To convert your audience into customers, you must create content designed for people in the different stages of the buyer’s journey.
This post discusses the types of content you must create for each stage in your buyer’s journey and why.
To do this, we will use the simplified version of the before-and-after buyer’s journey. It is one of the many buyer journey models and consists of four stages.
The featured content types here should help you develop a marketing strategy geared towards attracting your prospects to your customer journey.
Awareness Stage
In this stage, your top-of-the-funnel audience is fully aware of their problems and wants to learn more information on how to solve them.
They also are not fully-informed to make a purchasing decision yet, which is why they’re conducting their online research.
Your goal, therefore, is to make them aware that your company exists and can help solve their issues. To do this, provide as much upfront value in your content for them.
Below are the content types that will help achieve these:
Informational intent blog posts
As the name suggests, you must create articles addressing the pain points of your buyer persona.
This type is not interested in presenting your company as a solution to their problem.
Its goal is to gain the trust of your audience and build brand awareness. You can achieve brand awareness by creating authoritative and easy-to-understand resource guides that people can find on search engines or social media.
Videos
Unlike blog content, videos help communicate ideas to your audience visually. Some people retain information better by watching videos than from reading.
Source: Brafton
Creating videos requires you to set up space at home or office and achieve high-quality production values in your recordings.
Nonetheless, videos are worth the effort and help complement the articles you publish on your blog. You can even repurpose your existing articles into videos and share your educational content with a broader audience.
Infographics
Like videos, information from infographics is much easier to process and retain due to its visual format.
You don’t need design experience to create beautiful and informative infographics to publish as part of your awareness stage. Tools like Canva and Crello allow you to choose from its wide array of infographic templates and edit it using its drag and drop builder.
However, it’s still best to have a professional graphic designer create a unique infographic that stands out from the crowd.
Interest Stage
In this stage, people are aware that your business exists and want to learn more information about it.
From here, you want to put your best foot forward without trying to be sales-y with your content. That means you don’t ask them to purchase your product just yet since they have yet to reach that stage of the funnel.
Below are content ideas that you can create in this stage to help bring them down further your sales funnel:
Navigational intent content
The purpose of content with a navigational intent is to help users find your site or web page.
For example, if people want to check out a specific pair of shoes from Nike, they’ll just search for it on Google instead of going to their site and browsing through its various pages.
In your case, assuming that your business is relatively new, most of your potential customers will search for your brand name.
Therefore, the perfect page that meets the requirements for navigational intent is your homepage. Here, you can include details about your brand, your best products, their features, latest blog posts, and others.
The goal is to show users what your brand is about and to get them to clamor for your brand even more.
Social proof
To show your audience how your business works, feature how your products and services have helped other people in their lives.
This could range from a short testimonial to a full-blown case study.
But before you create a case study, you must get the customer’s permission to be featured in one. From here, get quotes from them that you can include in the content to solidify your case.
The idea behind social proof is to convince people that your brand is the real deal. This tactic works exceptionally well if you get an influencer or a well-respected person in your industry to vouch for your business.
By building this type of content, you can drum up interest in your products and services, thus allowing people to move on to the next stage.
Desire Stage
This stage in the buyer’s journey is where people look for available options to help them fix their problems.
That means they’ll not only look into your company but also your competitors as well.
In this part, your brand is in the spotlight as you showcase how your business can get the job done for them. How you acquit yourself through the content you create here determines whether your prospects will go with you or not.
Below is the shortlist of types of content you should publish here:
Commercial intent blog posts
In the desire stage, your articles must now mention how your products can help improve their lives.
It’s similar to informational content because you’re sharing your expert insights about the topic. However, you want to put your business as part of the solution.
These articles have these words in their title:
- Best
- Affordable
- Top
- Comparison
For example, comparison articles pit your products and services against your competitors and list down their features, strengths, weaknesses, and others.
To make the comparison effective, you must prove that your brand is the better option than your competitors. It must also be truthful and not be embellished with false statements just to make your brand look better.
Webinars
These are similar to commercial articles but in video format. Here, you demonstrate your product in real-time, like how it works and makes things simpler for your audience.
Webinars also allow you to communicate with people live and answer their questions. You can then make a more concerted effort to erase their doubts and educate them about your products.
Setting up a webinar session involves lots of moving pieces. Aside from promoting it to increase attendees, it would help if you had all your bases covered to prevent technical difficulties.
Content upgrades
Also called gated content, these require people to sign up with their name or email address before downloading them.
Common examples are content upgrades are:
- Ebooks
- Templates
- Checklists
- Swipe files
These are comprehensive guides about a topic that goes a step beyond informational articles. Content upgrades should be good enough that you can sell and make money off them.
However, as part of your buyer’s journey, their goal is to get the personal information of potential buyers. If they’re willing to sign up for the content upgrade, they’re qualified to become your customers.
From here, you can use their details to send them emails that push them down the buying process.
Action Stage
People in this stage of your buyer’s journey are ready to go down the purchase process. They have the money and are interested enough to become buyers of your product.
However, they still need a little bit of push to finally commit to your brand.
To be clear, content in the action stage is not a sales pitch. It must make a compelling case for buyers to purchase a new product or service from you.
Therefore, below are content types you must create here:
Transactional intent content
For people to place their orders online, you need to create additional posts where they buy from your business.
This allows your posts to rank on search engines so potential buyers can search for them. As a result, you increase your ability to convert and make a sale.
This type has these words in their titles:
- Buy
- Coupons
- Discounts
- Shipping
If you issue discounts and coupons, publish a post that lists down the latest codes buyers can use to help them save up on their purchase.
Whitepapers
This content type is the most in-depth and authoritative of the rest. It usually serves as an advanced problem-solving guide promoting a specific method or process.
Ironically, whitepapers are not for promoting your brand. Instead, they are best used for thought leadership by displaying your expertise about a topic.
Creating these positions puts your brand on a level above the competition. As a result, it could indirectly lead to a more efficient sales process.
Need Help Developing Your Buyer’s Journey?
Understanding the buyer’s journey is a prerequisite to creating content that affects the bottom line. You can’t just publish any of the above at random and expect people to come in droves for your product.
And even if you have knowledgeable content marketers at the helm, you can’t expect them to do everything for you.
For problems like these, Romain Berg is the solution.
We make sure to roll out effective articles and content for every stage of your buyer’s journey. More importantly, our experienced and trained staff will do everything for you. All you need to do is focus on what you do best while we work behind the scenes.
To learn more about our digital marketing services, fill out our form, and we’ll get back to you soon.
