The Buyer Journey
You may understand your customer buying process, but do you understand the journey they take from awareness of the problem through to buying the solution? I can’t understate the importance of the Buyer Journey in your Inbound Marketing Strategy.
Why? Because understanding the buyer journey helps you to define what content the customer is likely to be looking for, and therefore it defines the content you need to create to capture the customer in a search engine.
We start off by defining a 3 step buyer journey, with the questions the buyer is trying to answer at each step:
Content Types
If you have the Buyer Persona and you know the buyer journey, then it’s useful to know what content is best at each stage in the buying cycle. Here’s an example of the type of content that works at the different stages in the buyer journey. Remember that video is the most effective way to engage with prospective clients.
Conversion
Built into the buyer journey and the content types is the concept of ‘Conversion’. We mean by this that we want to move visitors through a natural buying cycle, by offering them up content that moves them through their buying cycle. Here’s the over-arching philosophy behind conversion – the “Inbound Marketing” process:
The Content Calendar
A content calendar is the culmination of all these elements into a cohesive set of campaigns to move people from being strangers, who know little or nothing about you, to Customers, and delighted customers at that.
Here’s an example of a content calendar:
SMART goals
If you also set some SMART goals to measure how the content plan is working, then success will follow. Here’s an example:
SUMMARY
The idea behind this blog is to provide you with tools that can help you to build a powerful and effective content strategy, completely integrated with your buyer personas, the buyer journey and also some goals around it to measure success. At the heart of this process is the buyer persona, once you have that you’re well on the way.