With customer journey mapping, you can understand even better than before who your customers are, what drives them and how they experience their "journey" as customers. In turn, you can use this to improve your content or even your offers and products.

In this article, I'll explain in more detail what makes a customer journey map helpful, how you can create one and what alternatives there are, such as the empathy map.

What is a customer journey map?

A customer journey map brings together the two tools "customer journey" and "persona" in an interesting and useful way. It uses the same phases of your customers' journey, which can look like this:

• Awareness: The person concerned first identifies a problem or a need and sets out to find suitable solutions.
• Consideration: She learns more about possible offers and products and finally compares several.
• Purchase: She makes a purchase decision.  
• Retention: Ideally, this person will have such a good experience that they return again and again.
• Advocacy: And if it's really inspiringly good, she even tells friends, acquaintances and colleagues about it.

The special feature of the customer journey map is that it uses a persona to record and visualize the typical process for such a journey. See also our article Customer personas - identifying and understanding target groups. In other words, while the persona represents a group of customers with similar characteristics, the customer journey map shows their experiences with the company while they are on their journey.

A note in advance: Just as a persona is not an exact representation of a specific person, the customer journey map is not an exact representation of a specific journey of your customers. On the one hand, this would hardly be feasible and on the other hand, it is not even necessary. Rather, the map is a generalization. Nevertheless, it should be based on real data and not be an idealized fantasy version.

However, a customer journey map can also be helpful if you do not yet have such data, for example for products and offers that do not yet exist. In this case, it helps with the implementation of suitable landing pages, product pages and other content and activities. This map is then inevitably fictitious. However, it should still be based as far as possible on knowledge that you have gained from existing products and offers, for example.

Difference between customer journey and sales funnel

If you look at a customer journey, at first glance it looks very similar to a sales funnel. After all, both structure the path of a previously unknown person to a new customer and beyond. One key difference: the sales funnel is conceived from the company's perspective, whereas the customer journey is conceived from the customer's perspective.

From this perspective, the sales funnel is a good way to think comprehensively and fundamentally about whether all key phases of new customer acquisition have been considered. The customer journey and, above all, the customer journey map help you with the details and thus take the perspective of your customers.

This change of perspective is also very important for your content activities: it ensures that you don't emphasize the features of your offerings, but rather the benefits they have for your customers. And you think more about the questions, problems or doubts that your (potential) customers have.

This is particularly helpful in content marketing to promote the right mindset: After all, you want to gain trust and build a relationship with relevant and helpful content. It also helps you to write the right copy for sales pages and product descriptions.

How does customer journey mapping help you?

The basic idea of customer journey mapping is to understand your customers' journey in such detail and present it so clearly that you can use it to optimize your website structure, your content and, if necessary, your products and offers. With such a map, you also create a basis for argumentation with superiors in order to improve certain points: If necessary, you can clearly demonstrate why a certain task or investment is necessary.

For example, with the help of the customer journey map, you may find that your customers receive a response to a service request, but the team does not follow up later to check whether everything was handled satisfactorily. With your customer journey map, you can now show not only that there is a need for supporting software, for example, but also the impact and benefits of spending money on it.

Mapping will also give you a better understanding of how and where you can reach your potential customers. This will help you to better target not only your content, but also your ad campaigns, for example. And that's a good thing, because it becomes very expensive in the long run to address a vaguely defined audience and then hope that your own target group can be found somewhere within it.

In addition, a customer journey map shows you which touchpoints exist and what role they play. It answers questions such as: Where and in what way do people interact with your company or at least perceive the products and offers? This makes it clearer where you should focus your efforts or where resources are lacking. 

Example: It could become clear that your own website plays a different role than initially thought, as customers first look for information on comparison portals. It would then be crucial that you can be found here with your products and offers.

As you will see in a moment during implementation, the customer journey map is also about people's thoughts and feelings. And this in turn helps you to create the right content and implement it appropriately. In this way, you can counteract doubts or negative emotions at the crucial moment.

What belongs in the customer journey map?

A customer journey map ultimately consists of these components:

• Purchase process: Here you take the typical phases of the customer journey (see above) and list them horizontally, for example.
• Activities: What do the people in question do at each stage? Do they talk to friends or colleagues? Do they search on Google? Do they use a trial offer on your website?
• Emotions: How does the persona feel at each point of the customer journey? What worries and thoughts are there?
• Pain points: What are the biggest difficulties and challenges in each step?
• solutions: And finally, you record the ways in which you want to better accompany the customer journey. Is more content needed? What about software and services to better interact with your customers?

Steps to the customer journey map

Looking at the numerous details of a customer journey map, you may feel overwhelmed. At this point, I would like to repeat a point I made above: such a map is a simplified and generalized representation of reality.

However, because these maps can still be time-consuming, you will only create a few. Ideally, you should start with your most important persona. Only gradually add more maps. These should then usually be easier for you, as target groups are often similar enough to use the first customer journey map as a basis.

However, if you have not yet created any personas, this step comes first. You need to understand your real customers before you get started. In general, look at which insights are already available here and which are not:

• Web analysis tools are a possible source for collecting information.
• Also social networks usually offer you insights into your followers. 
• The next step would be to survey your customers, for example via a survey form on the website. Limit yourself to the questions from which you can learn the most - the shorter the better.
• In addition, it is generally considered very helpful to talk directly to customers. So you would schedule interviews with a few selected people and talk to them directly for 20 or 30 minutes. This might not be easy in many cases, as these people certainly have other things to do. But it's worth a try.
• Also talk to colleagues who have direct contact with the target groups. This includes sales or customer support. Of course, they only see part of the customer journey and it's your job to classify this correctly. But their experience and insights can still be very valuable.

If you are completely new to the topic, Wolfang Stefani explains in detail in his article what personas are for and how to create them step by step. He goes into detail about customer interviews. You can also read our e-book on targeted customer acquisition.

What does the end result look like?

Customer journey maps can look very different, as the examples linked below show. The decisive factor is that they show the course of time, the various touchpoints, as well as the thoughts, motivations and feelings of the persona.

The result should not be so complex that it takes too much effort to understand and apply it. But of course, it should also not be so generalized that it no longer makes any clear statements or bears little relation to reality. So find out which points are particularly important.

Your goal should be that as many people in your company as possible can do something with it. After all, what good is all the effort if the end result ends up languishing in a (virtual) drawer, never to be seen again?

In the end, this customer journey map could become a poster that hangs on the office wall, for example. This helps to anchor it in people's minds. The following examples can serve as inspiration:

• Customer Journey Map Templates from SlideModel
• Examples at Boagworld
• Examples and templates at HubSpot

An alternative: Empathy Map

As a customer journey map can be quite complex and time-consuming, there is a simpler version, the empathy map, which pursues similar goals. However, instead of mapping the entire customer journey with its phases and touchpoints, the empathy map is more of an extension of a persona.

At the end you will have a visualization of the person in question, surrounded by six sections:

1. Think and feel. What is important to these people? What are they concerned with? What worries and hopes do they have?
2. Hear. What do family, friends, colleagues, influencers say influences this person?
3. See. What in her environment does she see as a role model? Who are her competitors? What do friends and colleagues do?
4. Say and do. What is this person's attitude towards others? What do they do in public?
5. Pain. What fears, frustrations or obstacles does she have to deal with?
6. Gain. What does this person want to achieve? What does success look like for them?

Here too, real insights should ideally serve as the basis, as already described above in connection with the customer journey map and the persona model.

You can design the categories of such an empathy map differently if this makes it more meaningful or easier to implement. Based on his experience, Paul Boag recommends the following modification, for example:

1. Tasks. What is the person trying to achieve? What tasks are pending? What questions would they like to have answered?
2. Feelings. How does the person feel about what they are experiencing? What is important to them?
3. Influences. Which other people, things or places influence how this person behaves?
4. Pain points. What difficulties is the person experiencing that they want to overcome?
5. Goals. What is this person's ultimate goal? What do they want to achieve?

Admittedly: A customer journey map seems like an enormous task, especially for a small team and even more so for the self-employed. Keep in mind that this map doesn't have to be perfect right away. It is a living document. 

It can also serve as a reminder of what you don't yet know about your customers and their problems, questions and challenges during the development phase.