How to Create a Customer Journey Map, the Right Way

Advertising

A customer journey map is one of the most effective tools for visualizing and understanding the path someone takes from awareness to purchase. In the following guide, you’ll learn how to create a customer journey map that supports your brand’s growth goals. 

What Is a Customer Journey Map?

A customer journey map is a visual representation of the steps a customer takes from the first interaction with your brand to long-term loyalty. It encompasses every stage of the customer experience, including brand awareness, consideration, purchase, post-purchase, and retention. 

Mapping customers’ journeys helps your business understand their behaviors, pain points, expectations, and emotions throughout their interaction with your brand. 

Customer Journey vs. Buyer Journey

The buyer journey focuses on the path to making a purchase, but it does not include post-purchase interactions designed to promote loyalty and encourage repeat purchases. 

The customer journey, on the other hand, covers the entire experience. Learning how to create a customer journey map requires you to look beyond conversions and think holistically about your relationship with consumers. 

Benefits of Customer Journey Mapping

So, why should you care? Mapping out the customer journey can provide the following benefits: 

Improved Customer Understanding

Customer journey mapping shows how people think, feel, and behave at each stage, so you can meet them with messaging that clicks, not clutters.

Enhanced Customer Experience

By revealing exactly where friction lives in the sales funnel, journey maps help you eliminate roadblocks and keep high-intent customers moving forward.

Better Marketing Alignment

When every team, from product to performance, can see how they fit into the customer journey, strategy gets sharper and silos disappear.

Increased Customer Retention

Post-purchase insights make it easier to solve churn before it starts, turning one-time buyers into long-term brand advocates.

Informed Decision-Making

With journey data in hand, you can ditch the guesswork and optimize every campaign, touchpoint, and investment for measurable impact.

Mapping out the customer journey is simpler than you might expect. Here’s how to create a customer journey map that can give your business a competitive edge:

1. Define Your Objectives

Your very first step involves identifying why you want to map out the customer journey. You might be aiming to reduce churn, or perhaps you need to simplify the onboarding process. Establish your why with clear objectives and measurable goals. 

Best Practices and Strategies: 

• Involve stakeholders from every level of the company
• Set realistic and measurable goals
• Align objectives with broader business goals

2. Identify Your Target Personas

A customer persona is a template that defines the needs, pain points, and preferences of specific audience segments. It is a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer that is based on real data. You’ll want to create a few target personas so that you can build messaging campaigns and map out journeys for each segment. 

Best Practices and Strategies: 

• Use data from surveys, analytics, tools, interviews, and your CRM to build personas
• Include demographics, behaviors, goals, and frustrations
• Create multiple personas

3. Map Out Customer Touchpoints

A touchpoint is any interaction a customer has with your brand. Visiting your website, opening an email, or viewing your social media content are all examples of touchpoints. Identify every possible touchpoint and where they may fall on the customer journey. 

Best Practices and Strategies: 

• List every possible interaction across all channels
• Include digital and physical touchpoints
• Identify which touchpoints are most influential during each stage

4. Conduct Customer Research

Here’s where you take a deep dive into the minds of your customers with customer journey analytics. Put yourself in their shoes so you can determine what they want and what challenges they are facing, and use both qualitative and quantitative data to understand your audience better. 

Best Practices and Strategies: 

• Run customer surveys and interviews
• Analyze website behavior
• Use AI to look for recurring patterns 

5. Highlight Pain Points and Opportunities

Once you’ve done your homework, identify what’s working and what you can handle better. Look for gaps in your strategy, such as a lack of visibility on a major social media platform, while also focusing on aspects of the customer journey that are frustrating consumers and hurting your sales volume. 

Best Practices and Strategies: 

• Pay attention to areas where you are losing a large volume of leads
• Use emotion mapping to understand how customers feel at each stage
• Prioritize opportunities with the greatest business impact

6. Prioritize Key Stages in the Journey

Not all stages of the journey deserve the same amount of attention or resources. Focus on areas that influence conversion and retention the most. 

Best Practices and Strategies: 

• Highlight “make or break” interactions
• Consider both short-term and long-term wins
• Align your prioritization with the original goals from step one

7. Visualize the Customer Journey

Here is where the mapping truly begins, as it’s where you’ll put everything you have gathered into a visual format. Your map can take many forms, including a flowchart, table, or infographic. Choose the format and style that best aligns with the needs of your team and the complexity of your sales cycle. 

Best Practices and Strategies: 

• Include stages, touchpoints, and pain points
• Use visuals and color coding to make the map easy to read
• Avoid clutter

8. Validate the Map With Stakeholders

Get feedback from your internal teams in areas like sales and marketing. You want to ensure your map accurately reflects the real journey. Stakeholder validation helps catch blind spots and strengthen buy-in across the organization. 

Best Practices and Strategies: 

• Present your journey map to key departments 
• Encourage employees to provide constructive criticism
• Be open to revising your map

9. Implement Changes Based on Insights

Use the insights from your map to make targeted changes to your sales and marketing strategies. Don’t blow up your entire customer journey and start from scratch; implement focused changes so you can identify which adjustments are yielding positive results. 

Best Practices and Strategies: 

• Create an action plan with timelines and KPIs
• Share updates regularly to keep the momentum going
• Don’t change too much, too fast

10. Continuously Monitor and Update the Journey Map

Customer behaviors and expectations evolve, and that means your journey map needs to keep up. Regularly update your map to keep it relevant and useful. 

Best Practices and Strategies: 

• Review your map once a quarter
• Always involve key teams and stakeholders
• Adjust your objectives as needed 

How Performance TV Connects the Dots

Want to build a customer journey map that actually drives results? MNTN’s platform gives you the performance data to map real audience behavior, so you can align your CTV advertising campaigns with how customers research, evaluate, and convert. With AI-powered targeting, premium inventory, and real-time attribution, every ad supports a smarter, more strategic path to purchase.

Here’s how MNTN Performance TV helps marketers build better journey maps:

• Verified Visits™ Attribution – Tracks site visits and conversions tied to streaming ads, revealing key engagement points along the journey.
• Reporting Suite – Access real-time insights to guide your messaging strategy.
• Premium CTV Inventory – Reach audiences across every stage on top streaming networks, from awareness to action.
• MNTN Matched – AI-driven targeting ensures your ads align with where each viewer is in their decision-making process.
• Automated Optimization – AI adjusts your campaign dynamically, helping you improve performance across the entire journey.

Build journey maps backed by real performance data—sign up today to get started with MNTN’s self-serve software.

How to Create a Customer Journey: Final Thoughts

Learning how to create a customer journey map involves much more than following a checklist. You need high-quality data and clear goals so you can transform how your business interacts with customers. Nevertheless, when done right, journey mapping leads to more personalized experiences and stronger relationships.