The Buyers Journey: What It Is & How to Map It

Instead of pushing a one-size-fits-all solution, sales teams should provide as many value-driven resources as possible that help buyers confidently choose an approach — whether that includes their product or not. They are now evaluating different approaches or methods to pursue the goal or solve their challenge. Because of this, sales folks must approach potential buyers with sensitivity, not sales pitches. However, a sales rep can shine when buyers seek additional information about your product that can't be found online.

Addressing these pain points is key to moving them further along in their journey. Similarly, identify the challenges or obstacles your customers face at each stage. A key touchpoint could be the moment a potential customer sees a sponsored post on Instagram featuring one of your best-selling items.

Inbound marketing is a strategy focused on growing a business by fostering meaningful, long-term relationships with … Either way, content built around a real buyer’s journey is content that earns engagement, and customers. If you can provide real value to your target audience, your content is likely to bring more traffic to your website and lead to more purchases.

I’ll first walk you through the key findings from those reports (including what they reveal about modern buying behavior) and then share my own takeaways and insights. Stick around until the end, where I’ll walk you through a step-by-step guide on how to define your buyer’s journey using HubSpot’s customer journey analytics tool. The two example tables earlier in this guide map this out in full for two different businesses. At the consideration stage you’re likely to see phrases including ‘solution’, ‘service’, and ‘tool’; and at the decision stage terms like ‘compare’ and ‘review’ are common. By tagging keywords to the awareness, consideration and decision stages, you can build content that both users and search engines respond to. Aira’s Dan Brooks wrote a guide to labelling keywords by buyer’s journey stage.

A buyer journey map is a visual representation of a customer’s experience with a company. Customer journey mapping helps make sense of all the interactions buyers have with a company before and after making a purchase. His work has been featured on and quoted in several major media outlets including The Times, The Economist, and CNBC. Get the above metrics right, and it’s possible to earn $38 for every $1 you spend. You’re simply inviting further engagement, albeit with more investment from your potential buyer.

But here’s what separates successful purchases from regrettable ones—how deeply teams dig into these three fundamental questions. This means knowing exactly when and how to engage prospects at each stage. The company has 29,000+ employees on five continents and a portfolio of industry-leading brands that include Autotrader®, Kelley Blue Book®, Manheim®, vAuto®, Dealertrack®, NextGear Capital™, CentralDispatch® and Cox Fleet®.

Crafting Your Strategy: A Beginner’s Guide

The journey map helps reduce friction points and eliminate problems from the process to better guide your customers and influence their decisions. It involves all functions in your organization, including marketing, sales, technical, and customer relationship management or post-sales support. The buyer’s journey describes the entire process and each stage of the funnel an enterprise buyer takes while interacting with your company. This step-by-step guide to the enterprise tech buyer’s journey will help you develop an optimized process with reduced friction points. How you guide these decision makers through the process determines whether you (and your customers) succeed.

B2B Buyer's journey as a framework for sales and marketing performance

Now you know a bit about the benefits of the buyer’s journey, it’s worth looking at how to apply it to your content strategy. With personas, you can create content that is relevant and useful, and by mapping a buyer’s journey for each persona, you can plan content to engage each customer type at each stage of their journey. The focus of your content will differ too, depending on which of your personas you are targeting. Some personas will prefer blog posts, some will prefer video content, some perhaps original data, charts and templates.

• They identify personas based on imagination, fill up a document, and tuck it in the recesses of a Google Drive somewhere, never to be seen again.
• A company like Dollar Shave Club knows it’s the customer lifetime value (LTV), thus, it can afford to take a hit on the front-end when making this type of offer.
• Additionally, your marketing collateral needs to stand out from millions of online competitors.
• An impressive 75% expect their company to achieve a positive ROI on AI investments faster than with other investments.
• It makes it easier to assign touchpoints and identify points where customers may get stuck, like lingering too long in consideration.

Craft your content to meet any sales objections and pain points that typically arise, including issues related to pricing, contract buyer’s journey length, supply concerns, or something else. Analytically, focus on click-through rates and the type of prospects interacting with your targeted content. In the decision stage, prospects are confident they have found a solution to their problem and choose the product or service that will solve it at the right price. In the consideration stage, prospects actively identify and evaluate possible solutions to their problem. Observe how prospects respond to every step of your sales cycle so you can continue identifying and knocking down obstacles.

For example, FieldworkHub sets up dozens of focus groups for research on drink consumption, supplements, and even fashion perceptions. I see a lot of consumer brands gather focus groups via vendors to gain an understanding of preferences for goods, consumption shifts, or to unearth unexpected biases. They’re perfect for understanding how people influence one another’s opinions and testing concepts in a social setting.

I think as people are becoming better at spotting what’s inauthentic, they’re placing more trust in genuine, peer-driven recommendations instead (which brings me to my next point). Consumers and buyers are now researching products and tools differently. Weaving value-framing, value-affirming content, and buyer engagement insights directly into the seller’s workflow better guides conversations and drives stronger outcomes. Gartner found out that B2B buyers are 1.8 times more likely to close a high-quality deal when they use supplier-provided digital tools alongside guidance from a sales representative. The biggest problem of sellers is that they struggle to identify this and guide buyers toward a better path.

This is about setting SMART goals, like “Launch a Gen Z-focused social media campaign highlighting eco-friendly features by Q1 2026, targeting a 10% increase in engagement.” A SWOT analysis highlights direct areas of opportunity your company can continue, build, focus on, and work to overcome. AI tools have proven to be handy and help you achieve your research goals faster, increase productivity, improve efficiency, and save money. Well, you can use AI market research tools to achieve your goals a lot faster.

How most B2B companies market, and why it doesn’t work

Look for gaps in the journey where prospects might be dropping off or opportunities where you could enhance the customer experience. It’ll serve as a guide for planning your sales strategies & marketing efforts. Create a visual representation of your customer's journey, including buyer personas, touchpoints, goals, and pain points.

In the latest survey of 2,300 buyers, 53% completed all steps at the dealership, while only 7% bought completely online. Cox Automotive’s annual Car Buyer Journey Study continues to show that most buyers don’t want an all-online purchase or a fully in-person transaction. Throughout the 2025 CBJ Study, results continually reinforced the fact that “mostly digital buyers” – those who completed more than 50% of the required process online – were the most satisfied vehicle buyers. Another key theme in 2025 is that vehicle ownership was increasingly viewed as a financial burden. We know what consumers are looking for, we know what’s working, and we’re building the connected retail experiences that help the industry deliver it.” That’s why we’re so focused on getting insights from the 2.3 billion consumer interactions we see annually into the hands of our dealer, lender and OEM partners.