Stuck on deciding what content to create next? Wondering what type of content you should be creating for specific visitors? Don’t worry, these questions can be answered with some careful planning. In order to define our content strategy we must first look at our buyers journey.

What Is A Buyers Journey?

A buyers journey is just that. It’s a journey that a buyer goes on to purchase your product. The typical buyers journey is made up of 4 stages. For each one of these stages the visitors frame of mind is different. Therefore different types of content are needed to guide the visitor through these stages where, ultimately, they convert to a customer.

For example someone researching “how to grow spinach indoors” has a different mindset to someone searching “Hydrofarm’s Emily’s Garden setup guide”.

You wouldn’t drive customers who are in the initial stages of researching about growing vegetables indoors to a page that is trying to provide after sales support. Well, if you are trying to do that, chances are you probably aren’t converting many visitors.

In order to create an effective content marketing strategy we need to create content that each buying stage set of visitors can relate to.

This is a very crucial stage in your content marketing strategy and should never be skipped. In order to effectively drive leads and profit through your website you need a deep understanding of your customers.

Capture Data from the Business

Customer Services and Sales Teams are going to be your most effective sources of data. These teams deal directly with your customer and are likely to be the point of contact by which a customer will ask a question.

If you are a blogger or small business owner you might not have this type of setup. In which case, social media, forums, Q&A sites will be where you collect the questions that are being asked.

Looking in the right column of any Quora question with give you more related questions that you can look into.

This will help you better understand the challenges that your customers are facing. By understanding these questions we can start to understand the buyer journey in more detail.

With this information we can now start mapping these questions to the buyer journey.

Mapping Content to the Buyers Journey

After collecting the data you should hopefully have a list of questions from customers who are in various different stages of the buyers journey. By assigning these questions to the various buying stages we are creating topics on what to content we should be producing each stage.

What Types Of Content?

Single Grain touch on this in more detail, but as a general rule of thumb the type of content best suited to each stage in the funnel is as follows:

Awareness

• Landing pages
• Explainer videos

Research

• Infographics
• Checklists

Consideration

• How-to videos
• White papers
• e-books
• Webinars
• Testimonials

Buy

Retention strategies

• Email newsletters
• Coupons

By looking at our buyers journey we ensure we are creating content for exactly who needs it. This means you waste less resources creating content that isn’t needed and stand a better chance of connecting with your visitors.