Create Better Content with the Conversation Map Method
A process + toolset to help you plan and prioritize content ideas that your users will actually love
Illustration by Meghana Design
How can brands create content that works? And what does it mean for content to “work” anyways?
As a content strategist, I’ve created a 4 step process that helps teams (or individuals) plan out their content in a user-centered way. It’s also really fun.
The Conversation Map Method is great for UX and product teams, marketing and editorial teams, and even solo-entrepreneurs who are trying to build a personal brand and need content to do it.
Conversation maps can help you:
Know what content to create at each stage of the user journey, so that users get what they need when they need it
Overcome customer objections in your sales process with conversational content that drives conversions
Plan and create content anywhere, allowing you to generate tons of content ideas that your users will actually care about.
Guide your content efforts on web projects, email campaigns, or multi-channel experiences. This is platform agnostic.
This guide will take you through my 4-part Conversation Map Method:
Step 1: Personas and Journey Maps
Step 2: Conversation Map
Step 3: Content Ideas
Step 4: Priority Matrix
You can do these steps solo, or do this as a workshop with your team. I love it as a workshop, where content stakeholders get together and visualize, plan, and prioritize content in a user-centered way.
Let’s get to it.
Step 1: Create Personas and User Journey Maps
The first thing you’ll need is a persona and a high-level user journey map. These will help get you clear on who your content is for, and their experience (journey) with your brand.
I won’t go too in-depth on personas or journey maps here, but we’ll cover the basics and I’ll link to further reading. If you’re already familiar with these things, skip to step 2.
For the purposes of creating a conversation map later, you will need to know:
The person taking the journey: in other words, a persona or customer avatar. You’ll often have more than one.
The phases of the journey: this will be project dependent, but you might have anywhere from 3–8 phases (or steps) in a journey map.
What users are doing and where: an action and a platform in each phase, for example “visits website” or “sees a Facebook ad.”
What users are thinking and feeling at every phase: for example, they might feel skeptical at first, but confident when they make a purchase.
Armed with all those insights, you’ll be able to create personas and a user journey map.
User journey maps will look different depending on your project, and vary in length and detail, but here’s an simple example:
The journey map visualizes what your customer is doing, thinking, and feeling as they go through a journey with your brand. Most often, that journey starts at “unaware of your brand,” and ends at “becomes a customer.”
Once I have a user journey map, I’d then break create a conversation map that can guide user-centered content creation at every phase of the journey.
Notes about personas and journey maps:
These should be based on research, not guesswork. If your personas or journey maps are based on guesswork, your content will also be guesswork. It might work, it might not, who knows.
Research activities could include: user interviews, stakeholder interviews, user surveys, field studies, usability tests, data analysis, competitive research, and more.
Resources to help you:
To create evidence-based user personas, check out How To Create Customer Personas (with Actual, Real-Life Data).
For a great guide to journey maps, read Journey Mapping 101.
For a help running user interviews, read The Writers Guide to User Interviews or my 6 Tips for Better User Interviews.
For a guide to content-focused competitive research, read How to Analyze Your Competitors’ Content Strategy.
To run lean usability testing, read this Remote Content User Testing: Step-by-Step Guide.
Step 2: Create a Conversation Map
As you can see, journey maps visualize what a user is experiencing—but don’t go into specific ideas of how a company can better support them. This is what a conversation map does, but focused on generating content ideas.
Basically, the conversation map is:
A list of customer questions, objections, or concerns at each phase
A list of helpful responses to each of those statements
The responses to those user statements can then become content. Again, this is platform and content-type agnostic, so those responses can become any type of content that makes the most sense.
Let’s look at the basic structure:
At the top of the conversation map, note which persona this is for. It might be one persona, or it could apply to all of them.
Note what phase of the journey they are in
List user statements and corresponding responses
You’ll then continue to do this for each phase in the user journey.
Examples of user statements and responses:
User statement: “I’m skeptical, I’ve never heard of this brand before.”
Response: “We work with leading brands you’ve heard of,” or “We have 1M users and counting” or “Here’s a testimonial from someone you know…”
User statement: “I’m not sure I want to pay for this yet.”
Response: “You can try us free for 7-day trial, no credit card required.”
User statement: “I don’t understand how this works…”
Response: “It works by…”
The idea is to imagine having a conversation with your customer at every stage. What would they ask or say to you? What would you say back?
Here’s another example of a conversation that is filled out already. This is for a fictional brand that is selling a photo-editing app. They have a free trial, but the app is $7 a month.
In this fictional example, we can see some of the questions, sales objections, and thoughts that a user would be having, and how the fictional brand can respond.
The next step will be taking the responses from your conversation map and turn them into user-centered content ideas.
Notes and tips about this step:
This process usually starts on a whiteboard, sketched our or using sticky notes on a wall. Don’t worry about digitizing until after you’ve got your ideas out.
Once you’ve got the ideas out, then you can then transfer your best work into a digitized version. For the examples in this post, I just used Google Slides, but you can also use Keynote, Sketch, or any other tool you like.
Step 3: Use Conversations Maps to Generate User-Centered Content Ideas
Now that you’ve got a series of user statements and responses, you can then use those responses as starting points for content pieces. Whether they become web pages, page sections, blogs, ads, emails, or even text notifications, they’ll be based on meeting real user needs.
You can generate ideas on a whiteboard, jotted down on paper, or in a spreadsheet. I like to use a spreadsheet as a place to generate ideas, but will often switch to a presentation to share the ideas I’ve prioritized.
This basic template has a column for each of the following:
Channel, which is where the content will be published or where it’ll live
Content type, or any content “specs” you want to specify
Content idea, a description of what you want the content to be like
You could also add a column for Calls-to-Action or anything else that makes sense for your project.
Step 4: Prioritize Content Ideas with a Priority Matrix
Finally, if you find yourself with tons of content ideas and are struggling with how to prioritize them, I love using a Priority Matrix. (I’ve added this step as “bonus” because it’s optional, but a great tool when you need it).
Just draw a four-quadrant map on a big whiteboard, with a vertical axis for “impact” and a horizontal axis for “effort.” Impact is about how much value it will offer your business and users, and effort is about how much time/money/resources it’ll take to produce the content. Look over your content ideas, and put them in the quadrant that makes the most sense.
High-impact, low-effort content ideas are things you should do ASAP. Those ideas are gold.
High-impact, high-effort content ideas are also great, but you’ll need to plan ahead to successfully accomplish these.
Low-impact, low-effort content ideas you can “back-log” for later, but don’t get distracted by them. These ideas are also ones you probably need to validate further before going ahead.
High-effort, low impact content ideas are ones you should probably toss. They’ll just distract you, and your time is better spent elsewhere.
Conversation Mapping Method: Process Review, Guidebook, & Templates
That was a lot of information, so let’s review the steps.
The 4 steps in my conversation mapping method are:
Start with evidence-based personas and user journey maps
Create a conversation map
Use the conversation map to generate content ideas
Prioritize your ideas with a Priority Matrix