Most teams think they have a clear view of their customer journey, until they sit in a room together and discover everyone's view is different. That's why journey mapping workshops work. This long-form guide walks through the B2B journey-mapping process step by step, from problem identification through implementation, with the practical detail to run the workshop yourself.
Treat the marketing funnel as one big undifferentiated pile of leads and you'll write copy that suits no-one in particular. Awareness, consideration and decision are different problems requiring different content and different offers. Here's the three-stage marketing customer journey, with what to do at each stage and where most teams confuse one stage for another.
The retail customer journey has the same skeleton as any other, awareness through advocacy, but the internet has scrambled how customers actually move through the stages. The diagram looks linear; real shoppers bounce backwards and sideways. Here are the five stages, how to measure each one, and the points where retailers most commonly lose customers between them.
Without clear buyer personas, you build customer experiences for a generic "customer" who doesn't exist, and the resulting experiences frustrate everyone. Personas make customers tangible enough to design for. Here's a practical definition, where personas earn their place across marketing and experience design, and how to build them from surveys, interviews and operations data.