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Digital Marketing
What we will cover
What is a Customer Journey Map?
A customer journey map is a simple but powerful tool that helps you visualise how people experience your brand—from first impression to long-term loyalty (or drop-off). It charts the stages they go through, the actions they take, and how they feel along the way.
At Vu, we use journey mapping early in digital projects to get everyone on the same page. It helps clarify what your audience really needs and where your website, content or services might be falling short.
Why It Matters
If you’re running campaigns, building a new site, or just trying to improve user experience, journey mapping can:
- Reveal blind spots and friction points
- Uncover missed opportunities to engage or convert
- Align your team around real customer behaviour, not just assumptions
- Make smarter decisions about where to focus effort
When Should You Create a Customer Journey Map?
Customer journey maps are most useful when you’re at a point of change or decision. If you’re planning a website redesign, launching a new product, or reworking your marketing strategy, it’s worth pausing to map out how your audience currently interacts with you – and where they’re getting stuck.
They’re also helpful when you’ve hit a plateau. If engagement is dropping, conversions are slowing, or feedback is patchy, a journey map can surface the friction points you’ve stopped noticing.
It gives you a fresh lens on the experience and helps you prioritise improvements based on real impact, not hunches.
Even if nothing’s broken, it can be worth running a light-touch mapping exercise once a year. It’s a smart way to realign internal teams and keep your customer front and centre.
Step-by-Step: How to Build One That Works (and free template)
1. Set a Clear Goal
Start by deciding what you’re mapping. Are you looking at how someone makes a donation, signs up for an event, or buys your product? Avoid trying to map everything – zoom in on one specific journey.
2. Use Real-World Data
Talk to customers. Look at analytics. Review support tickets or live chat logs. You’re not guessing here -you’re investigating.
Want to go deeper? See our article on how to conduct simple user interviews.
3. Map the Stages
The map itself is simple. You take each step a customer goes through and ask a few key questions as if you were them.
What are they doing? What might they be thinking or feeling? Where are they interacting with you? What’s frustrating? Missing? What could you do better?
By looking at the journey from their perspective, it becomes much easier to spot what’s working and what needs fixing.
You can download our example map here and use it as a starting point to map your own brochure download or marketing flow.
You can make the steps the actions that the customer will take or if you have spent some time with the buying cycle, you can layer the stages like:
- Awareness
- Consideration
- Decision
- Retention
- Advocacy
Label them in a way that makes sense for your audience. Keep it human.
4. The importance of Emotions
For an effective map each stage should list:
- What they’re doing (e.g. reading reviews, attending webinars)
- Where it’s happening (e.g. Google search, email, landing page)
- What they might be thinking or feeling (e.g. “This sounds good, but I’m not sure it’s worth the cost”)
These internal cues matter—they influence whether someone takes the next step or drops off. For instance, someone feeling overwhelmed won’t download a brochure that asks for seven form fields. But someone feeling curious might, especially if you reduce friction and build trust quickly.
Don’t skip this step—emotion is often what drives action. It’s where empathy turns into insight, and insight into conversion.
Feel free to layer on it, it might be specific to your business, industry or sector. Or deeper thinking…
- What questions do they have? – Might inform new blog content
- What barriers are there to progress here? – Change of language or even offering
- Content or tools that would help them move forward? – Great content for search engines
5. Spot the Gaps
Where do people drop off? Where are they confused or overwhelmed? Where are they getting value?
Sometimes it’s obvious (e.g. your checkout page takes too long to load), other times it’s subtle (e.g. tone mismatch in your email funnel).
6. Identify Improvements
Now that you’ve got a clear picture, think about what would improve the experience. That might be:
- Better content at a key stage
- A clearer call to action
- A follow-up email that speaks to their concern
Keep the fixes achievable. You can always revisit later.
7. Sense Check It
Share it with your team. Walk them through it. See if it sparks new insights or prompts a re-think. This is where the map starts becoming a tool—not just a diagram.
Helpful Tips
- Don’t over-design it: Post-it notes on a whiteboard work fine.
- Update it regularly – especially after launching a new site or campaign.
- Use it: Let it guide content planning, UX decisions, and even internal comms.
What Happens If You Don’t Map the Journey?
Skipping this step might save time now, but it often leads to costly mistakes later. Without a clear journey map, you’re relying on guesswork.
Guesswork about what your customers need, where they’re getting stuck, and what’s actually influencing their decisions.
Here’s what’s at risk:
Misaligned messaging – You might be answering questions they’re not asking, or missing the ones that matter most.
Wasted budget – If you’re investing in content, ads or automation without knowing where the real friction lies, you’re likely pouring effort into the wrong places.
Drop-offs and lost trust – If the experience feels clunky, inconsistent or irrelevant, people will quietly disengage—and you may never know why.
Journey maps turn intuition into insight. Without one, even good marketing can fall flat.
Final Thought
A journey map is a shared, practical tool to help you build better experiences – based on how people actually think and behave.
Done well, it turns guesswork into clarity and puts your audience where they belong: at the heart of your decision-making.
Don’t underestimate its value for creating new customer-centric marketing ideas, and don’t skip this step as a nice-to-have.
PS. If you missed it, you can download our example map here.
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