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

Hey everyone, welcome to the SOB Marketing Podcast where we celebrate the SOB that you are and if you haven't figured it out yet, we mean small owned business. We don't mean SOB. 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. Our commitment here at the SOB Marketing Podcast is to give you the real talk

what works when it comes to advertising, marketing, promoting your business, and then what doesn't really work. And Chelsea and I promise to always keep the conversation real. Hello, SOB, small and businesses. We're back for another wonderful episode of the SOB Marketing Podcast. I'm here with my beautiful sister, baby sister, Chelsea. Thank you.

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.

But 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. And 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. Have...

Are you new to this podcast? If so, I'm going to save you time. Just go ahead and subscribe right now, okay? Because 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. And 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 see you guys cry in your cornflakes about mistakes that you made in your marketing. So, and then lastly, if this

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Chelsea, what topic are we getting into today? Okay, Vivian, today we are talking about customer journey. If that does not ring any bells, you better listen to this entire conversation. Oh, she's starting off sassy, you guys. I am because I feel like, you know, 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. 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. Like 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? And so 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, Chels. Okay. So let's start with what is customer journey? Okay.

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 forever.

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 absolutely what um can we go ahead because you know i'm a big analogy girl okay do we want to introduce an analogy y'all this is a map

Yeah. Okay. So think in, in very visually, this is what I do and would do if this,

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? Okay. Is it through an ad? Maybe it's a Facebook ad. Great. Okay. 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? Right.

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

First, you need to look in a well and you need to, you know, to summon me. Yes, that's how it works. Yeah, I throw a penny in a well. 25 cents? No, I'm throwing pennies in there. And then I do a little incantation and a dance and then Vivian appears. I need to see both. But yes, so what question do you have? So when I was going to school, when I went to college and I went to school for marketing,

Yeah, that was your major. Yes, that was my major. We talked about customer journey maybe once. We talked about the marketing funnel a lot.

Yeah. Yes. Can you explain? So if y'all don't know, the marketing funnel is basically like initial awareness, then lawyer, like you're pushing people through the funnel. Yeah. So think of it as an upside down pyramid. Yes. Okay. And

Yeah. Sorry. Yeah. Upside down pyramid triangle. And 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, right? That's the ultimate goal. That's the very tip of it. Can you explain the difference between marketing funnel and a customer journey? Because

You know, there are, not levels, but there are sections to customer journey as well. And they are basically...

The same. Like they're similar. They're not the same, but they're very, very similar to the marketing funnel. And as someone who was only taught customer journey like once out of all of these classes I took, can you explain the difference between the two? Yeah. So and this is what's interesting, you guys. Chelsea and I went to the same exact college and University of South Carolina. Both graduated from the same business school 15 years apart, meaning my career

Obviously, my education predates your stuff, but we didn't talk about the customer journey in there. And so 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. And so the...

The intent is different on both. When you're 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. So like the funnel is almost like a, ideally, this is what I would love to happen. Okay. When someone hears about me, they get brand awareness. Then they move on to the next step to try my product. Maybe then they move on to the next step to actually keep,

the product or, you know, 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 a process or so that you can find gaps. Yeah. Yeah.

Okay, so it should be a real life picture of what is actually occurring with a customer. All right, 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? Okay, so map out as things are in real time today. Mm-hmm.

Right. The customer sees me and then this is how, you know, the map goes. And then what you start to find is like, oh, 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. Like I'm missing a big gap after the sale. And you're able to find that if you're truly mapping that customer journey. Okay. Love, love.

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. And 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. Yeah. And it's something that, you know, 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 110 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 reasons why for when you're able to find gaps. What other things could mapping out a customer's journey do for your small business? I mean, I think a big one for me is improving satisfaction.

Because when you make your customer's 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. And 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. Yeah, I...

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 maybe why you don't have enough product reviews on there. Also, Vivian, it just helps you be more effective with your marketing. Like 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. Like with the visualization, it'll help you be able to say, you know what, this marketing 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? Yeah, the other thing it can do too is, you know, in

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? So if you're like, oh yeah, I started 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? Yes. 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. Like, hey, 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 paying for this because I'm going to

be using just one platform to do it. So 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. Vivian, do you think maybe we should now list out the categories that are in a customer journey? Yeah, let's go ahead and do that. Okay, let's go ahead and do that. So it starts with

So 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. It could be a billboard. Ooh, those are still around these days. Mm-hmm.

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. For those of you listening, Chelsea was starting to, with her hand, do the vertical funnel. Yeah, but this isn't a funnel. This is more of a map. So I'm right here. This is the beginning. This is awareness. Okay. Now we're going to move on to consideration. So consideration is awareness.

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.

And the consideration thing, I think one of the, if you're looking, if you're like, how do I even know? This is where data can help you. All right. So 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. Okay. I'm not going to use the same product. Okay.

we used in the last podcast episode um let's say it's uh i don't know um eyeliner oh what well you just earlier you were talking about a trolley trolley trolley trolley i don't know how to pronounce it the gummy t-r-o-l-l-i okay it's the brand of gummies they make gummy bears and stuff okay in worms gummy worms all that stuff they came out with some popsicles

Yeah. Okay. So let's say which gummy popsicles your friend says are delicious. Yeah. She said they were pretty good. Okay. We haven't tried them, so we cannot endorse. No, we trolley popsicles. Uh, but let's say we're trolley and we are introducing this new product. We're running a Facebook ad. Sure. The next step in that customer journey and where the data comes in is that ad is a

link to a button in the call to action that says, you know, 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 is how many people from the ad clicked on the button. Okay. And how many people then you look on the website, how many people actually opened ads.

that web page because 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 of like, now 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. Yeah.

All right. 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? To them making a decision. I'm thinking, let's say you get to the landing page and

and you have a digital coupon. Yes. 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. And so because the coupon you can use save 10, right? Or whatever you want or gummy, right? Gummy 10. You are then able to track it directly to that landing page. And you know that this particular Facebook ad is what got them there.

And so now this is where they're coming through this journey and you're starting to see, okay, is there any gap in there? Is there any, you know, but the intent, the decision for them to buy was made when they downloaded that digital coupon. Yes, absolutely. So now our next stop in our journey is going to be delivery. So what's happening during and after the buy? Okay.

So 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 did 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. 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 1,000 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? Like 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. Couple different things.

either maybe they still bought but didn't use the coupon, right? And so 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...

you know, how are they using that? Yes. Or is it maybe that it could be they never bought your product? Okay. So maybe they forgot. Maybe it wasn't, you know, they got to the store. They didn't want to buy it. It wasn't intriguing. Maybe then you have problems with the packaging. Like what? Maybe they forgot about it. Yes. 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. 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's 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. But you're like, what is going on? Using...

Matching the data, though, with these stages that Chelsea is going through. Okay, so we went through four of the five. So awareness, consideration, decision, delivery. Next, we got loyalty and referral. So this is we finally, they made the purchase. They bought the gummy popsicles. They think they're popping. Okay, love them. Pun intended. Popping? Because they're popsicles? Yeah.

You didn't get the pun? I didn't get the pun. No, I absolutely did. Okay. And I'm a genius for that. Intentionally did that? Mm-hmm. Yes. 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. This can even look like the loyalty point or part of this can even look as simple as like,

you're encouraging them to post on social media and use a certain hashtag, hashtag poppin popsicles, okay? Hashtag poppin trolley popsicles, whatever it is. But this is where you're looking. And what I love about this whole journey, like you said earlier, is it really does not just focus on the purchase, but it's,

you're actually going into like the after purchase. Yes. Okay, what is occurring afterwards? What gaps? What opportunities do I have? And don't forget, we always encourage you guys to...

look at that low hanging fruit. Okay. 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 pop and trolley popsicles back for another purchase? Are you saying, Hey, you know, after you have it automated to where once you see they make the purchase, you're like,

hey, you know, here's a 10% off discount or, you know, we just introduced a new flavor. We've expanded. Now we don't just have blue raspberry. Now we have, you know, pink lemonade, pink lemonade. But these are all things that you can look for to find gaps. And 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. Absolutely. Again, like making sure that they're having a good experience is so important. I

I want to hear from you guys out there is from you guys as y'alls. I want to hear from y'alls out there. Chelsea's about smack me. I'm just letting you do your thing. Go ahead. She's like, show the people how weird you are. Show them what I put up with every day. Um,

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. Yeah. It could be something that all the small business gangs out there are talking about, you know. Mm-hmm.

Vivian, before we wrap up, I want to make sure that we touch on how to actually map out your customer journey. Okay. 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. Y'all just ignore her. 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.

And then use the information to make changes for the better. Chelsea, let me ask you this. Okay, take us for example. We have two things. We have a course called 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. And we have the SOB community, right, which is a membership program.

We have two staple products. Would we have two different customer journeys? Yes. Perfect. Yes. 100%. Your customer journey is going to depend on what your goal is. Okay. So I would say we have...

A whole other customer journey, which is people going through the pipeline of just our resources. Yes. 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.

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 and 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. But again,

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, right? So they sit in that resource thing. And 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 that

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. Yes. You know, someone finds us through a download we have and then we map it out. The thing is, though, once we start doing ads for customers,

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. So 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, right? Yes. And 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 this.

free resources or and 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 light go into our video library vault go into our free downloads all that yes absolutely uh also

want to point out that you can use Canva or HubSpot. They both offer free templates for

for customer journeys. 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 a 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. Yep. It should. It

And then HubSpot has like a free template that you can download. Excellent. Yes. Okay, Vivian, I think are we ready for the TLDL? Sure are. 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. But 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 and 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. And 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, you know, 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. And 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. - That's all you need. - That's all you need. - That's all you need. - Just us 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 SOB you can be.