How to Create a Winning Content Strategy Aligned with Your Buyer's Journey This article details the importance of aligning content with the customer journey for long-term success, from top-of-the-funnel content that captures attention and builds awareness to bottom-of-the-funnel strategies that foster loyalty and drive conversions.

Understanding your buyer persona and their journey enables you to create content that helps them along that decision-making process while positioning your company as an authority in your space.

The buyer's journey comprises four stages: awareness, consideration, decision and action. Your content should be designed to meet the needs and interests of the persona at each of these stages. By offering relevant, useful content throughout the decision process, you can answer prospects' questions and increase your odds of turning them into purchasers.

Formulating a content strategy that gains the trust and wins the business of prospects involves these three steps:

1. Really understanding the top care and pain points of your target audiences
2. Creating content that specifically speaks to these needs
3. Keeping open dialog between the sales and marketing for up-to-date feedback on what your target audiences are lighting up about and any objections they may encounter

Related: What Is a Content Strategy and Why Do I Need It?

Where your content fits into each stage

Awareness:

During this stage, informative content like blogs, social media posts, infographics, free tools and templates that inform potential customers of solutions to their challenges should be used.

SEO is also extremely important here. Most search queries are informational searches, and informational content is key to improving the SEO performance of your entire website, including pages in subsequent stages of the buyer's journey. Leading practices to optimize for the Awareness stage include identifying informational or educational keywords and identifying landing pages with the highest traffic and content associated with these keywords.

Social media is equally vital. It allows businesses to raise awareness of their brand by engaging with customers and prospects, addressing their feedback and sharing insights into the company's values, mission, successes, team/company culture and day-to-day operations. All of this can help build a strong brand image that rises above the noise.

Measuring performance is important, and Google Analytics is a key tool for measuring the effectiveness of your efforts in the awareness stage. It enables you to gather and analyze data about how people interact with your website content. Metrics include which pages were visited, dwell time, traffic origin and actions taken on the site.

Google Analytics lets you perform several measurement tasks, such as setting goals and tracking conversions. You can set up a custom dashboard and reports, as well as segment your audience according to various criteria. You can also look at your performance across various channels over time.

Additionally, track likes, shares and comments on social media platforms to measure how well your content resonates with your audience.

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Consideration:

Content on your landing pages and search engine text should address your buyers' top concerns during the consideration phase. Prospects should be able to navigate your website and find information quickly. Buttons and links to your FAQ page, data sheets and assets can help them easily find what they need during the consideration process. Examples of effective content include:

• Comparison data sheets
• Free trials
• Video tutorials
• Market research/industry statistics/data

Measure performance, evaluate click-through rates, time spent on page and/or email open rates. As you move to the conversion stage, KPIs like conversion rate, cost per acquisition or sales revenue become more important.

Related: How to Create a Content Marketing Strategy

Conversion:

Double down on the product or service's unique selling points through demos, free trials, pricing information, testimonials, success stories and social proof. Customer content like testimonials, quotes and success stories plays a huge role at this stage. They provide credibility, foster trustworthiness and build customer loyalty.

Common pitfalls to avoid at this stage:

• Not developing your buyer personas and understanding your target audience's care-abouts
• Inconsistent communications, including social media posting
• Lack of meaningful engagement
• Overlooking the importance of data analytics

The final stage, Action, leads to purchase. Then comes the Post-Purchase stage – an often-overlooked aspect of the buyer's journey but one of the most crucial for establishing brand loyalty. Content should include anything that makes customers feel appreciated. This includes:

• Loyalty or rewards programs incentivized referrals and awards. Win/win PR (Public Relations) opportunities could continue to foster loyalty through targeted media coverage in a publication the customer wants to be featured in, joint award wins that highlight their innovation, and speaking opportunities to put key champions in the spotlight and make them look good!
• Email newsletters that provide value speaking to the direct needs of your customers.
• On the sales side, loyalty programs, discounts and giveaways are good post-purchase tactics.

There are pitfalls to avoid here, too. One is recommending inappropriate and/or irrelevant products and services as part of the cross-sell/up-sell motion; make sure you know your customer! Another is not recognizing customer loyalty at critical moments, like informing customers of loyalty opportunities or the status of expiration.

Related: 4 Reasons Why Content Is King

Align your content for the buying journey

Effective content strategies are crucial for guiding potential customers through the sales funnel in the digital age. From awareness to purchase and beyond, each phase has tailored content approaches. From top-of-the-funnel content that captures attention and builds awareness to bottom-of-the-funnel strategies that foster loyalty and drive conversions, your content should remain consistent and align with every stage.

Stay in close contact with the sales and marketing teams so that all involved in the content process understand what your target audiences want. Continue to message test and refresh to ensure your value proposition is clear, compelling and consistent with your messaging across the board. Measure success and pivot as needed so you can optimize your content strategy and transform prospects into customers.