How to Integrate Content Marketing Into the Buyer’s Journey

Content Marketing

Content creation and marketing can be useful for a variety of reasons. They help with SEO (search engine optimization) and generally provide value to your customers. 

If ill-managed, content is nothing but a distraction from your company’s purpose. But when used properly, content can speak to your potential customers through every stage of their buying process. This may even result in a completed sale and continued business. When developing your content strategy, make sure you have an adequate understanding of what the buyer’s journey is so you can direct appropriate content to your customers through each stage.

 

The Content Marketing Institute defines content marketing as “a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly defined audience — and ultimately, to drive profitable customer action.”

 

You must have a clear goal when creating content. The most basic steps of the buyer’s journey include discovery, consideration, and decision.

  • In the discovery stage, the potential buyer realizes they have a need and are searching for something that will fulfill that need. The brevity of this process depends on how important the need is. Your content goals for the discovery process should center around creating awareness for a specific need or problem and citing a sense of urgency. These people have a problem and need something to fix it immediately.
  • The consideration stage is where the potential buyer is weighing the pros and cons of several different options. It’s important that the content you tailor to your customers in this stage is helpful. They need solutions to their problem. Tailor content to your customers in this step by helping them identify solutions to their problem.
  • Lastly, in the decision stage of the process, they’ve identified a solution and are moving toward a purchase. At this point, you should have convinced your buyers that your solution to their problem is the best. With content marketing, you can either successfully guide potential buyers through the buying process or throw them completely off course. It all depends on the content itself and the strategy behind it.

 

To read more about content marketing and the buyer’s journey, click over to How to Align Content Marketing With the Buyer’s Journey via Entrepreneur.

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