Content Mapping: Strategize and Visualize Your Content

Content mapping is a process to create relevant, informative, and up-to-date content for your audience. Content mapping focuses on providing the content best suited to your audience in a timely fashion. Content mapping is useful for identifying gaps in your content strategy, and turning those gaps into opportunities. 

Content mapping typically involves creating personas of the different people in your intended audience, and their various needs from the content you deliver, and then providing a path to address their pain points or needs as they navigate through your documentation. Content mapping is accomplished through the interaction between several roles in your organization, ranging from content strategists and managers to the actual content creators and editors to the people responsible for delivering and promoting your content. 

When creating a content map, there is a typical set of steps you follow: 

1. Define the business goals that your content is meant to address: Who are you trying you help, what are their needs, and at what point of their content journey are they? Create a plan to answer these questions, and define the goals that you want to achieve. 
2. Research your audience: You can use actual customers to gather data, collect analytics or other user data to better understand the audience you want to target, and you can also research online sources such as social media and user forums. 
3. Create personas to represent the various segments of your target audience: Use data gathered from research to create a persona for each of the content users you want to target. Include demographic and professional details, as well as the users’ pain points that you want to address with your content. 
4. Create a plan: Generate a map or “story” to describe your content goals to address the persona's pain points. 
5. Create a map of your customer experience: Create a realistic path your customers might typically follow, and how they would interact with your content. Map out what content types are useful to them at what stage of their interaction with your documentation. 

Content mapping ensures that every item in your content inventory is used to its fullest, and serves a vital purpose in engaging your customers at various stages of their interaction with your content. It is an excellent method of keeping your content optimized for its intended purpose.