The power of content mapping for experience transformation

POV

23.01.24

Creating user journey maps can kickstart customer experience transformation. Adding messaging to your maps can embed that transformation into your culture, differentiate your brand and break down silos.

Jo-ann Fortune

Head of Content

Journey maps are designed to help you evaluate how well interactions with your brand meet user needs. Starting by defining key journey stages, you can layer audiences, touchpoints and what users do, say, and think onto each. Then from this skeleton, draw on channel insights to highlight experience gaps and focus investment.

But to truly step into your users’ shoes, you need to see your brand as they do.

Bringing each journey stage to life with examples of live content and marketing collateral gives you a reality check on exactly how your audiences are experiencing your brand, and where the disconnects with brand promise are.

For example: If you want the experience with your brand to be: ‘simple, personal and trusted’, yet feedback shows that users are ‘frustrated, confused and anxious’, you have some experience gaps to fill.

While it’s tempting to dive into channel audits to unpick the pain-points, doing so risks strengthening silos and missing opportunities for broader transformation.

Because audiences don’t experience your brand within a single channel.

Experiences are formed across multiple touchpoints, through interactions with content that conveys your brand offer and personality. Animating brand voice examples across these multi-channel journeys helps identify patterns and create consistently good experiences throughout.

Of course, brands are often organised by channel, and mapping exercises present a great opportunity to document experience owners, so you can design scalable fixes that work for all.

Now back to the example, how could we deliver on that promise to be 'simple, personal and trusted' through brand and employee experience fixes?

Simple, stress free

Brand insights

If your customers are dropping off at key points in their journey, review how many steps you’re asking them to take to complete an action. Are signposts and directions clear and consistent throughout? And is the language you’re using reflective of their mindset, particularly in emotionally-charged journeys?

Brand experience

Experience fixes here may look like simplifying journeys, for example in forms. Rewriting micro copy in labelling, headings and calls to actions. Revising the tone of your macro content to reassure users, and filling gaps in your frequently asked questions.

Employee experience

Documenting guidance on controlled vocabulary and tone of voice (with examples and ideally results to get buy in), can empower your employees to create consistent journeys.

Personal

Brand insight

Are you addressing your audiences directly? Is content personalised at different journey stages? And does your brand sound ‘human’, in a way that’s recognisable from competitors?

Brand experience

Review the tone and messaging of your brand voice, in both copy and editorial content, and how you’re amplifying tailored content to target specific audiences and journey stages.

Employee experience

Include guidance on how you want to address customers and talk about the brand and its people in your language resources. Create messaging matrices and a filterable content inventory so channel leads can select the right content for the right moments, to maximise your production investment.

Trusted

Brand insight

Are you utilising expert voices in your content, backing up your claims with the latest research and data and amplifying this when users are looking for guidance and reassurance?

Brand experience

Explore who could author your content and how you can demonstrate their expertise. Mark your content with bios and publish dates and cite references clearly. And amplify expert content when it’s needed – this may be at various stages of the journey, for example in both evaluation and post-purchase comms.

Employee experience

Consider setting up an editorial board to secure expert input and review. Update editorial guidelines on sourcing and take inventory of time-sensitive content, so you can work regular reviews and updates into production cycles.

Starting broad with brand allows you to break down big problems into their smallest parts. Your building blocks to create scalable solutions that transform multiple experiences.

User journey mapping? Don’t you, forget about brand…

Key takeaways

Considering multi-channel journeys helps identify patterns and create consistently good experiences throughout.

These mapping exercises also present a great opportunity to document experience owners, so you can design scalable fixes that work for all.

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