Are you struggling to attract buyers for your brand? Do you have a great blog, but still, potential customers aren’t biting? If that sounds like you, it’s time to ditch the guessing game and adopt a buyer journey-based content strategy.
The buyer journey isn’t linear. It’s not a straight line from awareness to consideration to decision. And achieving a successful content marketing program requires the right content to be delivered at each specific stage.
The focus of a buyer journey-based content marketing strategy is to create an immersive experience that targets your customers directly at each of these three stages: awareness, consideration and decision.
Follow the tips below to understand and execute a buyer journey-based content strategy:
Know your end goal
To start, you need to have a clear goal in mind. Having a documented content strategy is vital to achieving your goals – up to 80% of successful content marketers say they know what they hope to achieve.
Keep your end goal SMART (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-Bound). Focus on a single, over-arching objective to guide your team through the content creation process and filter out unnecessary content.
Know your audience
Understanding the audience is essential to any marketing strategy. Creating accurate buyer personas will help identify target customers’ needs, issues, and values. Personalizing your content to each segment’s pain points and motivations will yield better results.
A well-crafted buyer persona should include basic demographic information, values, hobbies, interests, research habits, paths to purchase, and potential deterrents.
Know your product
Knowing the unique features of your product or brand and aligning them with the target audience will maximize your content marketing strategy’s potential. Take into account how your target audience values brands that take a stance on social issues like racial justice, LGBTQ+ rights, gender inequality, and climate change.
Collaborating with your team on a “features and benefits” list will also help to highlight aspects of your buyer persona that may have gone unnoticed.
Keyword research tips for connecting your product with your audience
Keyword mapping your buyer journey will help you to personalize your content for each stage effectively. The following lists outline keywords for each stage: awareness, consideration, and decision.
Awareness Keywords
Some common user queries in this stage might include the following words:
How to
Issue
Troubleshoot
Resolve
Improve
Prevent
Learn
Examples
How
Why
Guide
Tips
Ideas
Tutorial
Resource
How to
Consideration Keywords
Queries in this stage might include modifiers like:
Solution
Software
Providers
Service
Tools
Best
Top
Comparison
Pros and cons
Strengths and weaknesses
Benefits
Features
Risks
Reviews
Affordable
Cheap
Decision Keywords
Queries to try for this stage might include words like:
Purchase
Buy
Coupon
Pricing
Price
Shipping cost
Specific product and model numbers
Sale
Clearance
Near me
Know your resources
When you’ve accurately mapped each keyword for each stage, planning your content calendar becomes easier. Analysis of your audience’s demographics and interests should guide your content strategy, ensuring you reach your customer where they engage with content regularly, whether on social media or other channels.
To make things easier for your team, have a winning formula for your editorial calendar by creating content that targets each stage effectively. This process should involve sharing something on social media daily, blogging weekly, creating longer-form content monthly, adding a whitepaper quarterly and sharing substantial iterations annually.
Putting it all together: A content calendar for the buyer journey
Take a concerted effort to create content that targets each stage of your user’s journey consistently. This strategy should involve sharing different content formats tailored to different stages on different distribution channels regularly.
Content strategy is a long-term game, with the winning formula being grounded in analyzing, monitoring and tweaking your approach over time. By following the guidelines above, you’ll craft a balanced content strategy to attract and convert customers effectively.
We want to thank the thought leader Daryl Fanelli as the source for this content and such awesome teachings on the subject, and we hope that this article can help you and your business!
