Content for every stage of the Buyer’s Journey

Nobody says to themselves, “Today I’m going to make a purchase.” Instead, they conduct research and make an evaluation before agreeing to meet with a salesperson.

The buyer’s journey describes the steps a customer takes when making a purchase. Since today’s consumers can do more research before making a purchase than ever before, it’s crucial to have a thorough understanding of your buyer persona and their journey before you can effectively help them and establish yourself as an industry authority through your content.

What exactly is the buyer’s journey?

Ultimately, every prospective customer goes through a series of steps known as the buyer’s journey before making a purchase. The three main phases that every buyer goes through before making a purchase are awareness, consideration, and decision.

What are the stages of the buyer’s journey?

There are three stages to this process:

  • Awareness –The buyer has come to the conclusion that there is a problem. They are interested in gaining further knowledge on the subject.
  • Consideration – The buyer is researching and evaluating different potential solutions to the issue that they are having.
  • Decision – A solution is acquired by the purchaser.

Nevertheless, developing the appropriate content at the appropriate time for the appropriate audience can be a difficult task.

The Importance of Tailoring Content to the Buyer’s Journey

To be successful in any area of marketing, it is essential to have a solid understanding of your target demographic, including how they think, the questions they look for answers to, and the approach they typically take to find a solution. Based on the findings of this research, you can start formulating a content strategy that will be documented and will map your content to the various stages of the buyer’s journey.

A divide will develop between your company and the people who might become its clients if you have an incomplete understanding of your target demographic. This typically indicates that you are publishing content that your readers can’t really relate to, which can result in you losing them as customers for your content marketing efforts.

You will need to consider the stage that they are currently at in their journey, how to meet them there, and the best channels to put the content in front of them in order to prevent this from happening. Through the use of content marketing, marketers (and salespeople) now have an easier time engaging customers at various stages of their journey than ever before thanks to the internet. One of the primary reasons why sixty percent of marketers believe that content is either “very important” or “extremely important” to their overall strategy is because of this very fact.

What you need to know about content creation for the buyer’s journey

The goal of learning about the customer’s process is to tailor content to their needs at various points along the way.

Here’s how to do it.

1. Create buyer personas

A buyer persona is a “fictional person” that you create to represent your typical client in order to better understand their needs and preferences. Having a clear idea of what it is that they want will make it much easier for you to produce the appropriate content.

Developing a buyer persona is not an intellectual exercise in and of itself. Sadly, a significant number of businesses approach it in this manner. They create personas based on their imagination, fill out a document, and then file it away in the depths of Google Drive, never to be viewed again.

Evidence from the real world needs to serve as the foundation for buyer personas. Therefore, rather than conjuring them up while sitting in a conference room, we need to take this discussion outside.

2. Match topics to each stage of the buyer’s journey

Let’s look at an example to better understand this step. Our buyer persona will be Billy Blogger, a popular blogging platform. Billy’s goal is to create a blog that brings in enough money to support him while he travels the world full-time.

Examine the data from your internal site search, discuss the issue with your customer service and sales teams, and so on. Find out what is stopping customers from clicking the “buy” button on your website so you can fix it. That is the kind of content that you have to produce.

3. Stage-by-stage content creation

It is time to begin developing content for each of the stages of the buyer’s journey now that you have the topics for those stages in hand.

It is highly likely that at each stage of the process, you will be required to develop unique forms of content. For instance, when a buyer is in the Awareness stage of the buying process, they are searching for information such as blog posts, videos, and so on. On the other hand, when buyers are in the Consideration stage, they are comparing, and as a result, they may look for category pages or comparison pages.

Analyzing the pages that currently rank highest in search results for the three components of search intent is the simplest way to determine the type of content you should produce for your website.

4. Make sure each piece of content has a call to action

When you’re still in the “Awareness stage,” it’s not helpful to try to sell your product right away in the content that you create. After all, the buyer has only recently recognized that there is a problem and is currently in the research phase.

Instead, you ought to include calls to action (also known as CTAs) that are suitable for the subsequent stage. (The answer is Consideration in this particular scenario.)

If someone is just starting out with SEO, for instance, we don’t want to send them to our pricing page; rather, we can point them in the direction of our suite of free tools. In this way, potential customers can become familiar with what it is that we do and how the tools that we offer function. Alternatively, we may suggest that they sign up for our newsletter in order to obtain additional information regarding search engine optimization (SEO).

If your content is geared toward the Consideration stage, you might want to include a link to your trial or collect potential customers’ contact information so that your sales team can get in touch with them later.

Formats of Content That Should Be Contemplated
1. Guides to compare products

During the consideration stage, the buyer persona is still thinking about potential solutions to the problems or pains they are experiencing. Product comparisons are an excellent way to assist customers in making decisions for this reason.

2. Case Study

A case study can be used during both the responsibility and decision combined with the organization by convincing the audience that the solution is effective by demonstrating that the provider accomplishes outcomes for their clients as a result of administering the solution. This can be accomplished by establishing that the provider accomplishes results for their clients by utilizing the solution.

A strong case study will make an emotional and logical appeal to the persona by presenting in-depth information and quantitative data on the outcome of the problem being investigated.

3. Free Sample

Free samples are another type of content or offer that can be an example of something that overlaps between the stages of the buyer’s journey. Consider the following: A person has decided to paint the interior of their house, but they are unsure what color to use.

They go to their local hardware store and pick up some paint chip cards to look at while they decide which color to go with (the solution). These cards are created by a provider using their own individual solution as the basis. When a person discovers a color that they adore, they are already familiar with the manufacturer of the product that color comes from.

Final Thoughts

The buyer’s journey is frequently depicted as a sequential series of stages, despite the fact that this is rarely how it actually occurs in practice.

Just consider how you act when in similar situations. When you purchase something, do you go through such a logically ordered series of steps? Unless it’s something you buy on the spur of the moment, probably not. You most likely move back and forth between each stage as you conduct research, go about your day, hesitate, test out various things, forget about it, conduct additional research, etc.

Take into account that this model is not perfect, despite the fact that it does ensure that you are creating content for each stage so that interested customers can discover you.

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