Latest / Customer Journey with Fexingo: Touchpoints, Mapping, and Multi-Channel Marketing / When Your Customer Journey Map Misses the Share of Voice Gap
Transcript
- Lucas: You spend months mapping your customer journey. You've got the awareness phase — paid social, maybe a podcast ad. Consideration — your comparison page, a retargeting sequence. Decision — the checkout flow, the abandoned cart email. It looks complete on the wall. Luna: But it's a wall. And walls have blind spots. Lucas: Exactly. The biggest one I keep seeing is what I call the 'share of voice gap.' Most journey maps capture what the brand controls — owned and paid media. They completely miss the earned media moments where customers actually build trust. Luna: You mean like Reddit threads, YouTube reviews, forum discussions? Things the brand doesn't buy but the customer finds organically. Lucas: Right. And when you leave those out, you're designing a journey around a customer who doesn't exist. Let me give you a concrete example. I was working with a direct to consumer mattress brand — you know the type, beds in a box. They had a beautiful journey map. Awareness started with Instagram ads and a podcast sponsorship. Consideration was their side-by-side comparison tool. Decision was the 100-night trial pitch. Luna: Sounds thorough. What was missing? Lucas: They didn't map the moment a prospect types 'Is mattress worth it?' into Google. That search doesn't land on their site. It lands on Reddit threads, Wirecutter reviews, YouTube videos from sleep influencers. Those are credibility moments — and they're completely outside the brand's paid funnel. Luna: So their journey map assumed customers were comparing on their comparison page, when actually they were comparing on third-party sites they trust more. Lucas: Bingo. We did a share of voice analysis for that brand. Their paid media owned about 70 percent of the top of funnel search results for their brand name. But the organic results — the ones that actually drove consideration — were dominated by third-party content. Reddit had the highest click-through rate of any referral source for their product page. Luna: Higher than their own Instagram? Or the podcast? Lucas: Higher than everything except direct type-in. And direct type-in often comes from someone who already heard about the brand from a friend or a review. So essentially, the entire consideration phase of their journey map was built on a fiction. They thought customers were comparing on their site. Customers were comparing on Reddit. Luna: That's a massive blind spot. How do you even start mapping earned media touchpoints if you don't control them? Lucas: You start by listening. Use a social listening tool — Brandwatch, Sprout Social, even a simple Google Alerts setup — to identify every place your brand is mentioned organically. Then categorize those mentions by journey stage. A Reddit 'should I buy this' thread is consideration. A YouTube unboxing is awareness. A tweet comparing you to a competitor is decision. Luna: So you're building a parallel map of organic touchpoints that sits next to the paid and owned map. Lucas: Exactly. And then you overlay volume and sentiment. For that mattress brand, we found that negative reviews on Reddit had three times the engagement of positive ones — but they were also the ones that drove the most conversions to the site. Because people saw a critical review, read the comments, and then wanted to fact-check the brand's claims. Luna: So negative mentions can actually be a conversion driver if handled right. Lucas: If you know they exist and you respond. The brand started engaging in those threads — not selling, just answering questions. Their organic referral traffic from Reddit went up 40 percent in three months. That's a channel that didn't even appear on their original journey map. Luna: It's wild that a journey map designed to capture every touchpoint can miss something so influential. What's the fix for teams building a map from scratch? Lucas: Do a 'search audit' as part of your discovery phase. For each of your top five customer personas, Google what they would search at each stage. Don't use your own brand keywords — use problem statements. 'Best mattress for back pain.' 'Mattress warranty issues.' 'Is memory foam toxic?' See what comes up. That's your real journey. Luna: And then map those third-party sites as touchpoints, even though you don't own them. Lucas: Exactly. You can't control them, but you can influence them. And you can design your content strategy to appear in those places. Guest posts on authoritative review sites, partnerships with YouTube reviewers, even just having a strong FAQ that answers the questions people are asking on forums. Luna: So the map becomes a tool for content strategy, not just a visualization of your existing ads. Lucas: That's the shift. A journey map should reveal where you're not present, not just where you are. And the share of voice gap is the most common omission I see. It's easy to map what you spend money on. It's harder to map what people actually trust. Luna: If today's episode sparked something you've actually used — maybe a new way to think about your own journey map — we'd love it if you considered supporting the show. We keep it ad-free, and listener support is what makes that possible. There's a buy me a coffee link — it's buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo. No pressure, just if it was worth a coffee to you. Lucas: Yeah, we really appreciate that. And honestly, even just sharing an episode with a colleague helps. Back to the earned media gap — one more thing I want to mention. The brand I worked with also started creating content specifically for the organic search moment. They wrote a 'mattress buying guide' that answered the exact questions people were asking on Reddit. That guide now ranks number one for 'best mattress for side sleepers 2026,' and it's the top entry point for their entire funnel. Luna: So they turned a blind spot into their biggest organic acquisition channel. Lucas: Exactly. The journey map didn't just show them what they were missing — it showed them where to invest. That's the power of including earned media in your mapping. You stop optimizing for the journey you think you have and start optimizing for the journey your customers are actually on. Luna: And that's the difference between a map that decorates a wall and a map that drives growth. Lucas: Well said. Next time you look at your journey map, ask yourself: where is the share of voice gap? If you can't answer that, you're probably missing the most important touchpoints of all.