Step into Your Customers’ Shoes
A customer journey map does one thing: It turns your internal focus and puts the attention on how customers interact with your products, services and employees. 
Some call it “understanding the moments of truth,” others call it optimizing customer interactions.” No matter how you define a customer journey map, it is a process of pointing your marketing directly at the journey customers travel as they move toward and interact with your organization (or your competitors).
A journey map is a visual representation. A good journey map reveals every touchpoint and every experience your customers have with your organization over time, through channels and employee touchpoints. It is your customer story. The more you study your customer, the more you’ll find the journey is not linear. It is complex and has many stops and starts.
Plotting all your touchpoints along the customer landscape also allows you to benchmark against your brand promise. It’s a way to help build internal consensus on how each touchpoint builds brand and customer experience (or how people should be treated at each step). It’s the one place where all channels are identified and maximized for improved experience and communications.
The final stage of a journey map is an analysis tool and a way to carry out “what if” scenarios to help build your business for the future.
Mark Mathis
Mark wrote his first direct-mail fundraising letter in 1981 for the University of Iowa Center for Advancement. The effort raised a few million dollars in undiscovered wills and legacy gifts. From that day forward Mark discovered a love of the big idea that moves the needle.
After 12 years at KWWL, Mark became a business owner as a co-founder of ME&V — rebranded as AMPERAGE in 2015. After 25 years of leading creative teams in video production, graphic design, PR, writing and web development, Mark transitioned out of ownership in 2021. Today he serves in an employee role as special projects consultant.
He is creatively ambidextrous — son of an artist and engineer — and famous for distilling complex ideas down to a few words and a few visuals. Mark is a writer. When he found that many nonprofits struggled with complex branding puzzles, he wrote the book, “NonProfit-NonMarketing .” He also wrote a novel called “Reenactment.”
Mark is an active blogger OneMinuteMarketer® with nearly 1,000 readers each week on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter. One of his most popular YouTube videos is on “How to Look Good on Zoom.”
One of Mark’s fondest business memories was being named to INC 500 two times and attending the INC 500 conference with other winners. Mark is considered by some a Civil War expert (and that explains his novel). Mark also served as an adjunct professor in the business and in the communications departments at Wartburg College.
Mark is a graduate of the University of Iowa and is currently vice president of the University of Iowa Journalism and Mass Communications Advisory Board.
Mark is married to state Sen. Liz Mathis, and the two love to travel, even when it means being trapped by a volcano in the Czech Republic for three weeks.