Five steps to aligning your content to your buyer journey
Not all content is created equal. If you’re trying to decide what type of content you need to create, you first need to go back and decide who you are trying to reach and what the next action is you want the reader to take. That’s where mapping your content to your buyers' journey can help.
According to Hubspot, a buyer journey is “the process buyers go through to become aware of, evaluate, and purchase a new product or service.”
In its simplest form, buyer journeys include three stages — awareness, consideration and purchase. Different forms of content can be used across each stage to engage with buyers and influence their opinion as they progress through the purchase decision-making process.
The 5 step process
Follow these steps to assess whether you are creating the right content in the right channels to engage your customers.
Step 1: Make a list of your customers’ questions at each stage of the journey
It may seem logical, but this can prove to be quite difficult. If you are struggling to get inside the mind of your customers, consider interviewing some of your advocates.
Write down the questions that your customers would be asking (themselves or others), and the type of content that would be most influential. When they are considering a purchase, a product fact sheet with the specifications of your product or a testimonial from a happy customer is likely to be more influential than a blog post or whitepaper.
Step 2: Identify the channels that buyers would go to in order to find out the answers to these questions
Once you’ve got the questions and types of content, it’s then time to look at the channels that your customers use to find the answers. It’s no use putting an advertisement in a newspaper that your potential customers don’t read.
Step 3: Identify gaps in content or channel reach
Now you’re able to look at the content that you have and the channels that you use and identify if you have any gaps. This gives you a list of the content you should be working into your plan.
Step 4: Look at ways to repurpose or atomise your existing content and develop a plan to create new content to reach your audience
Just as importantly, look at the content that you already have and see if I can be reused or repurposed to fit within your buyer journey. Can a blog post become an infographic for a social post? Or use a whitepaper to create a webinar?
Step 5: Test, Measure and refine
Buyer journeys constantly change and evolve. You should test the different channels and types of content you develop to see what works to progress your prospective customers through the sales funnel.
