What Is Customer Journey and Why It Matters For Your Small Business

Customer journey has a big impact on your small business - but have you ever taken a second to think about it or map it out?

Get your compass out, fellow cartographers. This week on the Small Owned Business (S.O.B.) Marketing podcast, Vivian and I are here to help small businesses learn and map out customer journey.

We discuss the differences between the customer journey and the marketing funnel, as well as how understanding the customer journey can lead to improved satisfaction, loyalty, and effective marketing strategies.

We also share the stages of the customer journey, including awareness, consideration, decision, delivery, and loyalty, and actionable insights on how to map out this journey effectively.

Have you ever mapped out your customer journey? Let us know in the comments!

Have a question you want answered on the S.O.B. Marketing podcast? You can leave it in the comments or send us an email at Help@TheSeasonedMarketer.com.

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Chapters:

00:00 Thank You For Listening & Please Leave us a 5 Star Review

05:52 Understanding Customer Journey vs. Marketing Funnel

11:15 How a Customer Journey Helps Small Businesses

14:09 Stages of a Customer Journey

24:56 Resources for Mapping out Customer Journey

30:28 TLDL: Key Takeaways on Customer Journey

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*Preview Clip*

Vivian: The difference between a marketing funnel and the journey is in the intent for us to improve on and to make sure that that customer journey is great.
*Intro* Chelsea: Hey everyone and welcome to the S.O.B. Marketing podcast. Where we celebrate to S.O.B. you are, and if you haven't figured it out yet - we mean Small Owned Business, we don't mean S.O.B...

Vivian: Listen, we know that as a small business owner you are working hard on the daily to keep your business fully operational while trying to promote it. And while some days it may feel like the business is owning you, if we're being honest with each other I bet you would admit that you wouldn't give up the insanity for anything.

Chelsea: Our commitment here at the S.O.B. Marketing podcast is to give you the real talk, what works when it comes to advertising, marketing, and promoting your business. And then what doesn't really work.

Vivian: And Chelsea and I promise to always keep the conversation real.

*Beginning of Episode*

Vivian: Hello, SOBs, Small Owned Businesses. We're back for another wonderful episode of the SOB Marketing Podcast. I'm here with my beautiful sister, baby sister, Chelsea. Chelsea's like, okay, thank you, thank you. So let's do a little housekeeping before we jump into today's topic, which I promise you, you guys are going to like this topic. It's very, very important to every small business out there.
Before we get started, friendly reminder, we have a TLDL section. If you are in a rush and you just want the bare bones of what this conversation is, go ahead and skip to that chapter. Chelsea always does a great job of just giving you a nice little synopsis. Then when you have time, you could come back and listen to us, you know, jab a little about the topic at hand. We do think context is extremely important. So we would want you to come back and listen to the full conversation.
Other than that, hey listen, if you guys are listening right now, first of all, let me ask you a couple questions. Are you new to this podcast? If so, I'm going to save you time. Just go ahead and subscribe right now, okay? We want to be your go-to source for all marketing information, news, topics, all of that good stuff. The reason we started this podcast was simply to help small business owners get confident in their marketing because we know you guys are having to do most of this stuff in-house on your own. So we want to connect you to resources and just give you the lowdown on what's worked for us as professional marketers, save you a little bit of time and lots and lots of headaches and you know, some time from crying. We don't want to you guys cry in your cornflakes about mistakes that you made in your marketing. Lastly, if this episode is helpful to you, go ahead and share it with a small business owner that you love, like, trust that could use the help just simply because that is going to help grow our community and that's what we want. We want to build a strong army of small business owners to take over the world. Pinky and brainy style. Chelsea, what topic are we getting into today?

Chelsea: Okay Vivian, today we are talking about customer journey. If that does not ring any bells, you better listen to this entire conversation.

Vivian: Oh she's starting off sassy you guys.

Chelsea: I am because I feel like customer journey is so so so so important when it comes to marketing and I feel like we ignore it. I feel like we forget about it.

Vivian: Well, and to be fair, it's not something that a whole lot of people talk about. If you're on the other end and you're listening to this and you're like, I have never even stopped to think about my customer's journey. It's because we talk about all of the flashy stuff in marketing. We talk about branding and we talk about social media platforms and how to grow your following, but we don't talk about, have you mapped out what your customers go through. There are several reasons that you want to do this. They all behoove you. They are all going to translate to, more money in your pocket and all that good stuff. So let's get into the juicy details,

Chelsea: Okay, so let's start with what is customer journey? So it's going to be the complete sequence of experiences and interactions that a customer has with your business. Okay, so it starts at their initial awareness. They discover your brand and it's going to keep going post purchase and beyond because remember we want to have repeat customers so that means once they make a purchase their journey does not end with you. You need to keep interacting with them.

Vivian: Absolutely. Can we go ahead, because you know I'm a big analogy girl. Do we want to introduce an analogy? Y'all this is a map. So think, and very visually, this is what I do and would do. If this is the first time you're going to try to do this, take out a piece of paper and start from inception like Chelsea said, how are they first becoming aware of your brand?
Is it through an ad? Maybe it's a Facebook ad. Great. They see you on the Facebook ad. Where is that ad leading them to? Is it leading them to a very specific page on your website? Is it leading them to a very specific video perhaps? What is their perception of you at that point? And then you map it through all the way.

Chelsea: Vivian I want to...you know, as the big sister I go to her for knowledge.

Vivian: First you need to look in a well and you need to summon me.

Chelsea: Yes. That's how it works. I throw a penny in a well, I do a little dance...

Vivian: 25 cents?

Chelsea: No, I'm throwing pennies in there. Then I do a little incantation and a dance and then Vivian appears.

Vivian: I need to see both. So what questions do you have?

Chelsea: So when I was going to school, when I went to college and I went to school for marketing.

Vivian: That was your major.

Chelsea: Yes, that was my major. We talked about customer journey maybe once. We talked about the marketing funnel a lot. So if y'all don't know, the marketing funnel is basically like initial awareness, then loyal, you're pushing people through the funnel.

Vivian: So think of it as an upside down pyramid. Basically it starts off very broad at the top and like Chelsea is saying, that's where she's thinking okay great you captured someone's attention through an ad and then you're bumping them through down until finally they make a sale. That's the ultimate goal, that's the very tip of it.

Chelsea: Can you explain the difference between a marketing funnel and a customer journey because there are levels, not levels, but there are sections to customer journey as well. They are basically the same, they're similar. They're not the same, but they're very, very similar to the marketing funnel. As someone who was only taught customer journey once out of all of these classes I took, can you explain the difference between the two?

Vivian: Yeah. So, and this is what's interesting, you guys, Chelsea and I went to the same exact college, University of South Carolina. Both graduated from the same business school, 15 years apart. Meaning my, obviously my education predates your stuff, we didn't talk about the customer journey in there. My point in this is to tell you guys that what I've learned about the customer journey, I've learned in real time and also just from maintaining my education over the years. So the intent is different on both.
When you are creating a marketing funnel, it's more so for the purpose of you having a guide as to how you are going to bump that person into the next step of their transition through your business, ultimately leading to a sale. For a customer journey, the perspective is more so you want to map in real time. The funnel is almost like a, ideally, this is what I would love to happen. When someone hears about me, they get brand awareness. Then they move on to the next step to try my product. Then they move on to the next step to actually keep the product and then do a repeat purchase, all that. For the customer journey, your intent is more so to be able to utilize it to help you in your business to either better know what the customer is actually going through so that you can help improve the process or so that you can find gaps. So it should be a real life picture of what is actually occurring with a customer. It is not going to behoove you to make your customer journey look good because then you're not able to really find opportunities to improve on it. Right? So map out as things are in real time today. The customer sees me and then this is how the map goes. What you start to find is, maybe something is broken in the fact that I'm not getting them onto an email list to then be able to sell to them again after they've already purchased from me once. I'm missing a big gap after the sale and you're able to find that if you're truly mapping that customer journey.

Chelsea: Love that we brought up intention because I think that's really important when we're talking about customer journey and also I'm sorry at the beginning y'all that I said no one knows about customer journey because yeah. We went to college for this and they didn't talk about it. Great example of Vivian and I take pride in staying up-to-date and what's going on in the marketing world.
No, we were not taught customer journey, but we know what it is and we're going to tell you all about it.

Vivian: It's something that, a lot of times I think you get marketing advice that is really great if it's pie in the sky, but is it something that's applicable and that is actually going to help? This is 100%. 10 out of 10. I recommend you do this. Okay. Because I do think it helps. Chelsea, I know we, in the brief conversation, we mentioned just a couple of reasons why...for one you're able to find gaps. What are other things could mapping out a customer's journey do for your small business?

Chelsea: Vivian, I think a big one for me is improving satisfaction, because when you make your customers journey like a satisfying experience, you know what that's going to do? That's going to boost your brand loyalty. When you make their experience positive, easy, remarkable in some way, they're going to keep purchasing from you. At the end of the day, that's what we want, right? We want repeat customers. They're cheaper and they spend more money most of the time.

Vivian: Yeah. The other thing that this brought to mind whenever you mentioned this was, this is also a good way for you to kind of figure out maybe why you're not getting as many Google reviews or why you don't have enough product reviews on there.

Chelsea: Also, Vivian, it just helps you be more effective with your marketing. When you're mapping out your customer's journey, you can see where they're spending the most time. You can see where most of the people are being pulled in with your marketing. With the visualization, it'll help you be able to say, "you know what, this marketing is really effective. This is what's bringing people in. Let me spend more money on it." Or, "you know what? This is a touch point that people are not interacting with. Do I want to change it? Is there something I can do to make it more effective? Do I just want to stop with this marketing campaign?"

Vivian: In 2025, you guys are probably out there looking for resources to help you with your marketing and you're probably paying for a lot of different platforms or add-ons or things to just help you along. This can probably indicate to you if you need to quit paying for something because you're not utilizing it. Right. If you're like, oh yeah, in January I said I was going to do X, Y, and Z and I started paying for X, Y, and Z, and here it is in May and I still haven't done it.
Okay, well then maybe just cancel that for now until you're ready to implement, right? So this could show you areas where you can save money because you're not utilizing or it could also do the thing where you find duplicates. This thing that I'm doing here is a duplicate of something that I'm using further down the line. Let me just go ahead and merge them or let me quit pay for this because I'm going to be using just one platform to do it.
I think it does have the capability to ensure that you're utilizing the features and everything you have accessible to you to its fullest extent.

Chelsea: Vivian, do you think maybe we should now list out the categories that are in a customer journey?

Vivian: Yeah, let's go ahead and do that.

Chelsea: So it starts with awareness. When are people finding out about you? How are people discovering you? Like Vivian said, it could be a Facebook ad, it could be a sponsorship...

Vivian: It could be a billboard. Those are still around these days.

Chelsea: They are. So we start with awareness. Well, this isn't really a funnel, so let me not do the funnel. I was about to do the funnel. This is more of a map.

Vivian: For those of you listening, Chelsea was starting to with her hand do the vertical funnel.

Chelsea: Yeah, but this isn't a funnel. This is more of a map. So I'm right here. This is beginning. This is awareness. OK, now we're going to move on to consideration. So consideration is, the potential customer deciding whether they want to learn more about you. They're a little bit interested. They're considering your brand, they're considering the products that you or the services that you offer. So then from here, we move on to decision.

Vivian: The consideration thing, I think one of the, if you're like, how do I even know? This is where data can help you. Let's say with the awareness, let's keep it very simple. You're running Facebook ads.
That's the first time somebody is learning about your product. I'm not going to use the same product we used in the last podcast episode. Let's say it's, I don't know.

Chelsea: Eyeliner?

Vivian: Well, earlier you were talking about a Trolli, Trolli. I don't know how to pronounce it. The gummy brand, T-R-O-L-L-I.
Okay, it's the brand of gummies. They gummy bears and gummy worms, all that stuff. They came out with some popsicles. Which your friend says they're delicious.

Chelsea: Yeah, she said they were pretty good.

Vivian: Okay, we haven't tried them, so we cannot endorse Trolli popsicles. But let's say we're Trolli and we are introducing this new product. We're running a Facebook ad. The next step in that customer journey and where the data comes in is, that ad is linked to a button. The call to action that says, find out more here or click here. They click on it. It takes them to a landing page. This is the data that you look at, how many people from the ad clicked on the button. Then you look on the website, how many people actually opened that webpage, bcause you are only using this ad to promote that web page. Or even if you're using five different sources, it's still going to tell you how many people landed on the page to watch the video that you embedded in there, that is talking and promoting about these new popsicles. So this gives you some indication, you're like great. I'm putting these puzzle pieces together.
What is that next step that Chelsea just mentioned after the consideration after they landed on this page? It's the decision. So then what would be the next step? How would you link and how would you know if they went from that page to then making a decision?

Chelsea: To them making a decision? I'm thinking, let's say you get to the landing page and you have a digital coupon. If they download the digital coupon, that's them making a decision that they want to take a chance on those gummy popsicles and they're going to go purchase them because they're downloading the coupon.

Vivian: So, because the coupon you can use SAVE10, right? Or whatever you want or Gummy, right? Gummy 10. You are then able to track it directly to that landing page. You know that this particular Facebook ad is what got them there. Now this is where they're coming through this journey and you're starting to see, is there any gap in there? The decision for them to buy was made when they downloaded that digital coupon.

Chelsea: So now our next stop in our journey is going to be delivery. So what's happening during and after the buy.
Let's stick with they downloaded the digital coupon. Let's say they went to a store, but the store didn't accept the coupon. That's a bottleneck. That's a problem that you can fix. You can reach out to the store and be like, "yo, you were supposed to accept this". Or maybe you never realized that they even were selling your product. Now, I don't think that should happen, but let's say you do not realize that this store was selling your product. Now you have a place where you can make a connection and another location where you can sell your gummy popsicles.

Vivian: Yes. Or what I was thinking was another thing would be, let's say you don't have a lot of data, but what you see is this. You saw that 1000 people downloaded this coupon and you only had 20 people that used it, that went to a store and used it. This is where your Spidey senses are like, whoa, what happened? If a thousand people made the decision to buy, but then the delivery, only 20 of them walked in the store to actually use it. A couple different things, either maybe they still bought, but didn't use the coupon, right? Then maybe that indicates to you like, hey, is it maybe the mechanism, the downloadable coupon, how does that work? Is it in the store system? Is it in our system? How are we, how are they using that? Or is it maybe that it could be they never bought your product, okay? So maybe they forgot, maybe it wasn't, they got to the store, they didn't want to buy it, it wasn't intriguing, maybe then you have problems with the packaging?

Chelsea: Maybe they forgot about it. So maybe you can see that they didn't use the coupon. You can send them an email and be like, hey, don't forget you have this coupon.

Vivian: Yeah. So maybe you automate 48 hours. If you see that the coupon has not been used, it's like, hey, don't forget this coupon is sitting in your digital wallet. Right. You can do the same thing after 30 days or whatever it is. These are all, you guys kind of see you're starting to play detective here. What is going on? Using, matching the data with these stages that Chelsea is going through. Okay, so we went through four of the five. Awareness, consideration, decision, and delivery...

Chelsea: Next, we got loyalty and referral. So this is, finally they made the purchase, they bought the gummy popsicles, they think they're popping. Love them.

Vivian: Pun intended. Popping...because they're popsicles? You didn't get the pun?

Chelsea: I didn't get the pun...No, I absolutely did. And I'm a genius for that.
So loyalty and referral, they made the purchase. Now, are they going to come back and make another purchase? Are they like, wow, these popsicles are so popping, that I'm going to buy them again? Are they going to say, wow, my journey was so great that I'm going to refer someone. I'm going to tell my friend, hey, I got this digital coupon. You should go get a digital coupon and you should go make a purchase.
Vivian: This can even look as simple as you encouraging them to post on social media and use a certain hashtag, hashtag poppin' popsicles, okay? Hashtag poppin' Trolli popsicles, whatever it is.
But this is where you're looking in. What I love about this whole journey, like you said earlier is it really does not just focus on the purchase, but you're actually going into the after purchase. What is occurring afterwards? What gaps, what opportunities do I have?
Don't forget, we always encourage you guys to look at that low hanging fruit. How can you get someone back for a repeat purchase? This is where you're going to find that gap. Are you doing anything to try to get that person that tried your poppin Trolli popsicles back for another purchase? Are you saying, after you have that automated to where once you see they make the purchase, you're saying, "hey, here's a 10 % off discount". Or, "we just introduced a new flavor". We've expanded. Now we don't just have blue raspberry. Now we have...

Chelsea: Pink lemonade.

Vivian: Pink lemonade. These are all things that you can look for to find gaps. If you guys have not heard the soundtrack that we're playing in the background through this entire episode, it's cha-ching, cha-ching, cha-ching, okay? This is all money, money, money, you guys. So it's about finding those gaps, filling them in, and then just expanding in and looking at how is your customer working through this? Because that is what's going to keep them coming back for more.

Chelsea: Absolutely. Again, making sure that they're having a good experience is so important.

Vivian: I want to hear from you guys out there, from you guys', y'alls. I want to hear from y'alls out there. Chelsea's about to smack me.

Chelsea: I'm just letting you do your thing. Go ahead.

Vivian: She's like, show the people how weird you are. Show them what I put up with every day. Is this the first time you've heard or even considered mapping out your customer journey? Is this new information or had you heard about this before and you just haven't sat down and done it. Or maybe you have done it. I'd be curious, because like we said, we don't think it's something that's talked about often enough, but we could be wrong. It could be something that all the small business gangs out there are talking about.

Chelsea: Vivian, before we wrap up, I want to make sure that we touch on how to actually map out your customer journey. So first off, why are we bothering to map it out? Make sure that you are thinking about your goals and understanding why you want to go through this entire process. Okay. Next, you want to remember who your target audience is, who your customer avatar is, making sure you understand who's going to be on that map in that journey. Outline the stages that we just talked about. Make sure you're putting where each touch point lands in the stage. Identify the touch points for all the stages. Gather the data. Look at the feedback. Look at your analytics. Then use the information to make changes for the better.

Vivian: Chelsea, let me ask you this. Okay, take us for example. We have two things. We have a course called a Rock Your Fair. It's aimed at small business owners who want to start doing the market and craft fair circuit type stuff to sell their products. We have the SOB community, which is a membership.
We have two staple products. Would we have two different customer journeys.

Chelsea: Yes. 100%. Your customer journey is going to depend on what your goal is. So I would say we have a whole other customer journey, which is people going through the pipeline of just our resources. Or people interacting with our newsletter, our email newsletter. Those are all different customer journeys because each one of those customers are experiencing something different with us.

Vivian: Yeah, so maybe what I would say, I agree with you, minus the email thing, because I think the email journey is going to be embedded in one of the customer journeys. But I agree with you.
So take for example, Chelsea and I, and you guys can apply this to your small business, whatever industry, whatever product and service you're selling. Chelsea and I have the two staple products, but the third leg of our business, which is big, is the actual resources. So when we map out our customer journeys, we need to map one out for the course, for the membership community, and also just for the resources. Eventually, what's going to be embedded in the resource one is somewhere in there, we're going to introduce our paid services, right? Our paid course and our membership. That by itself, there are some people that are going to be in our ecosystem that are never going to purchase from us. Our role is going to be to try to convert as many people as possible to actually a paid service, but there's an off chance that they won't. So they sit in that resource thing. The reason that all three of them also, I want to make this distinction. It could very well be that Chelsea and I just said, we're only going to do one customer journey and it's going to be the resource one. Because really we can embed the other two products under that resource. Someone finds us through a download we have and then we map it out. The thing is though, once we start doing ads for the community, for the course, then that's where it starts to get where we're stifling them off into their own so that we can better find, remember you guys, we said the difference between a marketing funnel and the journey is in the intent for us to improve on and to make sure that that customer journey is great.
If we're wanting to do the customer journey for the SOB community, the membership community, then we do it specifically for that to find the gaps in there. One of the gaps probably would be, let's say it's their first time hearing about us, we map out the journey. At some point, it may be that they don't know that we offer free resources. So we're having to introduce them to all of that. So that means creating an automated email that whenever they get in that ecosystem, we say, "hey, by the way, did you know that you have this accessible to you today?" Right? Go into our video library vault, go into our free downloads, all that.

Chelsea: Also want to point out that you can use Canva or HubSpot. They both offer free templates for customer journeys.

Vivian: Excellent. I love that. Yeah. Well, so glad that you pointed that out because you guys know we're not just going to tell you the info without giving you backend resources. So Canva, many of you are probably using Canva right now. Under the template section, probably just type in their customer journey and it'll pull up.

Chelsea: Yep, it should. And then HubSpot has like a free, free template that you can download.
Okay, I think are we ready for the TLDL?

Vivian: Sure are.

Chelsea: Okay, y'all. So if you skipped ahead to this chapter, TLDL, too long didn't listen. That's fine. I'm going to give you a synopsis. Make sure you go back and listen to the entire conversation because it'll make more sense if you listen to the whole conversation. Today, we talked about customer journey. It is the sequence of events and experiences and interactions that your customer goes through interacting with your business. Why it matters, it's going to help you find pain points or bottlenecks. It's going to help you improve satisfaction and loyalty when you find the bottlenecks in your processes. It helps you just be more effective in your marketing.
There are five core stages that you want to make sure you're paying attention to when you are mapping out your customer's journey. That is awareness, consideration, decision, delivery, and loyalty and referral.
We talk about how to specifically map out your customer journey. So it's going to be remembering what your goals are. So you can be specific with mapping out what you're focusing on. You want to focus on your target audience, outline the customer stages, identify the touch points, gather data and feedback, and then make changes where changes need to be made.
I feel like that was a lot y'all. If that was a little confusing, it's because this was just a very brief synopsis and you need to hear the whole conversation.
Just a friendly reminder, if you are not subscribed or following this podcast, what are you doing? Make sure you go and do that and make sure you leave us a review because that helps us get in front of other small business owners. Again, we just want to share all of this marketing knowledge so you guys can feel confident handling your marketing by yourself, in-house. You're a small business, you're an SOB, you don't need anyone else. But you have us, if you need help.

Vivian: That's all you need. Just us.

Chelsea: And the SOB community. So just a friendly reminder, we do have the SOB community. It's $50 a month. We have a resource spreadsheet. We have videos, courses, templates, downloads. We also have a weekly hour-long zoom call where we answer all of your questions and we all talk with one another so you get to talk with other small business owners who are also going through the same thing. Or they have experience with something you're considering It's just a really great community. So y'all go check that out as well and go be the best S.O.B. you can be.

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