What the buyers journey looks like in 2025: Action-packed insights from 4 major studies

Once completed, your sales and marketing teams can use your buyer journey map to optimize content, guide behaviors, and increase customer acquisition. However, buyer journey maps can serve as a guide to learn more about consumer behavior and how to capitalize on it. Prospects in this stage are at the bottom of the sales funnel and ready to buy a product or service.

Although large buying groups may seem challenging, 94% of buyers with groups of six or more report clear benefits, including broader perspectives, shared effort in validating solutions, better ability to secure budget, and greater likelihood of approval. The typical buying decision now includes 13 internal stakeholders and nine external influencers, with that number rising for more complex or strategic purchases. Touchpoints can be online, like viewing your product reviews, or offline, like visiting your store. A customer touchpoint is any point in which your customer engages with your brand. “Perhaps it’s a cumbersome checkout process, lack of clear product information, or slower delivery times,” she says. Nosto’s content personalization platform that adapts a website’s messaging, visuals, and layout for each individual shopper.

This insight allowed us to refine our messaging before the launch, saving us from what could have been a disappointing rollout. Easy marketing tools that deliver fast time-to-value, unified in one place. We had not addressed this in our messaging for leads who wanted to switch to our service. But when I switched to messaging built on real customer research, our conversion rates doubled. I’ve realized that smart companies aren’t just throwing money at research — they’re investing because they know gut feelings aren’t enough anymore.

Perform Keyword Research for Every Stage

Rainstorm Storage is a B2B business that sells online file storage and organization software. B2B and B2C buyer journeys can vary, as prospect motivations and sales cycles differ by industry. Prospects are close to the finish line, but your sales personnel must exceed expectations in every interaction to ensure they don’t back out or switch to a competitor at the last moment. They should also be mindful of how prospects perceive both their business and the marketplace as a whole. Doing so creates a well-oiled machine that turns prospects into customers time after time.

Analyze questions target buyers ask in industry communities. But the key is to identify the topics in which your buyers are genuinely interested in. Start with the later stages first, as influencing buyers at that stage tends to have the best ROI in the long run (because this way, you’re plugging the leaks in your funnel, instead of pouring more water into a leaky bucket). Invite key people from the marketing and sales team, and a subject-matter expert to a workshop.

An ecommerce customer journey map is a diagram that details how customers engage with your company across various mediums including online, retail, and contact with your customer support team. Providers must also engage intentionally with the buyer’s extended network, including partners, analysts, and industry voices that influence decision-making. Research from 6sense shows that typical B2B purchases now involve around 10 people across IT, operations, finance, and end users. 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.

Step 4. Add appropriate calls to action for each piece of content

Sometimes, a company’s division might compete with your main product or service, even though that company’s brand might exert more effort in another area. Now, you want to get very specific about how and where the buyer researched potential solutions. The next three stages of the buyer’s journey will focus specifically on that purchase.

Steps to Build Your Own Buyer Journey Maps

47% of respondents use AI to narrow down their options, but then turn to Google for reviews or pricing. Because of this hesitation, 86% of respondents say they verify AI brand recommendations at least sometimes, including 20% who always do so. Netflix secured 30–40% better campaign ROI by shifting from static recommendations to dynamic content and predictive analytics tailored precisely to the user’s lifecycle stage. ChatGPT leads the market with 64% of users using it monthly, followed by Gemini at 49%.

Some companies also consult industry analysts and reports from Gartner and Forrester to identify potential vendors and gain insights into market leaders and emerging players. 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. “We identify a specific problem and come up with a list of requirements. “As buyers reevaluate how they engage with organizations, providers must ignite action and put buyers first to create meaningful experiences.

• For example, the buyer that will be using the product may want to understand how the product compares to competitor offerings and so they may speak to industry peers or read expert reviews.
• If time allows or gaps in your customer data call for more research, consider sending out surveys or conducting user testing to get feedback from real customers.
• “The buyer’s journey is the process someone goes through up until the point of purchasing your product or service.
• We are able to offer our services for free because some vendors may pay us for web traffic or other sales opportunities.
• B2B buyers prefer self-service tools over interacting with sales representatives and want to complete part or all of their purchase process independently (Business Dasher).

Consumers and buyers are now researching products and tools differently. Given this, I think it’s clear that brand building and awareness play a crucial role in influencing purchase decisions. In fact, if your product is already known to the buyer, there’s over a 75% chance it will make the shortlist. And since 78% of buyers start their research on Google, it’s clear why brand-led growth (BLG) companies with strong brand recognition and solid SEO consistently outperform in the B2B space. As for timelines, 87% of buyers complete their purchases within a six-month sales cycle.

Oppositely, the B2C buyer’s journey is quicker, primarily because it’s a process sustained on emotion. The B2B buyer’s journey and the B2C buyer’s journey may sound the same, but, in practice, they’re entirely different.

Why do consumers still verify AI recommendations?

Marketing your products and services starts with building out the personas you wish to attract to your business and identifying their specific pain points. How you guide these decision makers through the process determines whether you (and your customers) succeed. Ensuring you have a unique selling proposition that provides value to the buyer and sets you apart from IT buyer’s journey competitors. Understanding exactly how our product or service solves their problem compared to our direct and indirect competitors. As I mentioned above, instead of pushing a product or service, the goal should be to help buyers articulate their problem, explore potential impacts, and guide them toward the next steps in their journey.

Currently, 86% of B2B purchases stall during the buying process and 81% of buyers express dissatisfaction with their chosen providers. 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. Importantly, shoppers who engaged AI tools reported the highest levels of satisfaction. I was able to complete most of it online, including getting a quicker approval.”

When asked what primarily triggers engagement with providers, respondents more often cited interactions with industry experts than information from AI tools. To identify competitors whose products or services overlap with yours, determine which industry or industries you’re pursuing. These elements make it a useful guide for identifying when various types of content can be most effective and ensuring they’re created with the right objectives in mind. On the flip side, you’ll also be able to identify when your customer personas are happiest and ensure you’re reaching prospects with the right touchpoints. Seventy-two percent of buyers turn to Google during the awareness stage, so it’s important not to neglect the importance of identifying what you’re already ranking for in the search engine results pages (SERPs).

For a head start, identify recent customers or brand loyalty program members who made a purchase on your website. Instead, a far better approach is to identify your most valuable customers (i.e., personas) and map their journeys one stage at a time. They tell you where users are coming from, how many days or visits it takes to move from one stage to another, what the goal of the user is in each stage, and how each segment behaves. Perhaps they want to initiate a return, understand how the product works, or see whether there’s a discount available on their next order. Here, they weigh their options and visit your online store—as well any competing brands that might better serve their needs.