Marketing maps chart the course to changing the behavior required to grow your business. They lay out: 1) whose behavior are we trying to change, 2) what behavior are we trying to change, 3) what belief is the barrier to the behavior we want, and 4) what are we going to use to change that belief, bust that barrier, and get the behavior we want.
Here are a few important keys to building powerful marketing maps:
1. Define your target audience as specific as possible and in a way that you could target in advertising. For example, a behavior is almost always easier to target on digital platforms than a belief. Instead of building a marketing map for “people who don’t like lemonade”, find out what those people typically drink instead. If it’s iced tea, it will be easier to target consumer who drink iced tea.
2. Try to be specific and single minded. Stick to one audience and one specific behavior. The more specific you can be, the stronger your marketing will be.
3. Build a lot of maps. Treat this process like ideation. The more ideas, the better.
4. Use research to determine the marketing map that has the most potential. This will be a combination of a) how big is the audience and b) how compelling is the barrier buster. Your research can be as simple as sharing them with friends, family, and colleagues to get their reactions or as sophisticated as a quantitative concept test.
5. Once you’ve narrowed it down to the map with the highest potential, execute against it. This may require some enhancements to your product/service. You marketing map should be given to your creative team to build your marketing campaign.
