Map Your Audience Before You Message Them: For The Best Conversions

The Model

The Audience Map is a strategic tool used to visualize and understand the various interactions an audience has with your brand across multiple touchpoints.

It’s an enhancement of Dave Grey’s Empathy Map Canvas. It factors all the sense and adds cognitive and emotional experiences, subconcious influences, environmental influences and dynamic user states to make more relevant in an increasingly digital world.

Sensory Experiences

• See: Observations made by the audience in their environment, such as market trends, competitor messaging, and visual elements associated with your product.
• Hear: Information received through social media, word of mouth, online reviews, discussions, competitors, and other external channels.
• Touch: Interaction and tactile experiences with your product or comparable items, focusing on texture, design, and functionality.
• Taste: Relevant primarily for the food and beverage sectors, this involves the flavor experiences offered by your product.
• Smell: Scents associated with your product or brand that can affect audience perception and recall. Ideal for perfumes, scents, food, etc.

Cognitive and Emotional Experiences

• Think: The audience’s logical evaluations of your product, including assessments, comparisons, and decision-making.
• Feel: Emotional reactions, both positive and negative, elicited by your product or similar offerings.
• Intuition: Instinctual feelings that may sway the audience’s decisions about your product.
• Memory: The influence of previous experiences with your product or others on current perceptions and actions.

Subconscious Influences

• Imagination: The creative and forward-thinking considerations of the audience regarding your product.
• Reasoning: The rational decision-making processes applied by the audience to your product.
• Mood and Emotion Fluctuations: Variations in mood and emotional states that could impact how your messaging is perceived.

Contextual and Environmental Influences

• Contextual Influences: The effect of the social and physical environment, including cultural trends and societal norms, on interactions with your messaging.
• Environmental Influences: The influence of the immediate physical surroundings on the audience’s engagement with your product or messaging.

Dynamic User States

• Real-Time Updates: A section dedicated to ongoing updates based on continuous audience feedback and market research.
• Digital Integration: The use of digital tools for collaborative updates, creating a dynamic document that adapts to the changing needs and perceptions of the audience.

Application in Marketing Messaging

To effectively use the Audience Experience Model in marketing messaging:

1. Gather Data: Collect comprehensive data through surveys, focus groups, social media listening, and direct customer feedback.
2. Analyze Insights: Examine the data to discern patterns, needs, and opportunities for connecting with your audience.
3. Tailor Messaging: Craft marketing messages that resonate on sensory, cognitive, and emotional levels, emphasizing benefits that meet the audience’s desires and alleviate their concerns.
4. Iterate and Evolve: Regularly refresh the model with new data and insights, fine-tuning your messaging strategy to remain relevant to the audience’s evolving preferences.

This method ensures that marketing communications are profoundly engaging, personalized, and effectively meet the audience at their point of need, thereby enhancing engagement and conversion rates.

Use Cases for the Audience Experience Map from Business

1. Product Development: Tailoring new products to meet the unmet needs and desires of the audience by understanding their sensory and emotional experiences.
2. Customer Service Improvement: Enhancing support services by identifying and addressing the emotional and cognitive pain points of customers.
3. Brand Strategy: Crafting a brand identity that resonates on a sensory and emotional level with the target audience, ensuring a deeper brand connection.
4. Market Entry Strategy: Understanding the unique sensory and cognitive landscape of a new market to tailor entry strategies effectively.
5. User Experience Design: Designing digital and physical interfaces that align with the audience’s intuitive and tactile expectations.
6. Content Marketing: Creating content that speaks directly to the audience’s interests, concerns, and emotional states, improving engagement.
7. Employee Training: Training customer-facing employees to recognize and respond to the emotional and cognitive states of customers.
8. Crisis Management: Preparing for potential negative sensory or emotional experiences associated with the brand and strategizing responses.
9. Innovation Strategy: Identifying gaps in the current market offerings by understanding the subconscious desires and needs of the audience.
10. Loyalty Programs: Designing loyalty programs that appeal to the emotional desires for recognition and rewards, and cognitive appreciation of value.

Solve the Problem Using this Model

Assume the brand is a skincare product that wishes to revive its fortunes in a plateauing market.

1. Sensory Experiences
   To determine this conduct surveys and focus groups to understand the visual, tactile, and olfactory expectations of environmentally conscious consumers regarding eco-friendly skincare products.
2. Cognitive and Emotional Experiences
   Use social listening tools to gauge the rational and emotional reactions of this audience towards existing eco-friendly skincare brands, identifying gaps and opportunities.
3. Subconscious Influences
   Analyze customer feedback and reviews to uncover subconscious desires, such as the need for sustainability to align with luxury.
4. Contextual and Environmental Influences
   Research the cultural and social trends influencing the perception of eco-friendliness in skincare, adapting messaging to fit these narratives.
5. Dynamic User States
   Implement real-time feedback mechanisms on digital platforms to continuously adapt the product and messaging based on evolving consumer insights.

Recipe: Prompt for this Model Using the RATS Framework

[Role]: As a Topic Expert + Strategic Thinker, you are adept at synthesizing complex data, empathizing deeply with diverse audiences, innovating within constraints, communicating insights compellingly, and driving actionable strategies.

[Avatar]: 25-45 year old moms in urban cities conscious about skin care.

[Topic]: A skincare brand has noticed a decline in engagement among its environmentally conscious segment, despite a positive initial reception. Market research indicates a 30% drop in repeat purchases and a significant shift in social media sentiment towards competitors.

[Task]: Solve the problem above using the Audience Experience Map, focusing on dissecting the audience’s journey, identifying disconnects in the brand’s sensory and emotional appeal, and devising a strategy to realign the brand with its audience’s core values and expectations.

Do this one section at a time, and ask my permission to proceed, before you start the next one.

[Structure]:
Sensory Experiences

• See: Observations made by the audience in their environment, such as market trends, competitor messaging, and visual elements associated with your product.
• Hear: Information received through social media, word of mouth, competitors, and other external channels.
• Touch: Interaction and tactile experiences with your product or comparable items, focusing on texture, design, and functionality.
• Taste: Relevant primarily for the food and beverage sectors, this involves the flavor experiences offered by your product.
• Smell: Scents associated with your product or brand that can affect audience perception and recall.

Cognitive and Emotional Experiences

• Think: The audience’s logical evaluations of your product, including assessments, comparisons, and decision-making.
• Feel: Emotional reactions, both positive and negative, elicited by your product or similar offerings.
• Intuition: Instinctual feelings that may sway the audience’s decisions about your product.
• Memory: The influence of previous experiences with your product or others on current perceptions and actions.

Subconscious Influences

• Imagination: The creative and forward-thinking considerations of the audience regarding your product.
• Reasoning: The rational decision-making processes applied by the audience to your product.
• Mood and Emotion Fluctuations: Variations in mood and emotional states that could impact how your messaging is perceived.

Contextual and Environmental Influences

• Contextual Influences: The effect of the social and physical environment, including cultural trends and societal norms, on interactions with your messaging.
• Environmental Influences: The influence of the immediate physical surroundings on the audience’s engagement with your product or messaging.

Dynamic User States

• Real-Time Updates: A section dedicated to ongoing updates based on continuous audience feedback and market research.
• Digital Integration: The use of digital tools for collaborative updates, creating a dynamic document that adapts to the changing needs and perceptions of the audience.

[Style & Tone]: Keep your analysis succinct, ensuring insights are delivered with clarity to engage stakeholders and encourage creative thinking.

AI Tools that you use

You can use any one of ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini Pro, or the free llama 3 LLM for trying out the techniques discussed on Phewture.

Or if you crave variety, then use Perplexity,ai [select Perplexity, or Claude Models], or Poe [select from multiple models such as Claude, GPT4, etc].

I personally prefer Perplexity.ai because it searches the web by default, cites sources, and because it uses Claude, the answers are more human.

ChatGPTs native output, without using special Styles and Tones, is over the top. I reckon that they will improve it and things will become better.

You can use ollama to run llama 3 Model and use MSTY as the interface for this llama 3. Ensure that you choose the small footprint models as these are very memory and GPU intensive programs.

Read this article on Phewture for how to install LLMs on your desktop.

Notes

1. To customize these prompts for your problem, just change the variables in the Avatar, Topic, and Task, as appropriate.
2. Expand the points in the Structure separately using 2-3 points at a time in the ChatBot if you feel that you need to do it.

Next Steps

1. To help you find your way around Phewture, I have put together a set of AI Recipes under Wayfinding. Do go through these and you’ll navigate like a pro through this stream of consciousness. 😄
2. The Learning Methods are exercises that I’d recommend if you wish to wrap your head around the possibilities of using AI Recipes at work, or for play.
3. Don’t forget to leave your comments below and share your joy with your friends on social media. Use the share icons below this post to gain some good karma.
4. Wish to train your in-house team on AI techniques and raise their productivity by 5X, and creativity by 10X?

   Pigtail Pundits offers AI-spurred training for teams. Do check out the Training Services.