You know the feeling when you walk into a room for a specific purpose, but the moment you breach the doorway, you can’t remember what the heck you were doing? Sometimes we tend to get lost even on the simplest of journeys.

Your customers often take paths fraught with obstacles in order to find your brand and your products and services. Knowing and anticipating these obstacles will help you to ensure your customers never lose their way on their journey to your business. Hubspot has some tips to get you started on understanding your customer journey.

1. Outline a customer journey map. This should include an overview of everything a customer will experience on their journey: the buying process, user actions, emotions, pain points, and solutions.
2. Identify the right analytics tools. There are a number of tools you can use to monitor customer actions across your site and the various channels that lead to your site. You likely have some in your arsenal already, but Hubspot has some recommendations to get you started.
3. Collect your data. You earned it! The focus here is on user data (info specific to the user), and interaction data (info about a user’s interaction with your products and services.
4. Analyze data. Now you have all the pieces to the puzzle and it’s time to put them together to see the big picture. This is where you’ll get to see which obstacles are turning customers away so you can clear a better path for customers moving forward.
5. Update customer journey map. Back to the drawing board! You didn’t think your job was done yet, did you? You know better than that (you’re a digital marketer after all). Insert your findings into your journey map to reflect a more realistic process.
6. Use customer journey analytics to test new strategies. With a few previous pain points eliminated, things ought to move a bit smoother. Craft an enticing abandoned cart email or decrease the steps needed for a customer to create an account.

Keep reading to uncover more of the benefits you’ll find by looking under the hood of your customer journey.

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Netflix knows how to make a gripping and action-packed movie – there seems to be a new one every other day. While digital marketers may not have broken a sweat with their Extraction 2 campaigns, we can’t say the same for their traditional marketing counterparts.