Customer journey mapping

What customer journey mapping is

Customer journey mapping sets down the order. It is a written account of what a buyer reads, watches and asks between the first time they hear your name and the day they pay, step by step, with the material you already own placed at the step where it is actually read.

Order is the whole product. Audience research says who the buyer is. Buyer question research says what they need answered. A map says in what sequence, which is how you find out that a page is not weak but merely in the wrong place, read by someone who was not ready for it.

When you need one

Two patterns make it worth doing. Plenty of people arrive and almost none of them convert, which usually means the next step after the first read does not exist. Or your sales cycle is long and involves several people, and nobody can say what a buyer is meant to do between the first contact and the quote, so the gap is filled with chasing phone calls.

You do not need a map if your sale happens in one visit. Something bought on the spot has a journey about three steps long, and a content funnel plan will sort your existing material into found, understood and bought for a good deal less money.

What gets mapped

The journey is built from evidence, not drawn on a whiteboard. Four inputs.

• What the sales record says. How long deals really take, how many conversations they contain, and who joins them partway through.
• What customers remember. Short calls with recent buyers on what they did first, what they went looking for next, and what they did while nothing was happening.
• The site's own traffic. The paths people take through your pages, and the pages where they stop.
• What you own. Every existing piece, placed against a step, which is when the empty steps become obvious.

Where a buying group has more than one person in it, each gets a separate line. The person who finds you and the person who signs are often not the same person and almost never read the same things.

The map is also honest about the stages where nothing of yours gets read at all. Parts of a buying decision happen in conversations you will never see, and a map that pretends otherwise invites you to write pieces nobody was going to open.

What you get

The map. One page, landscape, printable. Stages across the top, and under each: the question the buyer is holding, what they do, what of yours they encounter, and how long the stage typically lasts. It is meant to go on a wall, so it is deliberately not forty pages.

The notes. Four to six pages behind the map. What the evidence was for each stage, which handovers are broken, and the pieces that need writing to close them. Each gap is named as a specific piece for a specific step, not as a topic.

The call. Forty-five minutes with sales and whoever handles content in the same room, because most broken handovers sit exactly between those two jobs.

The map is not a promise that buyers behave in a straight line. People skip stages, go backwards and disappear for a month. What it fixes is the assumption that a single page can carry someone from stranger to signature on its own.

A worked example

An illustration. A Calgary firm selling workplace safety training maps a sale that takes eleven weeks. The map shows four stages and a very clear hole. A safety officer finds a useful article, likes it, and then has to convince a finance director who never visits the website and receives nothing except a quote in an email.

The firm owns 30 articles, and 28 of them belong in the first stage. Nothing exists for the person who signs. The notes call for two pieces: a one-page summary the safety officer can forward, and a short written account of what the training costs and what it prevents. Two pieces, aimed at one stage, chosen because the map showed the sequence snapping in the same place every time.

How it runs

1. A half-hour call. What a typical sale looks like, how long it takes, and who is involved by the end. No charge.
2. Evidence. Read access to your site data, a look at recent deals, and introductions to two or three buyers who are willing to talk.
3. The work. Six to ten working days, depending on how many buying roles there are to map.
4. Delivery and walkthrough. The map and the notes arrive the day before the call, so you can disagree with it before the call.

What it costs

Quoted after the first call. The cost follows the number of buying roles and the length of the sale, not the size of the website, so a two-role business-to-business sale and a single-visit purchase are very different pieces of work. The figure is fixed in writing before anything starts, and the pricing page sets out the four ways of working if you would rather this sat inside a wider project.

What happens next

The map names missing pieces, so most people go and make them: a summary for the person who signs, a comparison page, or a set of nurture emails for the weeks when nothing is happening. Some use it to fix the order of what already exists, which costs nothing. Others fold it into a content strategy plan so the stages get a publishing schedule attached. The map is finished when it is delivered and nothing further is assumed.