Where are my audiences?

Mapping digital customer journeys and understanding what role each one of your digital channels should play in this journey is key to being effective in really creating an impact in your target audiences.

One of the main misconceptions about customer journeys is that they are just for customers. In the current world, your organization has different audiences and seeks to achieve a wide range of goals with them. An example of this, is your media relations (journalists, editors, bloggers, etc) where you want to build a relationship, reputation and probably some kind of output (publication, referral, etc.). So if you think about it, this is the equivalent of a purchase. 


A few years ago, in my role in EY Colombia, I decided to create this CRM system for our journalist database with my PR agency. It was a very interesting experiment as it allowed us to track characteristics of their profile, but also which of our contents they were picking up to publish, and therefore understanding better their interests in the brand.

The same concept of customer journeys applies to audiences that include recruits, influencers, and for instance clients (which in my mind are two groups: prospects and current clients as their journey is different). Once you map their customer journey, and you understand what they're doing, thinking, and where they are, you can start producing relevant content.

The success of this relies of deeply understanding the audience, so research into audience behaviour helps significantly in the process. Many people think they know their audiences, but a lot of things can be urban myths about the audience. On the other hand, one of the most useful input is to analyze what you already have: data. If you go back a year in your web analytics, look deeper into what your most visited content was, which was the one people shared the most, what was the longest average time on page. This will give you lots of insights.

Finally, the last point is to match all this understanding of the audience with your business objectives. What do you want to achieve? There are many goals that range from awareness to sales. Understanding what are the stages, and mapping these to the customer journey, will help you create a holistic view of what your content strategy will look like. When you have all these elements together, you can start getting tactical. This will help you easily create a content calendar of what, where, when and how. The rest of success is execution, which is usually the hardest part in this. You also want to measure and learn as you go, as one of the magical things about digital is that you can always tweak, test, improve and analyze very quickly.