What is the customer journey?

The customer journey is the complete path a person takes from first discovering your brand to becoming a loyal customer and advocate. It covers every interaction with your business, across channels, devices and teams.

In digital marketing, the customer journey helps you understand how people move from awareness to purchase and beyond. Instead of looking at a single campaign or channel in isolation, you see how search, social, email, your website and sales conversations work together to drive revenue.

The main stages of the customer journey

Most models of the customer journey use similar stages, even if the labels differ. A simple and practical version for B2B and e commerce looks like this: awareness, consideration, decision, onboarding, retention and advocacy. In awareness, a buyer first discovers a problem and your brand. In consideration, they compare options. In decision, they choose, buy or sign.

Onboarding is where the customer journey often breaks, because teams focus on acquisition instead of first value. Retention and advocacy cover renewals, repeat purchases, referrals and reviews. For growth marketing teams, these later stages are where customer lifetime value is created and protected.

Touchpoints across the customer journey

Every time someone interacts with your brand, you create a touchpoint in the customer journey. That could be a Google Ads click, a LinkedIn post, a price page visit, an onboarding email or a support chat. Good journey mapping connects these touchpoints to clear metrics, like lead quality, sales velocity or churn rate.

In practice, this is where your CRM system, analytics and marketing automation need to work together. When you can follow the same contact ID from first touch to closed won and renewal, you can attribute revenue to channels and improve your growth marketing strategy based on facts instead of assumptions.

Why the customer journey matters for growth

For founders and marketing leaders, the customer journey is a decision tool. It shows where prospects drop off, which messages move them forward and where internal processes slow things down. That lets you invest budget where it has the most impact on revenue and margin.

  • Aligns marketing, sales and customer success around one shared view of the buyer.
  • Reveals friction points that hurt conversion, retention or upsell.
  • Connects campaigns and content to measurable outcomes at each stage.
  • Supports smarter channel mix and budget allocation across the funnel.
  • Improves forecasting by linking pipeline stages to real journey data.

When you treat the customer journey as a living system, not a one time exercise, it becomes the backbone of your marketing strategy. You can test new messages, channels and offers quickly, then double down on what moves people smoothly from first touch to long term customer.

How to work with the customer journey in practice

For many B2B and e commerce teams, a useful starting point is to map one core customer journey for a single product or segment. Keep it simple, focus on key stages and the 5 to 10 most important touchpoints per stage. Then connect each touchpoint to a measurable KPI and an owner.

As you run campaigns and track performance, refine your customer journey based on real data, not whiteboard theory. Over time, this gives you a clear, shared picture of how marketing drives pipeline, revenue and loyalty. That picture makes it easier to brief agencies or an embedded team like 6th Man, because everyone is working from the same map of how your buyers actually buy.

If you want to dive deeper into using the customer journey as a growth lever, explore our latest marketing insights where we translate journey thinking into concrete playbooks and experiments.