What is Customer Journey – A Practical Guide on its Stages & Mapping

The most critical aspect of the customer journey is getting a thorough understanding of why a customer takes an action with a brand – be it clicking on an ad, browsing on the app, making a purchase or even walking away from it. Understanding customer behaviour helps you to create more personalized experiences, improve lead generation, and increase brand loyalty.

Let’s understand what customer journey is, why it is important, the key stages involved, and how virtual events improve modern customer journey and more. 

What Is a Customer Journey?

A customer journey is the complete experience an individual has while interacting with a brand — from the initial discovery to becoming a loyal advocate.

Think of it like a roadmap: it shows where customers begin, what paths they take, and where they might need a nudge to move forward. Without understanding this path, even the most creative marketing strategies can lose direction.

Traditionally, marketers used the sales funnel to understand customer behavior. But the customer journey goes deeper — it’s nonlinear and personal. People in this fast moving landscape tend to move in-between channels, compare brands, as well as engage with digital communities before they take a particular decision with the product. 

The 5 Key Stages of the Customer Journey

While every brand’s journey looks different, most follow five major phases.

1. Awareness: Discovering the Brand

This is the moment of discovery. When potential customers know about your business—it could be through an ad, a blog post, a webinar, or even a recommendation from a friend. At this stage, the customers are identifying their problem or need, which is why they may not necessarily be looking for a specific product just yet.

How virtual events/webinars help – Webinars as well as online sessions can play a crucial role in creating awareness. You position your brand as an authority by hosting thought leadership discussions, product education sessions, or expert panels. For instance, a software company might host a webinar on “Top Marketing Trends in 2025” and subtly introduce their solution to new audiences.

The goal here is to capture attention and start building trust.

2. Acquisition: Turning Interest into Action

The next phase is where your potential customers gradually get to know your brand better, where your goal is to nurture them into valuable leads and convert them into paying customers. This stage should conclude in conversion, where prospects are ready to take an action. It can be it signing up for a demo, making a purchase, or even registering for a webinar.

How virtual events/webinars help – Here, virtual events platform can help organize product demos, or live Q&A events which can help them convert, by bridging the gap between curiosity and decision. Prospects can directly interact with your brand, and can raise their questions, clear their confusion, and gain value from your brand.

Help customers make an informed decision and also influence them to choose your brand over competitors.

3. Onboarding: Making the First Impression Count

Make sure that the onboarding experience is well-crafted to make customers fully aware of your offerings. Show support to make them feel confident about having invested in your product. Do not fall short of efforts in this phase or else you might risk losing your hard-won customers – to confusion or frustration.

How virtual events/webinars help – Here, you can conduct virtual onboarding sessions, customer success webinars, & training workshops which can make learning easy and interactive. Avoid long guides or sessions, which might leave your customers bored, rather leverage webinars to walk them through the setup, features, and best practices.

Empowering new customers and guiding them through the product is to properly use it is the main goal here.

4. Engagement: Building Ongoing Relationships

Once customers are familiar with your product, it is time to engage them on a greater level. Keep them connected, interested, and satisfied by consistently communicating, educating, and supporting them.

How virtual events/webinars help – You can host regular webinars to boost customer engagement—and inform them about the new product features, updates, and use cases. Build loyalty towards your brand and subsequently foster a sense of community.

5. Advocacy: Turning Customers into Champions

The advocacy stage is among the most powerful stages among all. Here your customers become your vocal supporters and take on a lot of your promotional work by referring your brand to new leads, writing reviews, as well as sharing success stories.

How virtual events/webinars help – You can host virtual recognition events, customer appreciation sessions, or panel discussions where you can bring your loyal customers and help nurture advocates. This will boost your brand’s credibility and offer authentic social proof for prospects.

Transforming your satisfied customers into brand ambassadors is what this stage involves.

Why Customer Journey Mapping Matters

Mapping your customer journey is one of the smartest moves any marketer can make. This helps you figure out how customers interact with your brand and identify opportunities to enhance their experience with your product.

Here are some of the biggest benefits:

• Understand Consumer Behavior – Mapping your customer’s journey can help you see how they move through the touchpoints, and figure out where they tend to hesitate, convert, or drop off.

• Identify Critical Touchpoints – You also get to identify the channels that are driving engagement among your customers – advertisements, email campaigns, social media interactions, virtual events, etc.

• Improve Marketing ROI – Mapping helps to know your customers better at each phase, allowing you to tailor the campaigns accordingly, ensuring its effectiveness. You can shorten the conversion cycle, as well as reduce wasted ad spend.

• Enhance Customer Experience – You also get to anticipate your customer’s needs via mapping to reduce friction, and deliver a seamless experience to them end to end.

• Drive Loyalty and Retention – Satisfied customers are more likely to be loyal to the brand. And you need to optimize that opportunity by consistently enhancing their experience at each stage of the journey, and turn them from one-time buyers into repeat customers.

Building Your Customer Journey Map

Here’s a step-by-step guide on how to build your customer journey map.

• Define Your Goals – Defining goals is the most important aspect in this process. This can either be increasing sign-ups, boosting repeat purchases, improving post-event engagement, etc. Goals shape the way you design each stage of the journey.

• Understand Your Audience – Incorporate surveys, dive into analytics reports, and also leverage feedback forms to figure out their pain points, preferences, and motivations. Gaining specific insights will help you to tailor and refine your journey map easily.

• Identify Key Touchpoints – Try listing the ways customers interact with your brand – be it on social media, email, website visits, or any other channel. Shortlisting these touchpoints can help you figure out where you need to improve.

• Outline the Stages – Organize your customer journey into key phases — Awareness, Consideration, Purchase, Retention, and Advocacy. Note what your prospect feels, does, and expects at each step. 

• Analyze Pain Points and Opportunities – You need to be aware of the pain points of your customers, and opportunities of where you can add extra value. For that, you need to identify the drop-off points where people generally tend to lose their attention. See if they are losing interest before signing up or if the post-purchase communications are being too generic, or something else.

• Implement, Measure, and Optimize – Treat your map as a living document. New data can come up from customer feedback, ad campaigns, etc., and update that data into the document so customer experience doesn’t get hampered.

Elevating the Customer Journey with Airmeet

There’s no doubt about the fact that customers today prefer digital experiences over in-person ones, for the convenience they offer and that’s exactly where virtual event platforms like Airmeet, come into play.

Airmeet is increasingly used among marketers these days as it handles both virtual and hybrid events efficiently. With all its advanced features, you can drive meaningful interactions with your event participants, and contribute towards organizational growth.

Here’s how Airmeet supports each stage of the customer journey-

• Drive Awareness with Engaging Events: With Airmeet, you can organize every type of events, like webinars, summits, conferences, etc, that can help attract new audiences and can establish brand credibility.

• Nurture Consideration Through Interactivity: Very few platforms offer interactivity as Airmeet does. The platform offers engagement features like live polls, Q&As, and social lounge to foster two-way conversations.

• Boost Conversions with Real-Time Demos: You can host the product demos or showcase a service in action via virtual sessions. It helps you deliver prospects a great value firsthand.

• Foster Retention with Ongoing Engagement: Incorporate customer education programs, onboarding sessions, as well as community events, helping users to secure your offerings effectively.

• Encourage Advocacy and Loyalty: Recognize your most active customers through user spotlight sessions, brand communities, or referral events that strengthen long-term relationships.

With powerful analytics, Airmeet also enables you to measure engagement across every event touchpoint, giving you actionable insights to refine your customer journey strategy. Besides, it also aids in delivering personalized as well as memorable experiences at every stage of the customer journey.

Bottom Line

Understanding customer journeys is of utmost importance in the growth of an organization. As mentioned, it gives you a glimpse into the customer’s psychology, and allows you to experience your brand from their perspective. It lets you figure out how to build and nurture relationships with valuable leads, secure their trust and eventually make them loyal towards your product. And subsequently, in your journey of making the customer journeys better, you can always count on platforms like Airmeet to bridge the gap between awareness and advocacy.