Customer journey mapping: go beyond the funnel

Elements of the customer journey map

To bring clarity to the complexity, effective customer journey maps include several core elements:

• Persona: Demographics, background, motivations, barriers, and the ideal experience for each type of buyer in the decision-making group.
• Stage: Early stage (awareness), mid-stage (consideration), and late stage (decision)—more on this later.
• Touchpoints: Touchpoints refer to every time a customer comes into contact with your brand: online or in-person, over the phone, on your website, through your app, or any number of other touchpoints.
• Emotions and pain points: While not every customer journey map has this, it can be useful to include how customers are feeling at each touchpoint and what their pain points or unmet needs may be.

Improving buyer experience

Journey mapping helps teams identify gaps, friction points, and opportunities. DDifferent teams can gain different insights from the same map: Marketing learns which messages resonate and which channels drive engagement; Sales identifies barriers to conversion; and Customer Success finds opportunities to deliver timely support and build loyalty

Aligning teams

When departments use a shared customer journey map, they have a similar understanding of the buyer’s experiences. This helps establish a common view of key stages and touchpoints, clarify team ownership at each stage, align messaging around high-intent moments, and close gaps in the journey.

Enhancing retention and loyalty

Customer journey mapping helps businesses optimize the experience, building trust and increasing loyalty and retention. When you layer in Intent data that reveals changing needs and priorities, you can adapt your approach before existing customers start exploring alternatives.

1. Early stage

In this customer journey phase, buyers are building awareness and understanding of the challenges their organization is facing and exploring potential solutions to address them.

• Who is your audience? Mid- and lower-level researchers or initiators such as operations managers and product managers. These personas often remain involved throughout the process, becoming your “champions.”
• Where are they consuming content? Social media channels, broad Google searches, third-party websites, industry publications, industry events
• What to measure: Engagement metrics, reach, brand awareness, content consumption patterns

2. Mid-stage

Buyers are now defining their specific requirements and exploring solution types and vendors. Your goal is to get on the short list of vendors from which a decision will ultimately be made.

• Who is your audience? Influencers, who define specifications and provide expertise (such as CISOs or managers), and end users, who assess functionality and adoption considerations
• Where are they consuming content? Review sites, your website, direct contact with sales teams
• What to measure: Downloads, form fills, signups, engagement depth

3. Late stage

Prospects are narrowing down their list of vendors. This customer journey phase is where proof points and social validation become essential to closing the deal.

• Who is your audience? Decision makers (C-suite executives, VPs, directors), who approve the purchase, budget holders and gatekeepers, who control contract terms. Influencers continue to provide input to validate the final decision.
• Where are they consuming content? Your website, materials shared with them by your sales team, private demos and presentations
• What to measure: Closed/won sales, sales cycle length, contract value

4. Adoption and expansion

Prospects (now customers) are starting to adopt the solution: selecting use cases, building advocates, and tracking early wins and initial return on investment.

• Who is your audience? Users and beneficiaries of the solution, decision makers and budget holders who are anxious to prove out return on investment
• Where are they consuming content? Customer user sessions, newsletters, and direct interactions with your customer success tea
• What to measure: Usage and adoption (unique to each product and solution)

1. Define goals and success metrics

Start with a clear objective for your customer journey mapping effort, such as supporting a specific go-to-market strategy, improving conversion rates, reducing friction, or supporting ABM strategies. You also need to define what specific experience you’re examining. For example, are you mapping the first 30 days of a new user, the path from a social ad to purchase, or the entire onboarding process?

Here are some examples of goals and how they tie into the experience you’re mapping:

• Improve targeting and conversion rates by mapping key touchpoints of the customer journey
• Reduce friction by mapping where customers drop out or where sales velocity slows down
• Support account-based marketing (ABM) by aligning marketing and sales touchpoints across target accounts

2. Define your target personas

Now you need to decide who the primary persona for this map is. For persona-based mapping, you’ll choose a persona within your buying group, and for account-based mapping, you’ll have multiple personas. Remember, each one may come in at a different time in the buying journey.

Different personas play different roles throughout the process. Look at your CRM or talk to your sales team to learn who comes in when during the buying journey for your core products. This intelligence forms the foundation of an accurate, actionable map.

• Improve targeting and conversion rates by mapping key touchpoints of the customer journey
• Reduce friction by mapping where customers drop out or where sales velocity slows down
• Support account-based marketing (ABM) by aligning marketing and sales touchpoints across target accounts

3. Gather data

Teams need to gather inputs from CRM systems, analytics platforms, customer feedback, and third-party intent data to understand where accounts and buying groups are actively researching specific topics. A combination of customer journey mapping tools can help you build a more accurate, behavior-driven journey map:

• CRM systems: Your CRM tracks important information like deal stages, communication history, and outcomes. CRM data reveals which accounts are engaging, when they’re moving forward, and what worked or didn’t work in closed deals.
• Marketing attribution and analytics platforms: These platforms can capture website behavior, traffic sources, conversion paths, and campaign and content engagement metrics. They reveal time on page, bounce rates, and content consumption patterns, helping you understand which touchpoints drive progression and where prospects drop off.
• Customer feedback: Asking customers directly through surveys or interviews reveals valuable insights into their experiences, pain points, and how they use the product.
• Website behavior: The pages visitors view, the order they view them in, and their engagement depth and bounce rates all provide insights into how they navigate your digital experience.
• Intent data: Intent data can reveal what prospects are researching before they contact a company, adding another layer of depth to a customer journey mapping. It can also show how the focus of research changes by buying group persona as the customer journey evolves from early stage to mid stage and beyond.

4. Identify your touchpoints

Now you can map out your touchpoints. Touchpoints are any instance where a prospect interacts with your brand. These may include:

• A display ad that first introduces someone to your brand
• Social media posts and engagement
• Email campaigns and nurture sequences
• Paid search ads and organic search results
• Third-party review sites where prospects compare vendors
• Customer support interactions via chat, phone, or email
• Webinars and in person events
• Sales calls and proposal presentations

Mapping these out helps you spot inconsistencies and areas of improvement in your customer journey. Cross-reference your touchpoint list with your data sources to identify which touchpoints drive the most engagement, which create friction, and which are underutilized.

5. Build the journey map

You’re ready to translate your insights into a structured visual journey map. Customer journey map templates provide a practical starting point—there are many template possibilities depending on your goals and the complexity of your buying process. Visuals can range from simple timelines to detailed diagrams that include personas, touchpoints, emotions, pain points, and opportunities.

Digital tools such as Miro or HubSpot can help standardize the format and simplify sharing across your organization. Bombora also enables powerful visualization of the category buyer journey and account engagement across touchpoints, helping you precisely map even the most complex journey.

6. Activate your map

Once you’ve built it, you need to learn how to use a customer journey map: your map becomes the foundation for how you engage prospects and customers at every stage of their journey. Insights from your customer journey mapping power full-funnel sales and marketing strategies like:

• Engagement tailored to where prospects are in their buying journey, such as broad topics at the top of the funnel and focused topics at the bottom of the funnel
• Targeted digital advertising across programmatic media, Reddit, and LinkedIn
• Automated email and other nurture tactics
• Account-based marketing campaigns that coordinate touchpoints across multiple stakeholders

Mapping these out helps you spot inconsistencies and areas of improvement in your customer journey. Cross-reference your touchpoint list with your data sources to identify which touchpoints drive the most engagement, which create friction, and which are underutilized.

7. Keep your map updated

Review maps quarterly, as well as after new product launches or feature updates, to ensure they remain accurate and actionable. By continuously layering in new data analytics and customer feedback, you can keep your customer journey relevant.

Bombora Intent data provides real-time signals that reveal changing research patterns and emerging topics of interest among your target accounts. This continuous feed of fresh behavioral data ensures your journey map reflects current buyer behavior, not outdated assumptions, giving you the agility to adapt your strategies as the market evolves.

Visualizing the evolving customer journey

Bombora’s Company Surge Intent data strengthens customer journey mapping by tracking how account-level, topic-level research evolves over time. As a prospect moves from early stage awareness to mid-stage active evaluation, Intent data reveals clear shifts in the topics they explore. These patterns also highlight buying group dynamics: early stage research is typically driven by technical stakeholders, while later-stage research is driven by the priorities of economic buyers and final decision-makers. Once a solution is selected, day-to-day users start shaping implementation and adoption strategies.

Uncovering insights with historical analysis

Bombora’s historical buyer’s journey analysis allows organizations to leverage a historical 18-month view of prospect research activity to better understand the customer journey. By mapping closed-won (and closed-lost) accounts against Bombora’s proprietary taxonomy of research topics, teams can reconstruct the “true” path to purchase.

This retrospective look identifies:

• Topic relevance: Which specific research themes correlate with each stage of the buying cycle for different products
• Hidden opportunities: Surprising interests or “blind spot” topics that indicate a readiness for bundled solutions
• Influencer identification: Who in the buying group is engaging with specific content and when they enter the conversation

By capturing these behavioral shifts continuously, marketing and sales teams can refine their messaging, optimize their content mix, and deploy outreach that aligns perfectly with a prospect’s current stage of purchase readiness

The analysis

The organization started by collecting Bombora Company Surge^® Intent data for 10 months, then looked at leads, opportunities and closed-one accounts and mapped them to that data. They learned that about 90% of people who were looking for their solution and were a good fit were not finding them through the marketing they were doing.

The plan

The company worked with Bombora to generate a list of Bombora Intent topics likely aligned to the customer journey: generic solution terms, company-specific terms and terms that reflected their competitors. Next, with Bombora historical analytics, the company mapped closed-won accounts and closed-lost accounts (captured in their CRM) against these terms to see how topical research patterns aligned with the stages of the customer journey: early stage, mid-stage and late stage research.

The findings

Analysis revealed that closed-lost accounts were researching competitors much earlier in the buying journey than anticipated. By the mid-stage — when buye the “short list” of solution providers — nearly 90% of target-fit accounts were engaging exclusively with competitive solutions. This indicated a critical need to optimize early-stage content and channel mix to build awareness and consideration.

The results

The company reworked their marketing plan to ensure that they were engaging prospects and buying group members on the research topics that matter most early in the customer journey. They invested in building awareness and engagement through thought leadership, optimizing their paid and organic search strategies, and launching a new prospect nurture email program.