5 min read
The content you create becomes far more effective when you can help meet the needs of the buyer. While one buyer might arrive on your site for the first time to learn more about you, another might know you well enough to consider making a purchase. These buyers are at different stages of the “buyer’s journey” and therefore have different marketing needs.
The path to a purchase is difficult to navigate if your different pieces of content aren't customized to meet the changing needs of each buyer persona. That’s why your goal is to create content that helps them along that path. Your content should not just establish you as an authority in your space, but also strategically carry the buyer further down the buyer's journey. Here’s why your content must meet the needs at every stage of a buyer’s journey.
The Stages of the Buyer’s Journey
There are three stages of the buyer’s journey:
1. Awareness Stage
This individual tends to fit your ideal client. However, they don’t know your products/brand or even think they need it. If your content isn’t properly targeted, you miss the opportunity to trigger that need.
2. Consideration Stage
At this stage, the individual knows their problem and needs a solution. They need more research to compare their options and find the right solution. Your content has to identify the problem and provide the solution as an industry expert who understands their pain points or this buyer will move on.
3. Decision Stage
Here the customer is considering you against your competition. You’ve caught their attention, but if you don’t show them why you’re the right brand, they won’t know your worth and move on.
When you understand these three personas, you can create the exact content they need from the top of the funnel or unaware stage to the bottom of the funnel when they make their purchase decision.
Understanding the Marketing Funnel
You’ve got to understand both the stages of the journey and the marketing funnel to help create your content strategy. Both elements of the sales process allow you to answer one simple question: How do you get this person to become a customer? You need to figure out how to do three things with your content:
- Attract strangers
- Engage prospects
- Delight customers
If you create content to perform these functions, you'll master the skill of creating the right content, for the right people, at the right time. However, that’s easier said than done. You need to create content to perform these functions and identify the channels to reach prospects at each stage of their customer journey.
Where to Attract, Engage, and Delight
So how do you know the best channels to attract, engage or delight? Here’s a good strategy to follow:
Attract
This is where the majority of your prospects are sitting right now. Your content needs to help them discover more about you so they see you can solve their pains/problems. This is the top-level educational stuff that triggers their radar to realize they need you. Right now, they’re low-value leads because it’s too early in the game to know you’ll get a sale. The challenge is without the right content here, you miss the opportunity to guide them to the consideration stage. You need to offer a solution and the best way to do this is:
- Blogging
- Search Engine Marketing
- Social Media Marketing
Engage
If they arrive at the middle of the funnel, you’ve done a good job at the attract and awareness stage. You’ve got their attention and they’re considering you as a potential solution to their problems. You’ve educated them, so now you’ve got to get into specifics to show them whether you’re the right fit or not. This means better quality leads and improved customer retention. Disappointment from a customer’s perspective just means you wasted time and energy with someone who really isn’t your ideal customer.
At the engage stage you’ll also get some people at the bottom of the funnel. So, your content needs to nudge them over the fence to your side where they’ll make their purchase. In both cases you need to nurture them and build trust using the following channels:
- Email Marketing
- Retargeting/Remarketing
- Social Media
- Sales outreach
- Personalization
Delight
We often overlook this very important stage of the journey. We see the three stages and once we grab them at the decision stage, we tend to forget about them once they’re a customer. But successful small businesses share something in common. They all know how to continue to market to existing customers to cultivate loyal relationships.
This is the only way to enjoy higher customer lifetime value and leverage their loyalty through free word-of-mouth referrals, testimonials, and user-generated content. The best thing about delighting customers is you can delight anyone at any stage of their journey. This just helps move them along faster. The channels to use here include:
- Email Marketing
- Retargeting/Remarketing
- Self-Service Channels Such as Knowledge Bases
- Live Chat and Chatbots for Service
- Loyalty Programs
How to Create Content for Each Stage of the Buyer’s Journey
Armed with the information above, you can become much better at creating content that suits your particular funnel. But it depends on what you sell, who your audience is, your business model, and of course how much a customer has to spend. For example, a B2C customer buying $50 clothing is not going to require the same level of time in the middle of the funnel at the consideration stage as a B2B customer whose spend is more like $10,000 on software.
Also, this also impacts your calls to action which are very important in getting people further down the funnel. A person buying clothing will be more likely to click on a link encouraging them to check out your sizing chart to get a better fit, while someone buying $10,000 software will want to watch a video demonstrating the software’s features or arrange for a demo. So, to customize content for each stage of the journey you need to:
- Understand your audience
- Develop your funnel around your industry and audience intent
- Create a documented content marketing strategy that maps custom content specific to each phase of their journey through the funnel
If you can master these three things, you stand a far better chance of hitting people where they live so to speak. This improves your odds of delighting your audience at each stage of their journey so you can increase your overall conversions.
If you are on the fence about all of this and need a little guidance, let us at StructureM set up a time with you to guide you through the process of developing a content plan based on your own custom growth goals. Click here to have one of our marketing experts speak with you!
