Marketing and experience are connected
Marketing and experience teams are often seen as having separate goals:
- Marketing focuses on driving awareness, demand, and customer acquisition.
- Experience teams focus on delivering great service, building loyalty, and driving advocacy.
But in reality, these two areas are deeply connected — and they directly impact each other.
Read on to learn how marketing and customer experience are intertwined, what’s at stake when they’re disconnected, and how tools like journey mapping can help bring them together.
The relationship between marketing and customer experience
Marketing and experience often operate in silos, yet both share responsibility for elevating brand reputation and customer retention.
Marketing doesn’t just promote a product or service — it “sells” the experience people will have with your brand. Your messaging makes a promise that the experience must fulfill.
When marketing overpromises or the experience underdelivers, even the most compelling campaigns won’t drive long-term loyalty. Customers might convert once, but they’re less likely to return or recommend your brand.
Related: Learn more about how customer experience affects loyalty (and how to build a CX strategy that drives retention).
For marketers to create campaigns that resonate, they need to understand what customers actually go through. And for experience teams to meet consumer expectations, they need to understand the promises marketing is making.
Simply put, both teams do their best work when they work together.
The cost of misalignment
When marketing and experience are aligned, both become stronger.
Marketing improves the customer experience by delivering the right information at the right times and setting realistic expectations. On the flip side, a stronger, differentiated experience is easier to market.
But when marketing and experience are disconnected, there can be consequences:
- Wasted ad spend: Driving people to a broken or confusing experience drains resources.
- Churn: Customers who were hard-won may walk away after just one poor interaction.
- Bad reviews: People voice their opinions when brands fail to meet expectations.
- Lost trust: Broken promises erode trust and weaken brand perception.
To align these areas, close the gap between customer experience and marketing. How? Map the customer journey to diagnose any disconnects and fix them at the source.
How journey mapping bridges marketing and experience
When marketing and experience teams aren’t operating on the same page, it’s often because they’re working from assumptions instead of reality. That’s where journey mapping makes a difference.
A customer journey map reveals the full story of what people actually experience with your brand, including the emotional highs and lows.
Research shows people don’t judge their experience by the average of all touchpoints. They judge it by the most emotionally charged moments and how it ends.
Journey mapping helps marketing and experience teams pinpoint those moments that matter most to fix friction points and design campaigns that emotionally resonate.
Benefits of journey mapping for content marketing
A customer journey map in marketing gives your teams a shared blueprint to align strategy, experience, and content.
It gives marketing teams something they rarely get: a clear, outside-in view of what customers actually experience.
With this clarity, marketing teams can:
- Create messaging that aligns with the actual experience
- Spot unkept promises or unmet expectations that could damage trust
- Identify defining moments that shape loyalty and advocacy
- Tap into hidden differentiators that create a competitive edge
In industries where products and services feel interchangeable, experience can be your brand’s differentiator. Journey mapping helps marketers surface the small but meaningful details — like empathetic customer service or timely follow-up — that turn customers into advocates.
Journey mapping also helps marketers deliver the right content at the right stage of the marketing funnel.
When content marketing and the customer journey align, it creates a cohesive experience that deepens trust and fosters authentic customer loyalty.
The value that marketers bring to experience
Marketers are uniquely positioned to partner with experience leaders to improve the customer experience because they deeply understand what matters to customers.
Marketers bring:
- A consumer-centric mindset
- Expertise in messaging and storytelling
- Insight into friction points across the customer journey and marketing funnel
- Awareness of customer needs, doubts, and questions at every stage
Armed with journey mapping insights, marketers can spot gaps between promise and delivery, improve touchpoints, and strengthen the overall experience.
Need help aligning marketing and experience?
When your marketing and experience teams work in sync, you foster loyalty and stand out in the market.
Journey mapping is the bridge between the two. It gives teams a shared, data-driven view of the experience, its pain points, and how to make it better.
Our journey mapping sessions include your marketers, frontline employees, and even your customers. Learn how we help cross-functional teams work together to deliver experiences that live up to expectations.
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