What Is the Buyer's Journey? Definition, Stages & Examples

In order to be effective, agile marketing teams need to measure the buyers journey, which is how prospects move from knowing nothing about you, to ultimately purchasing your product or solution.

What is the buyers journey?

The buyers journey gives you a simple lens through which to view the journey of a prospect or customer when they interact with your business.

The buyer’s journey describes a buyer’s path to purchase. In other words, buyers don’t wake up and decide to buy on a whim. They go through a process to become aware of, consider and evaluate, and decide to purchase a new product or service.

HubSpot

A visual representation of the journey enables marketers and growth teams to both understand, and communicate, the typical path to purchase. Building familiarity and trust over time is critical—a principle also emphasized by the Rule of 7 in marketing. Maintaining internal alignment across teams is also vital—learn more in our guide to Ending the War Between Sales and Marketing.

The 3 stages of the buyer’s journey: awareness, consideration, decision

Most buyer’s journey frameworks — including the version popularised by HubSpot — collapse the path to purchase into three stages. Each stage has a different buyer mindset, and content that matches that mindset consistently outperforms content aimed at the wrong stage.

Awareness

The buyer recognises they have a problem or opportunity but hasn’t yet named it precisely. They’re searching for symptoms and framing, not solutions. Content that works here: educational blog posts, definitional guides, industry research, and social content that helps a prospect put a name to their problem.

Consideration

The buyer has defined their problem and is now researching the categories of solution available to solve it. Content that works here: comparison guides, buying guides, webinars, and category-level content that positions your solution type as the right approach, without yet pushing a specific product.

Decision

The buyer has settled on a solution category and is now evaluating specific vendors. Content that works here: case studies, product demos, free trials, pricing pages, and customer reviews that reduce the risk of choosing you over an alternative.

Understanding which stage a prospect is in changes what you should show them. A visitor arriving on an awareness-stage blog post isn’t ready for a demo CTA, and a decision-stage buyer comparing vendors doesn’t need another definitional article.

Why you need to understand the buyers journey?

In addition to providing a useful visual aid, the buyers journey provides a constant reminder of the importance in building a relationship and trust with customers over time. Using the marriage analogy, too many marketing teams try to force a customer to marry them on the first date.

Here are some additional advantages in clearly defining your buyers journey:

• Identify where prospects are in the journey and market to them appropriately

• Identify and prioritise where growth efforts can have the biggest impact at any point in time

• Improve internal alignment across marketing and sales teams

• Understand core metrics and KPIs for each stage in the journey

• Map content and key assets to relevant funnel stages

• Identify moments of customer influence and customer goals for each stage

• Understand the impact of higher-level funnel activity on lower funnel stages

• Ensure focus is given to both demand creation and demand conversion activities

A funnel gives you a logical way to track and analyse the performance of key stages of your user journey so you can determine what’s working and what’s not, allowing you to prioritise efforts on things that have the greatest chance of driving growth. It helps you turn data into insight, and insight into action.

Nick Schwinghamer, Director of Growth @ Shopify

Buying journey terminology

There are literally hundreds of terms, phrases and visuals for describing the same - relatively simple - buying process. We’ve included a number of these below for completeness.

• Journey: Customer decision journey, Buyers journey, Customer journey

• Funnel: Marketing funnel, Conversion funnel, Sales funnel

• Moments: Buyer journey moments

• Loop: The customer loop, The purchase loop, Buying journey loop

• Map: Customer journey map, Customer journey mapping

• Ladder / Stages: Ladder of awareness, Stages of awareness

Buying journey examples

TOFU, MOFU & BOFU

Top of funnel, middle of funnel and bottom of funnel is one of the oldest frameworks for mapping the customer journey.

• TOFU (Top of funnel): Unaware or Problem aware - How to get better results from marketing spend

• MOFU (Middle of funnel): Solution aware - How agile marketing platforms can increase marketing effectiveness

• BOFU (Bottom of funnel): Product aware - Why choose the Growth Method agile marketing platform

Mapping funnel stage to buyer’s journey stage is straightforward: TOFU aligns with awareness, MOFU with consideration, and BOFU with decision. The framework is a useful lens for auditing whether your content calendar is overweighted at one stage, for example dozens of TOFU posts feeding a funnel with no MOFU comparison content to carry prospects forward. When you plan a marketing campaign around a new piece of content, naming its funnel stage up front makes it easier to measure whether it moved prospects to the next stage rather than just driving traffic.

The AIDA Model

AIDA was by American advertising pioneer Elias St. Elmos Lewis in 1898. The four stages are:

• Awareness

• Interest

• Desire

• Action

AIDA maps neatly onto the three-stage buyer’s journey: Awareness and Interest correspond to the journey’s awareness stage, Desire to consideration, and Action to decision. It remains one of the most widely taught models because of its simplicity, even though real buying rarely moves through the four stages in a straight line.

Chartered Institute of Marketing Buying Journey

Below are the five stages of the customers’ buying journey according to the Chartered Institute of Marketing:

• Awareness

• Consideration

• Purchase

• Retention

• Advocacy

For B2B teams navigating more complex, multi-stakeholder purchases, the Gartner B2B buying journey offers a more granular six-stage model that better reflects non-linear, group decision-making.

Buyer’s journey vs consumer decision journey

The three-stage buyer’s journey isn’t the only model for understanding how prospects move to purchase. The consumer decision journey, developed by McKinsey, reframes the same underlying behaviour as a continuous loop rather than a one-way funnel, which is particularly useful once you start thinking about repeat purchase and loyalty, not just the first sale.

Most teams don’t need to choose one model exclusively. The buyer’s journey is the simpler lens for planning top-of-funnel and mid-funnel content, while the consumer decision journey is more useful once you’re optimising for retention and advocacy after the first sale.

About Growth Method

Mapping your buyer’s journey is only useful if you act on what it tells you. Growth Method is the agentic marketing platform for B2B teams: plan your strategy, ship campaigns, and learn what works, all in one place, for people and agents.

Rather than treating the buyer’s journey as a static diagram, Growth Method treats each stage as something to test. Connect your analytics stack and an AI agent can flag where a specific stage or query cluster is underperforming, help you shape a hypothesis for closing the gap, and track whether the change actually moved clicks, conversions, or pipeline once it’s live.

That’s the core shift: your buyer’s journey shouldn’t sit in a slide deck. It should be a live, measured campaign, refreshed as your funnel data changes, not a diagram you draw once and forget.

Get started to turn your buyer’s journey into your next measured campaign.

Final thoughts

Here are some general tips and best practises to help when thinking about how to use your buyers journey:

• Focus on the bottom of the funnel stages first

• Understand conversion rates across your funnel, and by acquisition channel

• Pick ONE area to focus on at a time

• The is no “one size fits all” when it comes to funnels

• As a general rule, simple is better than perfect

Remember there is no such thing as the perfect funnel. Aim to be helpful, educational and informative for prospective buyers and use funnel analysis to make data-informed decisions and improve your marketing effectiveness.

Got questions? Ping me on LinkedIn or on Twitter.

Frequently asked questions

What is the buyer’s journey?

The buyer’s journey is the path a prospect follows from first realising they have a problem to deciding on a product or service to solve it. It’s typically broken into three stages: awareness, consideration, and decision.

What are the 3 stages of the buyer’s journey?

The three stages are awareness (the buyer recognises a problem or opportunity), consideration (the buyer names the problem and researches ways to solve it), and decision (the buyer evaluates specific vendors and chooses one).

What is the difference between the buyer’s journey and the consumer decision journey?

The buyer’s journey is a linear three-stage model popularised by HubSpot, while the consumer decision journey is McKinsey’s four-phase cyclical model that treats loyalty and advocacy as part of an ongoing loop rather than an endpoint.

How long does the buyer’s journey typically take?

Duration varies widely by purchase complexity and price. Simple consumer purchases can move through all three stages in minutes, while considered B2B purchases with multiple stakeholders can take weeks or months, similar to the Gartner B2B buying journey.

What’s the difference between the buyer’s journey and a marketing funnel?

The buyer’s journey describes the buyer’s mindset and behaviour at each stage, while a marketing funnel such as TOFU/MOFU/BOFU describes how a marketing team organises content and campaigns to match those stages. They’re complementary views of the same underlying process.

How can marketing teams use the buyer’s journey stages effectively?

Map content and campaigns to each stage, ensure a single campaign or content asset has a clear stage focus at a time, and track conversion rates between stages so you know where prospects are dropping off.

Additional resources

Recommended additional reading on marketing funnels and journey.

• Customer lifecycle stages: extends the buyer’s journey past the point of purchase into onboarding, retention, and advocacy.