What does an audience journey map entail?

First published April 5, 2018, and updated April 2019.

Why Create an Audience Journey Map?

An audience journey map -- or user journey map or audience mapping -- is the path your audience takes from becoming aware of your company and brand all the way through to becoming a loyal client or customer.

The journey answers questions like: Where do they start? When and why do they take action?

An audience journey map helps you lead the visitor to the right places at the right time, and reveals opportunities to improve this path.

It's a great exercise to complete BEFORE any large website refresh, website writing update, or website re-design.

Benefits of User Journey Mapping

• Improved user experience
• Avoid missed opportunities
• Capture more hearts and minds (that is, email addresses)
• Discover content optimization and creation opportunities
• Place calls to action more appropriately
• Bring people back to your site and close the loop

The Seven Stages of Audience Mapping

The path usually involves these seven stages:

1. Discovery
2. Intrique
3. Explore and Question
4. Make a Decision
5. Act
6. Experience
7. Reflect and Share

The idea is that an ideal audience journey will start somewhere along this path, depending on what they know already and what their mindset is, then follow along until completion. If they leave mid-experience (which they probably will many times), they are tugged back through drip marketing or social media. Different brands may have a slightly different ideal audience journey.

First, Create Your Current Journey Map

Before you can create your ideal user path, you should take a look at what's happening now. Here's what typically happens in a real-world audience journey map:

1. Discovery
2. Intrique
3. Explore and Question
4. Make a Decision
5. Act
6. Experience
7. Reflect and Share

By "bounce out," I mean they leave your site or brand experience. You know they're bouncing because of site analytics and/or user experience testing. Or you might have done client or customer interviews. And you might be sad because they bounce before they gave their contact info, or because you don't have an ongoing relationship email campaign or strong social media strategy to lure them back.

Next, Modify the Audience Map to Be Ideal for Your Business (and Their Needs)

Start by analyzing all the "bounce outs," and try to determine why they are leaving. Is the website content not appropriate for that stage of their journey? Is the call to action not appropriate for their mindset -- or not available at all? Test different theories to see what works best.

Leverage Audience Interviews

Also, we've found that information gathered from audience interviews is immensely helpful for ideal audience journey mapping. Potential clients, past customers, current clients: invite them to share their thoughts of your brand and their personal experience with it. To get the most candid responses, someone outside your company should do the interviewing.

(We've done plenty -- ask us your questions!)

At this point, you'll be able to describe and draw out a user map that shows how people should experience your brand at different points in their buying journey. This will greatly inform the organization and type of content you create for your website experience.

Get Started with Pybop

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Let's talk about creating an Audience Journey Map for your team.