Marketing Activation Plan (MAP)

Model a campaign customer journey using a MAP

A Marketing Activation Plan, or MAP for short, is a customer journey modelling methodology I developed to aid in the process measurement planning (e.g, identifying meaningful metrics, etc). It focuses on mapping out your campaign plan at a high level, and identifying key actions and outcomes that take place on each channel. This approach was inspired by the Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) approach.

What are the benefits?

You can create a MAP as part of your campaign planning and strategy process. The key benefits of creating a MAP include:

• Greater clarity - A MAP pushes you to model your marketing campaign in ways that help you achieve a birds-eye view of how everything fits together.

• Channel-level planning - With all the digital channels available to us today, marketers sometimes invest in creating content on channels that may serve little or no purpose. Creating a MAP will help you understand exactly what purpose each channel is serving, and where it's sending traffic to.

• Improved measurement - A MAP can help you identify more meaningful marketing metrics, as the process of building a MAP pushes you to think more clearly about the purpose of each channel in your campaign, the types of content / assets those channels will house (e.g. text, video, images) and when certain campaign objectives are met.

How does it work?

A MAP is built around a customer journey grid which includes 5 stages:

1. Awareness - This is the stage where a prospect becomes aware of your brand, product or service.

2. Interest - The stage where your prospects show interest in your brand, product or services (e.g. engaging with content.

3. Education - After showing intent, this is the stage where the prospect will begin to educate themselves about the bramd, product or service (e.g. comparting features, reading reviews, etc)

4. Decision - This is the stage where the prospects weighs their options and commits to making a purchase decision.

5. Conversion - Finally, after making a decision, at this stage the prospects converts to a customer.

Using a horizontal grid, from left to right, you will map out which actions that prospects will take across various channels and journey stages, using the following 4 symbols:

• Channels - These related to paid, owned and earned channels that you activate or leverage as part of a marketing campaign (e.g. Facebook, website, app, etc)

• Assets - Assets are the 'things' you create as part of your campaign, including creative assets, copy and content. You don't have to list out every single assets you may create. Rather, identify the key asset(s) that a user may engage with on any particular channel which serves to achieve your campaign objective. Examples of assets include a banner ad, a Facebook post, a blog or article, etc.

• Actions - These indicate the desired action you want a user to take after engaging with your channel and assets, such as reading, viewing, watching, or clicking.

• Outcomes - Finally, we have outcomes, which align to your core campaign objective(s). In some cases, you will have multiple business objectives (e.g. a primary objective to drive brand awareness with a secondary objective to drive sales leads), and this symbols allows you to identify at which stage of the journey each objective is met.