Tailoring Your Content For The Buyer's Journey - A Guide

It can be difficult to determine what kind of content you should use. Understanding and utilizing the buyer's journey can help you become more successful with if you incorporate it into your content strategy. 

An individual goes through a buyer's journey when discovering a problem they have, researching that problem, and ultimately purchasing a product to solve that problem. It consists of three stages: awareness, consideration, and decision. 

When you understand the buyer's journey, you can present the right type of content at the right time to potential buyers. An audit of all existing assets is the best way to apply the buyer's journey and start being strategic with your content. Your content assets - whether blog posts, case studies, web pages, videos, eBooks, or whatever else you have - need to be placed where they fit within the buyer's journey and be effective at moving prospects through your digital sales funnel. In this way, you can:

• Analyze your funnel for content gaps
• Place content where it belongs

The purpose of a content audit is to get a complete picture of your content, the performance of each piece, and the pieces you plan on running in the next few months. Good content takes a lot of work, but it pays off in the long run. Here’s how you can get started: 

• Auditing content for gaps

Compile a spreadsheet of all the content your organization has produced or plans to produce in the future. Among the columns you should include are its status (published or planned), type, title, stage of the buyer's journey it targets, the target persona and URL.

You will gain a great deal of insight into where content might be lacking just by filling out this sheet. As an example, you may notice that most of your content caters to the decision stage and that awareness is not a major focus. Or perhaps you've covered the awareness stage, but need more content for the consideration stage.

Planning for the future begins with identifying gaps. Make sure your content creation efforts address all of these gaps and ensure that the buyer's stage and persona combinations are well-covered.

• Setting content goals

Organizing your content to coincide with the buyer's journey allows you to draw visitors through your funnel more effectively by showing them the content they need to make a purchase. After determining where each piece of content fits in the buyer's journey, you need to determine whether those assets are really performing.

• Are you helping people define their problems with the content you create during the awareness stage?

• Are your consideration assets a good representation of the benefits of your solution?

• Is your offer convincing prospects that it's better than your competitors'?

You need to determine some measurable goals before you can answer these questions. The purpose of goals is to figure out whether your content is effective so that you can optimize it accordingly. Determine goals for each content piece based on both the buyer's stage and the content type. When you have identified the asset's goals, you can determine its effectiveness and begin to optimize it.

• Optimizing for the different phases of the journey

After you've positioned each asset on the buyer's journey and assigned it tangible goals, you can decide which metrics you want to track.

You should create another spreadsheet similar to the first, in which you list every piece of content you already have, as well as those you plan to create. For comparison purposes, a column should be set up for the title.

In addition to the goal of each piece, additional columns should include the number of views, time spent on a page per word count, bounce rate, source of traffic, conversion rate, and possibly more. Columns should only be added for metrics that apply to a given piece of content, and additional columns can be added as needed.

By tracking these metrics, you will be able to see how each piece contributes to its goal and where you can make improvements. It can be a bit tricky, and it requires practice. In the end, you'll come to understand how each stage of the buyer's journey differs and what content is most effective at moving prospects forward.

• Sales People and Content Creation

It is important to note that the sales people within your organization can’t be effective by simply distributing brand content into their social feeds. If they act like a pitching bullhorn, they will be just that to their prospective buyers and will be tuned out. 

Sales people must share and produce their own content that is not solely brand and product content. They need to curate and provide answers to questions that the buyer has during their research phase, without being seen as simply pitching. 

Most importantly, your sales people need to be human. Share about themselves. Be real. People connect with people, not content they aren’t interested in or brands they’ve never heard of. 

Conclusion

Filling the gaps in your content and optimizing assets according to their place in your digital sales funnel will help you develop a content ecosystem to suits your customer’s needs. Your content will always be there to help your prospects along their buyer's journey.

Empower your sales team to create and share additional content that helps your buyers, not just pushing brand content that will be off putting. .

So you will be able to help your prospects from start to finish. By strengthening this ecosystem, your conversion rate will improve. As a result, you will gain better insight into your buyer's journey and be able to create even better content. Content marketing allows marketers to fill their funnels sustainably, and this is how they are able to make it effective.