Seven Steps to Align Your Content to Your Buyer Journey
Reach your audience with the right content at the right time.
If you’re trying to decide what type of content you need to create, you first need to determine who you are trying to reach and what the next action is you want your reader to take. That’s where mapping your content to your buyers’ journey can help.
What is a buyer journey?
According to Hubspot, a buyer journey is “the process buyers go through to become aware of, evaluate, and purchase a new product or service.”
There are many ways that you can name the buyer journey. Buyer journeys can either be:
a. internally focused (e.g., top, middle, or bottom of the funnel) where you focus on how the buyer interacts with your organization through to purchase
b. customer-focused (e.g., Awareness, Consideration, purchase) where the focus is based on the customer experience and their decision-making processes from identifying a need through to the purchase and beyond.
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.
No matter the buyer journey you decide to use, the vital step is to ensure that the content that you develop aligns with the right step in the journey, providing the information that your prospects need to find out about your offer and why they should choose you.
Why is this important?
The fact is that most people are well along the buyer journey before they choose to interact with someone on their path to purchase. What this means is that if they don’t know who you are and what you offer, you are unlikely to attract the right customers to your products or services once they’ve made the decision to purchase.
By aligning specific pieces of content with the three stages of the buyers’ journey, you can provide potential customers with the help and information they need, when they need it. This helps you to demonstrate your relevance to your prospects, reach more customers, and achieve a more significant impact with your content.
This is important as most people don’t want to talk to a salesperson during the time they are researching and considering their needs.
The seven-step process
Follow these steps to assess whether you are creating the right content in the right channels to engage your customers.
Step 1: Understand pain points and what is triggering the need.
It may seem logical, but this can prove to be quite tricky. 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 go to find answers to these questions.
Once you have 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 the types of content that fit that need.
You know the questions and the channels. Now it’s time to identify the types of content that your prospects are seeking at each part of the buyer cycle. As they look to identify possible ways to get their needs met (at the awareness phase), are they looking for general or contextual information? What are the details they need? Are they more likely to consume short blogs or whitepapers? What role do podcasts, vlogs, and webinars play?
If you can, speak to your prospects and find out what content they consumed and when to work through the content that will resonate with similar prospects. However, if you can’t speak to customers, a quick rule of thumb, you can start with is:
- Awareness: ebooks, whitepapers, blog posts, research reports
- Consideration: webinars, case studies
- Decision: comparison guides and reviews, testimonials, implementation guides
Step 4: Identify gaps in your 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 5: Look at ways to repurpose or atomize your existing content.
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? Repurposing content allows you to extend the return on investment for your content.
Step 6: Develop a plan to create new content.
Once you have a view of the content you have and the content you need to create, develop a content calendar to prioritize the development of this content. There are many calendars and planning tools that you can use, from online tools, to excel templates or PowerPoint calendars. The tool you use will depend on your requirements — if you need to collaborate with several people, something cloud-based may be preferable to an excel spreadsheet that could be difficult to mage versions.
Step 7: Test, measure, and refine.
Buyer journeys continuously 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. Look at the metrics you need to help you identify whether the content is effective. Again, there are many tools out there that can help you to access and make sense of the data. The level of sophistication you need will depend on your needs and budget.
By having a robust buyer journey in place, you can develop content that meets the needs of your customers. The buyer journey should be tested and reviewed regularly as buyer preferences and channels change, evolving as you learn more about your customers and their needs.
