When you’re building a marketing strategy, it’s easy to focus on what you want, more clicks, more leads, more revenue. But smart marketers know that real traction comes when you flip the lens and focus on what your customers are actually experiencing.
That’s where a Customer Journey Map comes in. It’s not just a pretty diagram, it’s a tool to help your team see your business from the customer’s perspective. And in marketing, that perspective shift changes everything.
In fact, we always make sure there’s a documented and reviewed customer journey map before locking in any strategy. It’s a non-negotiable part of our process, not because it’s trendy, but because it grounds everything that follows. Without it, you’re basically guessing at what your audience needs and how they move through your world.
What Is a Customer Journey Map?
It’s a visual breakdown of the steps your customer takes as they interact with your brand. That might be through a website, a sales call, a referral, or even how they receive ongoing support. It brings clarity to the full experience, from that first “I think I’ve heard of them” moment all the way to loyalty and advocacy.
It’s part storytelling, part reality check.
Why Use It in Marketing Strategy?
If you’re serious about customer-centric marketing, a journey map helps you:
- Spot friction
It’s easier to find the moments where your process creates confusion, frustration, or just plain drop-off.
- Understand real needs
You get a clearer sense of what people are thinking, feeling, and doing at each stage based on actual observations, not assumptions.
- Design with empathy
When strategy is built around the customer’s real experience, your messaging becomes more relevant, your timing improves, and your content actually lands.
How We Build a Journey Map (and You Can Too)
Here’s how we typically build one with our clients. No fancy software needed. Just some sticky notes, textas, and butchers paper,
Step 1: Map the stages
Start by listing the key steps your customer goes through – awareness, research, decision, sign-up, onboarding, post-purchase, and so on.
Step 2: Dig into each step
As a team, unpack each stage by asking:
- Who’s involved? (Customer, team, partners?)
- What is the customer doing or trying to do?
- What problems might they run into?
- Where can we surprise or delight them?
- What assumptions are we making?
You’ll often find gold here. Stuff that’s been overlooked or misunderstood for years.
Step 3: Use the 80/20 rule
Don’t go down every rabbit hole. Focus on the most common journey paths first. If you uncover rare edge cases (e.g. unusual customer behaviours or exceptions), jot them down in a “parking lot” for future sessions.
A Tool That Keeps Strategy Real
Customer journeys are never static. They shift as your offer evolves, your market changes, or your audience’s expectations grow. That’s why the journey map isn’t something we do once and forget. It’s a working reference that we return to again and again.
It keeps us honest. It keeps the strategy grounded. And it makes sure we’re not just launching campaigns, but solving the right problems, for the right people, at the right time.
Need help building or refining your customer journey map? We’d be happy to walk you through it as part of your next marketing sprint. It’s one of the most powerful tools we use and it changes the way teams think about strategy for good.
