Consumer Mapping Matters
Mapping the modern audience journey is a strategic process of visualizing how an audience interacts with a brand from initial contact to loyalty. It involves defining goals, creating audience personas, identifying all touchpoints, and mapping the stages and emotions at each step to uncover pain points and opportunities for improvement. The resulting visual map helps create better, more seamless experiences, drive loyalty, and inform marketing decisions.
This mapping process further helps lay out key touchpoints across the consumer lifecycle, showing what customers are doing, thinking, and feeling as they move from awareness to action, loyalty, or churn. As Braze notes in, “A guide to customer journey mapping,” the journey map also allows for deeper, more targeted planning. “It helps you zoom out and design how different flows, channels, and moments connect from the customer’s perspective, giving you a blueprint to spot friction, align teams, and drive smarter decisions,” notes Braze.
Mapping matters from the first click and onto the rest of the journey’s positive (the “Aha” moment) and negative experiences for the customer. Braze notes that mapping can also help develop several benefits:
- Identify friction fast. From clunky onboarding flows to confusing pricing pages, journey maps can help show where things might break—so you can take action before customers drop off.
- Create seamless, cross-channel experiences. Whether someone clicks an ad, opens your app, or contacts support, every interaction should feel connected. Mapping helps unify those touchpoints.
- Build with real human context. Journey maps should capture the emotional and practical drivers behind behavior to help you orchestrate the right journey.
- Unite teams around shared insight. Marketing, product, CX, CRM—everyone gets a clear view of what the customer is experiencing, and where to focus.
- Personalize with purpose. Knowing where someone is in their journey helps you serve resonant messaging, fueling smarter segmentation and message timing.
Braze further suggests that the journey map can help enhance the marketing funnel process, as both help understand the audience to varying degrees. “Customer journey mapping and lifecycle marketing work best together,” advises Braze. “While lifecycle marketing focuses on delivering the right message based on where someone is in their relationship with your brand, journey mapping reveals the full experience. By using both, brands can design smarter touchpoints, surface hidden friction, and make their lifecycle marketing feel more human.”
Optimizing the Customer Journey
During The Media Insights & Engagement Conference, Selena Hsu, Vice President, Marketplace & Portfolio Insights at The Walt Disney Company, will present the session, “Mapping the Modern Audience Journey.”
As the lines between platforms blur, so do the paths audiences take to discover, consume, and connect with content. Whether it’s social, streaming, or traditional TV, people aren’t choosing based on format—they’re choosing based on need, habit, and trust. This session explores how and why viewers engage across platforms, what drives their decisions, and how content strategies must evolve to meet them in the moments that matter. From discovery to delivery, we’ll unpack how today’s media landscape demands a more fluid, consumer-first approach.
Tracking from the First Click
Customer journey mapping can help determine where and why a customer is loyal and engaged, or why they are a declining customer, or perhaps worse yet, a lapsing and inactive customer. There are various mapping techniques depending on your goal and audience.
For media and entertainment, with the growth of the connected viewer trend, and audiences that move from platform to platform, using a touchpoint map may be the best option. These track the ways a customer interacts with your brand—across channels, teams, and moments. They’re useful for spotting gaps, repeated messaging, or inconsistent experiences, notes Braze.
Media brands, according to Braze, use journey mapping to track how audiences find, engage with, and return to content across platforms. It helps uncover where viewers stall—whether at paywalls, app logins, or underperforming recommendations—and where to introduce actions and nudges that drive continued consumption and loyalty.
Video: “Customer Journey Mapping Tutorial,” courtesy of SiteGround.com.
