to improve your customer’s journey.

For example, do you see stats that emails aren’t getting opened? Try adjusting your settings, email subjects, opening paragraph, sender, and design to increase open rates.

Are your users following along faithfully, but simply failing to convert to purchase? Perhaps your landing could be far more compelling, or your price point is off, or they simply don’t know about your offerings. You can experiment here in many ways. For example:

• Move content higher up onto the page
• Move to a more visual, less text-heavy design
• Visualize the benefits your customers will get
• Add customer testimonials
• Change the size, design, and color of buttons
• Show social proof
• Try testing different headlines
• Etc.

Do you find you have a strong following on Instagram, but nobody is checking out your website? It’s time to start working on a website strategy – maybe working on your SEO, adding Pinterest (which is essentially a visual search engine), getting link referrals from other websites, or including your links more on Instagram.

In this example, I merged pain points with opportunities, but essentially it ended in the same result:

AB Testing

Another super important thing to consider in this stage is A/B Testing.

A/B Testing is essentially experimenting with different elements of something like a landing page on your website, showing two different examples, and seeing which performs best.

For example, you might have two different landing pages, each with a different headline. After a few weeks if you see one is performing even slightly better than the other, keep that headline – then try experimenting with the new thing.

Constant experimentation is what growth marketing is all about, and can position you towards fantastic growth for your brand.

The Power of Customer Journey Maps

There you have it – customer journey mapping in a nutshell.

Can you go deeper and more robust? Definitely.

I’ve seen some really complex customer journey maps. Maybe they work for those brands, maybe they don’t.

But your goal is essentially to make something that works for you. If you create something, and it simply sits in a folder on your computer unused, it’s not going to help anyone. I usually recommend starting with something slightly more simplistic, easy to read, and easy to use. That way, you’ll get the most impact from the work you did.

Then, once you have a clear picture of how a user is interacting with your brand, you can identify ways to deepen a customer’s relationship with your brand.

And ultimately? That leads to increased revenues for your business.

Customer journey maps can be incredibly powerful tools, in giving customers an incredible experience with your brand, in building trust, and ultimately in getting them down the path to purchase.

As you move from the build stage into the grow stage, you’re going to take this customer journey map and plot it into a customer funnel (essentially the path going from complete brand awareness, through to purchase and becoming a brand advocate).

You will also overlap your customer journey map against a full list of P-E-S-O marketing tactics (paid, earned, shared, owned).

You’ll be so glad you did this work now!

Because deepening customer relationships and ultimately leading to increased revenue?

Now that’s something we can all get behind.

P.S.

PS. If you’re interested, here are a few more versions of customer journey maps, pulled from HubSpot’s customer journey maps, in case you’d like additional reading or additional templates. Now roll up those sleeves and get to work!
 

https://blog.hubspot.com/service/customer-journey-map#process