Meet Jason. He is an entrepreneur, and his business has been around for two years. His product is unique and has potential. Yet, Jason and his team have a hard time growing their customer base.
Jason is a fictional character, but a lot of business owners can relate to his situation. They pour in a lot of money to advertise their products and get more customers, but all their efforts are in vain. And, in most cases, a poorly optimized customer journey is at the heart of the matter.
Ideally, a customer journey map should reflect how well you understand your customers’ goals. Salesforce’s research confirms it: 84% of customers will buy from brands that meet their clients’ expectations. Of course, there are plenty of other reasons why your customer journey map doesn’t work.

If you suspect that your customer journey map is to blame for the lack of interest in your product, here are six valuable tips you can employ to optimize it.
1. Evaluate Your Approach
Optimizing a customer journey map doesn’t mean you have to start from scratch. There’s a chance your current customer journey map will work just fine and needs minor improvement.
So, start by evaluating your current map and the approach you take to bring it to life. There are two perspectives you can follow:
Current vs. future state. Here, you compare your current customer journey map and its advantages and flaws with the desired customer journey to identify the areas that need finessing.
Assumption-based vs. research-based. Your goal is to analyze the current malfunctioning areas of the customer journey map and offer assumptions and research-based solutions to fix them.
Consider your findings and rethink how you and your team manage the customer journey. It’s best to always rely on data to find the optimal solution.
The next step is to revisit your team’s approach to managing buyers throughout the customer journey. It is possible that your project management methodology doesn’t align with your customer’s needs.
For instance, a waterfall methodology makes your team less flexible and leaves almost no room for unexpected and necessary changes. Instead, Scrumban allows more flexibility and implies continuous improvement.
One more tip: analyze how your competitors build their customer journey maps and which methods they use to manage their customers. Chances are they’ve been through the same hardships, so their experience can help you make an informed decision.
2. Revisit Your Target Buyer Persona
An incomplete or incorrect target audience description can be the reason why you’re having a hard time converting prospects into buyers. Either your target audience is too broad, or you can’t pinpoint their needs correctly.
So, to optimize your customer journey map, you need to look for gaps in the target buyer description. Here are a few ways you can do it:
Look at the social media data
If you have people following you on social media and you registered as a business account, you can review and analyze social media data collected from your followers.
First, you can compare the demographics of your followers and your target audience. Social media data can supply you with information on your followers’ age, gender, languages, and locations:

Next, if you own a B2B business, check if your audience description includes the information on the industry and the size of the organizations where your target buyers work. You can find this data on LinkedIn:

Lastly, you can go through your audience’s interests, which can help you develop a content strategy to appeal to the target audience’s needs on every customer journey stage. Twitter Analytics offers the information on your audience’s interests:

Social media data can provide you with additional insights into your target audience. However, don’t rely on it too much—it’s fluid and can change very fast.
Check your CRM software
CRM software has become a reliable tool for many businesses. It collects and stores valuable customer information, helping you:
All this data can come in handy to help you refine your target buyer description. It reflects real-life customer purchase patterns, which you can use to determine the reasons why your prospects bounce.
Survey your customers
Customer needs are notoriously hard to pinpoint, and even data is not always helpful. So, if you don’t want to beat around the bush trying to guess what your customers want, why not survey them?