The Customer Journey: A Brief Overview

The customer journey comes up in marketing a lot as it provides companies with needed insights and metrics to understand the customer’s decision-making and purchasing behaviors. The goal is to predict the various desires, needs, and motivation at each stage of the process. In doing so, businesses hope to identify perceived pain points and troubleshoot as needed. These various touchpoints are what allow businesses to continuously refine their marketing campaigns, making them more targeted. 

• Awareness: In the awareness stage, this is where your customer first learns about your business and your product/service. In recent years, social media has served as a first touchpoint for many newer brands and businesses, especially those that are more savvy about the benefits of using platforms like Instagram and Tiktok to expand their reach. 

• Consideration: In this stage, you’ve started to become more of an option in the customer’s mind. The customer may start looking at your other content (which is why your content has to be top-notch) to draw a better picture of the product or service. This also includes looking at other similar products, reviewing customer testimonials, and word-of-mouth advertising. A customer in the consideration stage is evaluating whether or not your product is going to solve their problem. In this stage, there’s the secondary action of desire. After careful consideration, the customer has now shifted gears into focusing more on pricing and fully weighing the pros and cons of the purchase. 

• Purchase: The customer is moving forward and ready to make a purchase. At this point, your marketing efforts have raised awareness of your product/service, driven traffic to your social media accounts or website, and led the customer through the buying process. The action here is to have the customer complete the transaction. 

• Loyalty: In the final part of the customer journey, we have the select customers that love the product/service so much that it’s become a staple purchase in their household. These customers are the ones that leave glowing reviews on your site, comments on your social media posts, actively engage in promotional offerings or perks for returning customers. In this phase, businesses can implement referral marketing as a tactic to get customers to bring new customers. Referral marketing is a great way to build and support a customer loyalty funnel. This can also help businesses build out opportunities for UGC, otherwise known as user-generated content. 

The customer journey will always adapt and change as your customer’s needs adapt and change. The goal of the journey and roadmapping it is to cultivate forward-thinking opportunities instead of having to focus on reactionary measures. The roadmap will help you provide the best experience for your customers and provide you with the insights you need to maintain said positive experience. 

I hope this comes in handy the next time you’re thinking about your communications and marketing strategies.

My name is Taylor Durham and I’m the Director of Marketing at Venture Lab, the University of Pennsylvania’s entrepreneurship hub for student venture development and the co-founder and chief creative officer at HoneyBlossom, a digital marketing company that works with small business owners to provide comprehensive creative and marketing services. In writing this series of articles, I’m hoping for one particular reason - to provide a set of accessible information on branding, digital marketing, and creative design. In this series, you’ll find various articles that provide tips, tricks, and best practices that any startup can apply with little to no cost.