In this series of videos, we're going to take a look at the customer journey.

As usual, let's begin with some definitions. What is a customer journey?

A customer journey is the set of steps and decisions made by a typical customer, from the time that they become aware of the need for a product or service to when they need to make a purchase. And even through their use of that product.

Here's an important caveat to that definition. Each of these steps must be considered from the point of view of the customer.

To help envision a customer journey, we use a tool called the Customer Journey Map. This is an infographic representing the customer's thoughts and actions over time.

Marketers tend to use the term Customer Journey and Customer Journey Map interchangeably. We'll look at some examples of maps in more detail in the next video.

Now just when your customer's journey starts and stops is debatable. And we'll be talking more about that too.

For example, if you're the Ford Motor Company, does your customer's journey begin the moment they consider buying a Ford? Or does it start long before that, when the idea of buying a vehicle first enters their head?

Does it end when the salesman hands them the keys? Or years later, after they've had ample time to deal with Ford's customer service and the quality of the car they've purchased?

I said that the customer journey is about steps or actions leading up to a purchase or conversion. But equally important is what the customer is thinking and feeling at each stage of the journey.

Is there some part of the journey that they can't wait to repeat or hope to never go through again? Is there a moment that tips them over to buying your product or has them considering your competitor?

The customer journey is all about getting you into your customer's mindset and seeing things from their point of view. And their point of view depends not just on their particular journey, but who they were before they even took the first step.

About that, the customer journey is closely bound to another important tool of marketing: The persona.

Personas are fictional characters that marketers create to represent certain groups of their customers or users.

If you're new to the concept, I recommend having a look at our Blackboard series of videos on the persona before you go any further in this series. Because it's almost impossible to talk about one without referring to the other.

Here's an easy way to think of the relationship between these two elements. If a persona is like a character in a novel, the customer journey would be the equivalent of the plot.

So why do we bother to make customer journey maps? The reason is pretty simple. Like the persona, they're a tool for keeping our focus trained on our customers or users. Following everything the customer does and feels puts us in their shoes.

Instead of thinking only of what we want our customers to do, we look at what they actually do and want in detail. By flipping our perspective to that of our customers, we gain fresh insights into solving marketing problems.

And even when everything is going well, that change in viewpoint can help us to figure out what we've done right so that we can repeat that success down the road.

The customer journey map is also a great tool for getting your teammates out of their individual silos and thinking about the entire customer experience, from the beginning to the end.

Okay. Let's get started by looking at a few different styles of customer journey maps and seeing where they take us.