What is customer journey mapping? A marketer’s guide in 2025

If you’re aiming to increase your conversions and drive more customers towards a purchase, you’ve probably heard of customer journey mapping.

But if not, this process is essential for understanding how customers engage with your business and how you can optimise campaigns to drive more leads and sales. With customers interacting across multiple online and offline touchpoints, having the right software – like call tracking – has never been more important for monitoring and analysing complex customer journeys.

This guide explores what customer journey mapping is, why it matters, and how technologies like call tracking provide deeper insights into customer behaviour for more data-driven marketing decisions.

What is customer journey mapping?

Customer journey mapping is a process where you create a visual representation of every customer interaction with your business, from initial awareness through to purchase and beyond. This strategic approach gives you a clear view of where and how customers are engaging with your marketing, and it also helps you understand why – so you make the right adjustments to your activities to generate more conversions.

With software like Mediahawk, customer journey mapping goes beyond simple data and captures insights that show how your campaigns influence customer behaviours along all stages of the customer journey. You’re able to identify the best-performing areas of your marketing, reveal customer pain points, and see how cross-channel journeys influence purchasing decisions.

Why is customer journey mapping crucial for marketers?

Customer journey mapping is one of the key ingredients in successful marketing – both business-to-business (B2B) or business-to-consumer (B2C) marketing – because in order to increase your customer conversions, you need to know exactly what influences them, as well as ‘when’ and ‘how’ that impact happens.

Here are some of the main reasons why customer journey mapping is crucial for marketers:

• More effective marketing strategies
  Customer journey mapping enables you to align your marketing strategies with actual customer behaviours rather than assumptions – a customer journey mapping mistake that can cost you conversions.
  By understanding precisely how customers move down your marketing funnel, you can refine your campaigns to deliver exactly the right message at the right moment in their journey. This data-driven approach ensures your marketing resources are invested where they’ll have the greatest impact.
• Enhanced customer experiences
  One of the most valuable aspects of customer journey mapping is the ability to highlight friction points and obstacles in the customer experience. By attributing every interaction to the right marketing source, you’ll see exactly where customers might be dropping off.
  These insights allow you to proactively address poor-performing areas in the journey, and create smoother pathways to conversion.
• Improved conversion rates
  By identifying the specific touchpoints in a customer journey that influence key actions – such as making phone calls, completing forms, or finalising purchases – you’ll be able to optimise these micro moments in line with customer behaviour data.
  Customer journey mapping reveals which elements of your marketing activities are driving conversions, such as the content style or specific channel used. This will allow you to refine your other activities to increase overall conversion rates.

Understanding customer touchpoints and their role in the journey

Touchpoints are the moments of interaction between customers and your business, and they form the backbone of any customer journey map. These interactions fall into two main categories:

• Digital touchpoints – This includes any interactions that happen online, including paid ad impressions, search engine results, website visits, email opens, social media engagements, and online chat interactions.
• Offline touchpoints – This encompasses interactions such as phone calls to your business, in-store visits, product demonstrations, and attendance at live events.

Human-centred interactions remain a decisive factor in the customer journey, particularly for high-value purchases. You need to know how each online and offline interaction either strengthens or weakens a customer’s connection to your business and influences their likelihood to convert.

How call tracking is pivotal to customer journey mapping

Call tracking software is essential for your customer journey mapping process, providing you with the key insights you need to make the marketing decisions that matter most to increase conversions.

• Identifying key touchpoints
  Call tracking reveals which specific marketing sources are driving phone calls to your business, whether campaigns, channels, or even individual ad placements. By assigning unique phone numbers to your activities with dynamic number insertion (DNI), you’ll precisely identify which efforts are motivating customers to pick up the phone – which is one of the strongest indicators of purchase intent.
• Connecting online and offline interactions
  Another major benefit of call tracking for customer journey mapping is that it bridges the gap between online and offline channels, which remains a significant challenge for many marketers. Mediahawk’s Parameter Connect, for example, provides detailed reports on the performance of your integrated marketing campaigns, creating a seamless view of the customer journey as it moves between online research and offline conversation.
• Optimising conversions with real data
  The software also provides granular insights about which touchpoints not only generate calls, but lead to quality conversations and conversions. By integrating Speech Analytics call data with your journey maps, you’ll identify patterns that indicate high purchasing intent from customers interacting with specific activities. This allows you to structure your marketing around these more high-value pathways to drive valuable leads.

Final thoughts

Customer journey mapping is a fundamental process for driving marketing success and growth. With software like Mediahawk, complex, multi-channel customer journeys no longer need to be a challenge for your business. You’ll understand exactly when, how, and why customers interact with your business across both digital and offline touchpoints.