Mapping the Modern Audience Journey

If you’re a marketer, you’ve no doubt heard the term “customer journey.” Implied in that phrase; however, is the idea of a purchase. For some marketers – especially those involved in corporate marketing functions – our goal isn’t a purchase, it’s company favorability or reputation. For that reason, I’m going to use the term “audience journey,” but the principles I’m talking about are universal.

I’d like to propose the following definition of “audience journey”:

The full sum of online and offline experiences that key audiences go through when they are interacting with your company or brand.

I stress “online and offline experiences” because often we get caught up in just thinking about the “user journey,” which typically relates to the digital channel space. Focusing only on the digital journey leaves out a large portion of potential engagement opportunity with your audience. Creating a successful audience journey is not about how we want people to engage with us. It’s about seeing and listening to how and why they actually engage, and creating messages and content built for those engagement preferences.

The traditional concept of an audience journey is linear – a direct path through awareness, consideration, purchase and advocacy. It was created by marketers who only had a few channels on which to engage, and who had firm control over when and how audiences would see their messages.

Those days are gone.

Today, the number of channels has grown significantly, and the journey your audience takes through those channels is not only circular and fluid, but constantly evolving.

Case in point: the recent merger of AT&T and Time Warner. AT&T will be one of the few companies that will be able to access consumer data across multiple screens: TV, mobile and other digital devices. This merger will evolve what was originally considered “traditional media” with TV becoming more targeted, more real-time. It is an exciting time to be in marketing!

If your approach to marketing is still divided into channel-based silos (paid vs. social vs. web vs. content, for example), you will have a hard time creating a seamless journey in communicating brand value for your audiences.

In simple terms, this siloed approach to the modern audience journey means that brands can act wildly different from channel to channel. The result for your audiences can be jarring. And it can hamper your ability to get the most out of audience engagement. Simply put:

If you have gaps in your approach, you will have gaps in how people perceive your value.

Mapping an audience journey is a visual representation of the journey and a fully integrated process that deserves the appropriate amount of time and cross-functional collaboration. Once the brief is defined, the next step is to gather all available data – audience research, performance metrics, engagement rates, long-term KPIs, etc. – and then prioritize your audiences. Figure out how things are performing, why they are performing that way, and make a group decision on how to use each channel going forward. Understanding how your audience is using a channel will help you better engage on that channel (hint: they probably don’t use all channels in the same way).

And remember: the audience journey map is just the beginning. It’s a helpful tool, along with monthly analytic review with your integrated team. This is when you should be tweaking and updating the map to reflect changes in audience engagement. Be open to the lessons in your data.

The audience journey is an incredibly powerful way to gain a clear-eyed view of channel complexity. The future will belong to marketers who embrace it.