Mike Zeederberg, ADMA instructor and Managing Director and owner of digital marketing agency, Zuni defines it as “the journey a customer goes through when solving a problem.”

A customer journey map is a visual representation of this journey – including the challenges they need to solve at each stage, the channels they're using, the barriers they face, and often the emotions and feelings they experience along the way.

A customer journey should not be confused with a purchase journey, which only maps out the touchpoints customers have on their path to purchase.

“Brands often think mapping a purchase journey is enough,” Mike says. “But sitting around that is all the gold. Because when you overlay that with the customer journey, you can get a lot of insights around why some people don’t complete a purchase.”

Customer journey mapping helps you better understand how your customers interact with your products and services and develop a robust customer-centric marketing strategy.

“It lets you unpack the holy grail of marketing – the right message to the right person at the right time in the right channel,” Mike explains.

It helps you uncover how your products solve customers’ problems and identify blockers you may not be aware of. Going through the exercise of journey mapping can also give you granular insights about what your customers need at each stage of the journey. This helps you develop messaging, content or campaigns that talk to customer needs and remove any obstacles from the purchasing path.

For instance, it can help you work out when offering discounts will help you get a sale across the line.

“Quite often we see marketers run discount campaigns in the hope that it's going to increase volume, without knowing and understanding whether the price is actually the barrier,” Mike shares.

“The customer journey helps you narrow down what the actual barrier is so you can create content or a campaign addressing that specific thing.”

There are 6 steps to effective customer journey mapping.

1. Clarify your objectives

First you need to identify why you’re creating a customer journey map. What business problem/s are you trying to solve? What are the business objectives?

Is it to generally improve sales? Reduce churn? Or to get a specific audience to take a specific action?

Whatever it may be, you need to define it before you jump into mapping it out.

2. Identify target audience

Next, you need to define what target audience is going to help you satisfy your objective.

“If you want to increase sales, then it's likely to be people we've never met. If it’s to reduce churn, you’ll be looking at current customers who are in danger of leaving,” explains Mike.

Work out the audience segment and what you know about them. What are their attributes? What can we do that would allow us to engage with them?

3. Defining the journey

Once you know and understand who the audience is, you need to work out the scenarios in which your business can offer the solution to their problem. On what journey will they encounter the need for your product or service?

Say a B2B client wants to improve marketing efficiency and effectiveness. Buying HubSpot’s marketing automation and email solution is going to help them do that.

4. Map the journey

Once you understand the journey your customers are on, it’s time to unpack it. Get everyone who knows your customer into a room – sales, customer service, business development managers (in B2B) and of course marketers.

Together, map out every stage of the journey, and for each note down:

• What is the customer thinking? What are their problems at this particular point?

• What questions do they have?

• What are they doing to find answers to these questions? Are they going to Google or asking friends or both?

• What information do they need to move forward?

• What are they feeling?

You can go a step further and look at what your competitors are doing, what you’re already doing, what the touchpoints are and what resources or content you currently have at each stage.

This part of the process will document and visualise what you already know – and, perhaps more importantly, highlight what you don’t.

5. Validate the journey

Now it’s time to make sure that your map reflects your customers’ reality. Conduct research through qualitative focus groups, one on ones, quantitative surveys, and by engaging with people. If your map raised certain gaps in your knowledge, make sure you ask those questions during the process.

And make sure you use your own data to validate your assumptions. If you think people download a PDF or read an email at a certain stage, cross check with your Google Analytics and email data.

6. Develop an action plan

Once you have a solid, realistic customer journey map, you need to think about how you’re going to use the insights to make strategic and tactical decisions.

“If the first thing somebody does is look at your price, you need to treat them as a value orientated segment. And so your messaging is going to be about price rather than about security, for example,” Mike explains. “Or if everyone's concerned about the safety of your product, you need a halo safety campaign, because without it, every step of the process becomes difficult.”

Develop metrics to measure how your activities perform and monitor outcomes on a regular basis.

Businesses often have more complex challenges and make more complex purchase decisions than B2C customers – and often the end user is not the same person who buys your product or service. There are often multiple people and departments involved, with different motivations, who evaluate products from different perspectives. The challenges they’re trying to solve are also often more complex.

You need to consider all of these to create a compelling corporate or business customer experience.

Whereas your B2C journey should ideally focus on one persona’s experience in a single scenario to help you uncover new insights that will help you make strategic decisions.

Omnichannel marketing aims to create seamless, consistent customer experiences across all touchpoints.

Through a customer-centric view of marketing tactics, it deploys consistent branding and personalised messages across all channels and stages of the customer journey.

Journeys extend to all channels naturally, because people don’t restrict their behaviour to one medium or communication method. So they should be able to give you all touchpoints of a specific customer segment (be that offline or online), helping you craft seamless omnichannel experiences.