Customer Journey Mapping

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Week 59 | 

This is not a map of what your brand does. It’s a map of what your audience is thinking, feeling, doing and encountering in regards to your product or brand.

1 SKILL TO LEARN

A customer journey map is a visual roadmap of every step your audience takes with a brand, product or service, from first awareness through purchase. It’s written from the perspective of your customer, not your brand. They’re useful for identifying pain points and opportunities that can help you reach a specific goal.

That goal determines the altitude of your map. If you’re trying to improve the overall brand experience, map the customer’s entire relationship with the brand. If you’re trying to improve the launch or performance of a specific product, zoom in on the journey surrounding that. For a new product, that means understanding how people navigate the category today and identifying where your product could naturally enter the picture. Map only as much of the journey as you need to solve the problem at hand.

These maps tend to look different depending on who is making them. They can be incredibly intricate or fairly straightforward. Personally, I prefer simple. Fewer variables makes for a more powerful document; one that’s easier to understand, share and use. With that in mind, below are the ingredients needed for a customer journey map:

Goal: Your overarching brand or product goal that the customer journey map will support.

Audience: Who are you trying to connect with, at the highest-level. Ground yourself in any existing persona work. And if you don’t have an audience persona, this post can help you.

Phases: The major stages your customer moves through. Start with a marketing funnel, then rename the stages to reflect how people actually move through your category. For example, a hotel journey might be dreaming (awareness) → planning (consideration) → booking (conversion) → staying & returning (retention).

Job To Be Done: What your audience is trying to achieve at each stage.

Think: What’s going through their head. What are they wondering, considering, questioning or telling themselves at each stage? Ideally, write these almost like quotes; e.g.“Is this actually worth the money?”

Feel: How your audience feel at every stage of the marketing funnel. Dramatize it. Think of this in terms of peaks and valleys. Use research, speak to people you love, and/or consider how you’ve felt if you’ve ever been in this situation.

Do: The high-level action(s) your customer takes at each stage.

Touchpoints: The moments and places along the journey where your audience encounters your brand OR where your brand could meaningfully show up because what you offer is relevant or useful.

Prompt Strategy: Track your visibility in AI answers

 Track your visibility in AI answers

Smart marketers don’t treat one ChatGPT answer as a ranking report. They track patterns across the questions that influence customer decisions.

AEO measurement is less tidy than traditional search reporting. AI answers can change with the platform, wording, context, location and date.

That does not make measurement impossible. It means you need a consistent method.

Choose a fixed set of commercially relevant questions and track:

Whether your brand appears

How accurately it is described

Whether it is mentioned, compared or recommended

Which competitors appear

Which sources are cited

Which pages receive AI referral traffic

Repeat the exercise monthly under similar conditions. Look for movement across the full set instead of reacting to one answer.

Try this prompt:

Help me create a simple monthly AEO tracking system.

Brand: [BRAND]

Website: [URL]

Category: [CATEGORY]

Audience: [AUDIENCE]

Market: [LOCATION]

Important customer questions: [PASTE QUESTIONS, IF AVAILABLE]

Create:

1. A balanced set of 10 questions covering discovery, recommendations, comparisons and purchase decisions

2. A tracking table with fields for platform, date, brand visibility, description accuracy, recommendation context, competitors, cited sources and notes

3. A simple scoring method that does not pretend AI answers have fixed rankings

4. Instructions for running the review consistently each month

5. A short list of website analytics and customer attribution signals to review alongside the answer audit

Explain what each metric can tell me and what it cannot prove.

The first audit gives you a snapshot. Consistent tracking shows whether anything is actually changing.

 

Prompt Strategy - Side Gig

Here’s exactly how I would do it, step by step. ⤵️

Step 1️⃣: Open Claude or ChatGPT — both have free options.

Enter this prompt:

“Create an outline for a 10–15 page guide about [your topic] for [your audience]. Give me a chapter-by-chapter structure with a one-sentence summary of what each section should include.”

Within a few minutes, you’ll have the structure for your guide ready to go.

Step 2️⃣: Start writing.

Take each section from your outline and use this prompt:

“Write a short, conversational section about [subtopic]. Keep the language simple, include one real-world example, and keep it under 250 words.”

Work through your guide one section at a time.

Once it’s finished, go back and rewrite/edit everything so it actually sounds like you.

Step 3️⃣: Give your guide a name.

Use this prompt:

“Give me 10 name ideas for a guide about [topic] for [audience]. Give me a mix of descriptive and punchy options, and avoid clichés.”

Pick the one you like best and move on.

Step 4️⃣: Open Canva.

Search for “ebook template.”

Choose a template you like, paste in your content, customize the colors and design to fit your style, then export the finished guide as a PDF.

Step 5️⃣: Upload your product to Stan Store or Pensight.

Choose your price — for example, $28 — and then use this prompt:

“Write a 4-sentence sales description for a product called [name] for [audience] that teaches [outcome]. Make it conversational and trustworthy without sounding hype-y.”

Paste in your description...

And you’re live.

One evening.
One digital product.
The potential to make sales while you sleep.

Claude - Saving Tokens

https://www.instagram.com/reels/DapvbR2J8E5/

AI - Watermark Remover

 https://watermark.sabrina.dev/

Prompt Strategy - Ask Claude to build a presenation -

Video 

Patrick Winston taught “How to Speak” at MIT once a year for 40 years. Still the best hour ever recorded on presenting.

Here are 3 powerful prompts to build a deck people remember.

1. Open so they stay

ROLE: Presentation strategist trained in Patrick Winston’s MIT framework.

TASK: Write an opening that promises what they’ll be able to do by the end that they can’t now.

STEPS: Ask for my topic, audience and core idea. Draft an opening built on that promise. State it inside 60 seconds. Cut all housekeeping.

RULES: Never open with a joke, the room hasn’t settled yet. Never “today I’ll be talking about.”

OUTPUT: A 90 second opening plus why each choice is there.

2. Eliminate your slide crimes

ROLE: Visual communication editor applying Winston’s slide principles.

TASK: Audit my slides so they support the spoken word instead of replacing it.

STEPS: Review my slides. Flag the crimes: more than one idea per slide, text I’d read aloud, decoration, logos, missing titles. Rewrite each with one headline and one visual idea.

RULES: Slides are for their eyes, my voice is for their ears. One idea per slide. Every slide needs a title.

OUTPUT: Before and after per slide plus which slides to delete entirely.

3. Make your ideas unforgettable

ROLE: Memory and rhetoric expert using Winston’s symbol, slogan and surprise method.

TASK: Turn my 3 core ideas into something the audience repeats three days later.

STEPS: For each: an 8 word slogan, a visual anchor, one surprising contrast.

RULES: Nothing abstract. No jargon. If I can’t say it as a slogan I don’t know it well enough yet.

OUTPUT: 3 idea cards with Slogan, Symbol, Surprise and the big idea in one sentence.

Save this before your next deck. Number 2 is the one that hurts.

Messaging Hierarchies

 Link

1 SKILL TO LEARN

A messaging hierarchy is a single-page document that tells your Creative team the exact messages they need to focus on for a specific campaign. It’s not everything your campaign could say. It’s everything your campaign needs to say based on what your audience cares about.

The ingredients for a messaging hierarchy are straight-forward. However, writing them requires careful consideration. Every word carries weight—needing to support your strategy and speak to your target audience.

1. Brand / Product: What brand or product this hierarchy is for.

2. The Strategy: The single idea that your Creative team must bring to life.

3. The Messaging Pillars: The core pillars that support that strategic idea. The amount needed depends on your campaign, but fewer is better. If you are seeing overlap in them, push them apart more or fold them into one.

4. Key Messages: The single line summation of what needs to be said for each pillar.

5. Reasons to Believe (RTBs): Tangible proof points that ladder back to each pillar

6. Tone of Voice (TOV): How campaign communications need to sound

Paid subscribers can access a reverse-engineered campaign messaging hierarchy for GAP’s recent viral Hailey Bieber collaboration at the end of this post

One thing to note is that you don’t always need to make one. They are really only useful if a campaign has multiple messages it needs to communicate (e.g. product benefits, products, etc.). If it’s a straight-forward campaign with one message and straight-forward RTBs, then I’d just make that clear when you brief in your creative teams.

For example, when McDonald’s runs a value-menu campaign, the key message is simple: you can get a lot of food for cheap. That doesn’t warrant a full messaging hierarchy. You’d just make the message clear in your creative brief.

1 ACTION TO TAKE

Pull up that Creative Brief you’ve been working on and drop in a messaging hierarchy slide at the end. Use the questions below to help as you construct your hierarchy:

1. Does everything ladder back to the strategy?

2. Are the key messages something the audience cares about?

3. Are the RTBs hyper-specific and something the Creative team could easily write about?

4. Is it clear? Is it short? If it’s super wordy, where can it be cut?

As you work through your own Messaging Hierarchies, I'd love to help. If you'd like feedback, join my monthly paid subscriber Office Hours. I'm always happy to offer advice on messaging hierarchies (or any other work challenges you're facing).