HOW TO SIMPLIFY CONTENT MARKETING · 2017-04-05 · 2 HOW TO SIMPLIFY CONTENT MARKETING . Fast-Forward Your Content Marketing is a guidebook to help you: • Streamline the content

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HOW TO SIMPLIFY CONTENT MARKETING

Fast-Forward Your Content Marketing is a guidebook to help you:

• Streamline the content marketing process.

• Cut busywork to save time and money.

• Take 7 strategic steps to make your content marketing more successful.

Simplify content. Streamline marketing.

When your content is truly strategic, less does more. Focus on 7 crucial steps:

1. Develop your content marketing mission. It’s a compass for content.

2. Write a simple 1-page strategy for content marketing. Ditch the big binder.

3. Audit your content and your competitors’ so you can offer the best answers to customers’ questions on the Internet.

4. Research buyer personas to gain deep insights on what buyers need. Deliver it.

5. Overcome short attention spans. Hook your audience in 7 seconds with a Message Map.

6. Map content to the buyers’ journey. Deliver the content buyers need at each step.

7. Gather all-in analytics. Hypothesize on trends. Experiment to improve results.

How can you put these 7 steps into practice? That’s what this guidebook will teach you.

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HERE’S WHAT MARKETERS SAY ABOUT

FAST-FORWARD YOUR CONTENT MARKETING

7 Steps to Fast-Forward Your Content Marketing

This guidebook complements our content marketing workshops. Here’s what marketers in New York City and Houston said about our workshops:

“Great review of steps to develop my content marketing and the importance of each step.”

“This helped simplify a topic that can become very complicated and overwhelming.”

“As marketers seek to understand how to better connect with their consumers, the 7 steps to content marketing provide the simplified, attainable approach.”

“Putting content marketing into a context I can explain to my stakeholders has always been hard. Fast-Forward Your Content Marketing gave me great tools and insights on how to keep content relevant, scalable and pitchable.”

“Highly recommended.”

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STEP 1. CONTENT MISSION STATEMENT

Who needs a content marketing mission statement? You do.

To start pulling ahead of your competitors, write down your content marketing editorial mission statement.

More than 3 out of 4 marketers fly blind, without a written content marketing mission. Content Marketing Institute (CMI) research found that only 22% of B2B marketers and 23% of B2C marketers have written down their content marketing mission. Yikes!

A Written Content Marketing Mission Points the Way to Success

A mission statement is a compass that does several crucial jobs. It:

• Says what to put into your content marketing and what to leave out

• Helps you check the quality of content day to day

• Frees you to conduct a wide range of content experiments

• Keeps your content marketing on course, on mission.

With our free template, you can create your own content marketing mission statement in as little as one hour! To help you, here are tips and examples.

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To create a content marketing mission statement, focus on 3 crucial questions:

• Who is your core audience?

• What do you deliver that’s valuable?

• How you help your audience succeed?

1. Who is your core audience?

Look at the world through the eyes of your future customers. Map the process of a reader becoming a prospect, a prospect becoming a subscriber, a subscriber becoming a buyer, a buyer becoming a user.

What content do you offer that helps move people forward towards a purchase? First, gather together what you know today about readers of your content from analytics:

• Which topics gain the most attention in blogs, emails and videos?

• Which emails get the best open rates and click-throughs?

• Which web pages garner the most interest?

• Which topics incite interaction such as likes, comments, subscribes?

• Which calls to action successfully create subscribers and customers?

Apply buyer persona research (see page 19) to find out:

• How do buyers recognize the need to make a change?

• What job are buyers trying to get done?

• What topics do buyers research online?

• What process do buyers use to research purchase options?

• Which obstacles do buyers encounter on the way to purchase?

• How do buyers overcome these obstacles and move forward?

• How do buyers reject the status quo and reach a buying decision?

2. What do you deliver that’s valuable?

To create valuable content, identify buyers’ real questions. Gather and inventory all the questions people ask.

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Analyze customers’ questions to see which topics, pain points, passions and concerns rise to the top. This work defines the topics to focus your content on.

“They ask. You answer.” Marcus Sheridan

Educate buyers to make them smarter. Provide buyers with resources and tools that help them decide quicker.

Two types of content are most used and shared, Andy Crestodina says. Research and strong opinions gain the most backlinks and social shares.

“What is the question that no one in your industry will answer? Answer it.” Andy Crestodina

Answer tough questions with long-form content such as white papers, which help professionals keep up with new developments in their fields. Your thought-provoking forecast of what’s to come in your customers’ industry over the next 3 to 5 years makes compelling content.

3. How do you help your audience succeed?

Help buyers address day-to-day professional challenges. Keep them up-to-date on what’s changing in their field or industry.

Don’t limit the idea of “success” to a company or person’s professional role. Create content that helps people succeed in their personal lives and careers, day by day.

Offer tips and advice to help them save time, save money and get ahead. For example, the LL Bean Oh, Ranger! Parkfinder app helps people find nearby parks.

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Offer content that inspires people. WestJet, a Canadian airline, offers video stories about Canadians who make a difference to others, including a YouTube video with more than 6.4 million views.

Here are three examples of content mission statements:

Digital Photography School has what you need to get your photography to the next level. From basic to advanced we offer daily tips, resources, tutorials that will help you get the most out your camera.

The Red Bulletin features breathtaking stories out of the World of Red Bull and its Playgrounds. Delivering the unexpected, the magazine honors those who don’t play by the rules, who push the limits, have a lust for life, swim against the current, who have a passion for adventure and are not afraid to walk courageous new paths.

Tellabs will be the best source of information on Optical LANs (local area networks), delivering useful information, thought-provoking insights, resources and relief. We show IT buyers how to: address technology and business challenges; identify industry, technology and user trends; reduce expenses; and improve user experiences.

Follow this formula to create your own content mission statement:

Source will provide the best information, inspiration and/or relief for target audience about topic(s) to help them achieve their goal.

Now, fill in the blanks:

________________________________ will provide the best ________________________________ for ________________________________ about ________________________________ to help them ________________________________.

Here’s a free template for your content marketing mission statement.

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Yes, your content has permission to be fun.

Tellabs’ mission statement includes “relief” to reflect the fact that the company published cartoons from The New Yorker in its customer magazine.

Cisco’s Tim Washer helps companies lighten up their content. Getting a laugh brings customers closer and helps build the relationship.

A content mission statement can be very simple or very specific. At a minimum, it must answer all the big questions.

If your company has many brands, develop an overall, umbrella content marketing mission for the company first.

Then create more granular content marketing mission statements for each brand. Make sure the individual brands’ content missions align with the company’s content mission.

You don’t need to achieve uniformity. But you do need to reflect consistency among your house of brands.

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STEP 2. CONTENT MARKETING STRATEGY

Simplify your strategy with a one-page plan.

“A written content strategy makes you 4 times more effective.” Joe Pulizzi

Research shows that a written content marketing strategy improves content results. Yet today, only two out of five marketers have a written strategy, according to CMI research.

Written Content Marketing Strategy

If you lack a written strategy, a one-page strategy is a great place to start. If you have a big fat binder of content strategy but struggle to gain traction, make it easier. Boil it down to one page.

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A one-page strategy helps you:

• Crystalize your content marketing strategy.

• Gain stronger buy-in more quickly from executives or clients.

• Keep content producers strategically aligned.

How to get started: To create a content marketing strategy on one page, first focus on what your organization needs to accomplish in the next year. How to find this information depends on your company. You can engage C-level executives, or research internal and external documents (including the marketing plan), to identify the:

• Company’s growth strategy

• Revenue growth targets (as a percent or dollar figure over last year)

• Profit targets (as a percent or earnings per share over last year)

• How growth will be achieved (e.g., new product launch, add-on sales to existing customers, new markets, acquisitions, new customers, increase in market share).

Marketing managers are often unaware of precise business objectives. Considering how crucial these inputs are to marketing, that’s surprising. Business-level elements appear in your one-page strategy as:

1. Objectives: What qualitative results must the company accomplish this year?

2. Goals: How will progress toward objectives be measured quantitatively?

Next, work with mid-level marketing, sales, and product leaders to sketch a content marketing plan. How will content marketing help the company achieve its goals? You may find some ideas that content marketing can support, and others that it can’t. What content marketing can support will appear in your plan as:

3. Strategies: What will the content marketing function deliver qualitatively during the next year? (e.g., introduce a new product, increase awareness, dramatize differentiation, create a better customer experience, offer social proof)

4. Metrics: How will marketing measure the achievement of content marketing strategies? (e.g., increase awareness by a certain percent, deliver specified number of marketing-qualified leads to sales, contribute a certain dollar amount to the sales pipeline from qualified leads, produce a certain amount of revenue)

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Don’t shy away from revenue goals. It’s bracing to have quantified goals to meet. Quotas bring a clear finish line and apparent value to all content marketing activities. Measure the sales pipeline, customers won, and revenue generated. These are the metrics your executives really care about.

Take it to the executives. Now that you’ve completed the first four parts of the strategy, present the draft to the executives and middle managers. Walk through the plan step by step and discuss it immediately, face to face. Be open to questions and input. Be succinct. Be wise – narrow the scope of discussion to avoid misunderstandings or setbacks. The results of their input will help you sharpen the plan, but you still must keep it to one page.

Through these exchanges, you’ll often see that that executives care most about the financial results. As one CEO put it, “When you come into my office, I see either a penny of expense or a penny of profit on your forehead.” They want to know:

• Content marketing costs

• Revenue planned to be generated and by what date

• Profit produced based on company or product margins

• Targeted return on investment (ROI) for content marketing.

Work toward a straightforward understanding with your executives – a simple and scalable marketing model. For instance, I reached this understanding with a CFO: For every $3 in revenue generated by marketing, the company would spend an additional $1 on marketing. The more revenue generated by marketing, the more budget to spend.

Align content creators. Pin the agreed-on one-page strategy on the wall above your computer screen. Encourage your team to do the same. Use the strategy as a litmus test for ideas. Let it simplify decision-making about which content goes forward.

As you well know, agencies, freelancers, reporters, writers, digital, and social experts need to work from the same strategy. When it’s only one page, they’re far likelier to use it day to day than they would a multi-page document or 3-inch binder.

The following example of a one-page content marketing strategy fits on one side of standard-sized paper. If you need more space, use bigger paper. The important

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thing is to keep your strategy on a single page that can be easily shared. That’s how to maximize its impact and usefulness with executives and content creators.

Example: Content Marketing One-Page Strategy

Objectives

1. Increase revenue from product X over the next 12 months.

2. Position this disruptive new product as a viable alternative to (competitor’s product).

Goals

1. Increase revenue by X% to X% in 2017.

2. Build buyer awareness to XX%.

Strategy

1. Become the best source of information on (customer problem or product category).

2. Deliver useful information and thought-provoking insights.

3. Educate buyers on:

• How to address key technology and business challenges

• How to generate revenue, reduce expenses, and improve user experiences.

Metrics

1. Increase website traffic +XX% year over year.

2. Convert XX% of website users. (You may track soft conversions and/or hard conversions.)

3. Add to the sales pipeline XXXX marketing-qualified leads per year, including $YY million in potential deals.

4. Generate revenue of $X million.

Who we serve: Capsule version of buyer personas

What’s in it for buyers? Ideas to further buyers’ careers and their companies’ success

Topics: List the topics buyers are seeking information about.

Calls-to-action

Soft: Watch a video. Read blog, magazine article, or white paper.

Hard: Enter demand funnel – read a gated white paper, sign up for a webinar, qualify at a trade show or event.

Here’s a free template for your one-page content marketing strategy.

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Use this guide to offer buyers the right sizes of content.

Serve up a mix of content lengths and media.

It’s like serving a meal to your guests – starting with hors d’oeuvres, then working up to the soup, salad and main course. When the hors d’oeuvres are great, buyers are much likelier to stick around for the main course.

Offer Content to Buyers in the Right Sizes

Adapt the one-page content marketing strategy template to suit your needs. Include the most relevant elements. Cover what you need to gain executive support and align content creators.

Always keep in mind that it must fit on a single page or its purpose will be diminished.

Use the same one-page template to strategize about each marketing component:

• Blogs

• Website

• Social media

• Trade shows and events

• Demos

• Videos and presentations

• Infographics

• News media relations

• Customer magazines.

With a complete set of one-page strategies, it’s easier to keep all your content marketing flowing. In a world where average people have an 8-second attention span, one-page strategies can work wonders to win and hold your executives’ attention.

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STEP 3. COMPETITIVE CONTENT AUDIT

Learn exactly how to beat your competitors with a competitive content audit. In crowded, competitive markets, take the time to do a thorough audit of all the content from you and your main competitors.

Competitive Shares of Findable Content

In a comparison of 7 brands’ shares of content, all brands except Brands C and D are playing catch-up.

A competitive content audit scans the content universe as seen through buyers’ eyes. It encompasses your content, content from relevant competitors, and content from third-party influencers.

With a competitive content audit, you gain clarity on what information is available to buyers, which content is most relevant and resonant, which content is shared most often, and which brand does the best job with each type of content.

Brand A11%

Brand B9%

Brand C28%

Brand D36%

Brand E11%

Brand F4%

Brand G1%

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Since most marketers lack the staff time to tackle a competitive content audit in-house, it’s typically farmed out to a consultant. Avoid assigning a content audit to a marketing team or agency that would be put in the awkward position of grading their own report cards.

Focus the competitive content audit on finding ways to outsmart competitors.

A comprehensive competitive content audit includes these elements:

Search behaviors and trends

• Which search terms customers use

• Whether content is well-aligned to search

• What’s trending up and down

• Who’s winning the lion’s share of page-one Google searches

• How search performance varies by geography (state or country).

Brand websites

• Which content is working

• Which is not working

• Which ideas are worth copying and improving

• Which content should go into the trashcan

• How each website creates a path to purchase with minimal friction.

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Brand Website Competitive Analysis

Brand A Brand B Brand C Brand D Brand E

Comparison ☑ ☑

Customers ☑ ☑☑

Case Histories ☑ ☑☑

Distributors ☑ ☑

Value Props ☑

Tools ☑ ☑☑ ☑ ☑ ☑

Training ☑ ☑ ☑

Trade Shows ☑ ☑ ☑ ☑

Warranty ☑ ☑ ☑ ☑☑

News ☑ ☑ ☑☑

Apps ☑ ☑ Not US

Here’s how website content compared among 5 competing brands. Audits often reveal the gaps in information that buyers need.

News coverage

• Which companies and products have the greatest share of voice

• Which reporters, reviewers and bloggers are the most influential

• How to improve positive news coverage and share of voice.

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Social media

• Which kinds of content each competitor offers through mainstream and specialized social media

• Which content gains the most attention, interaction and sharing

• How much content is generated by users and influencers

• Whether social media connects smoothly to the path to purchase

• Which interactions are most valuable

• Which interactions are hurting a brand (for example, offering and then discontinuing customer service on Twitter, or handling haters poorly in public).

Social Media Competitive Analysis

Facebook Instagram Twitter YouTube Reddit

Brand A ☑ ☑ ☑ ☑ ☒

Brand B ☑ ☒ ☑ ☑ ☒

Brand C ☑ ☑ ☑ ☑ ☒

Brand D ☑ ☒ ☑ ☒ ☒

Brand E ☑ ☑ ☑ ☑ ☑

Brand F ☑ ☑ ☑ ☑ ☒

Brand G ☑ ☑ ☑ ☑ ☑

Here’s how 7 brands compared across social media.

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E-commerce stores

Examine products that compete on Amazon and other Internet shops to see:

• How well your products are positioned in each online marketplace

• How many stock keeping units (SKUs) are featured from each brand

• Whether unexpected competitors are showing up.

While the above elements are essential to a competitive content audit, brands may also consider additional elements. For example, brands may need a get a handle on face-to-face customer interactions. In that case, they may extend the audit to include customer experiences such as customer service, retail stores, trade shows and events.

Why outspend competitors? Outsmart them instead.

With a competitive content audit, you can answer the crucial questions that enable you to outsmart competitors:

• What are your competitors up to?

• What’s working and what’s not working?

• What are your content strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats?

• How can you outmaneuver competitors with your content going forward?

A competitive content audit brings you deep insights into your content as buyers see it. You’ll appreciate the buyer’s point of view, as the audit sheds light on what competitors do well and what they do poorly.

You can quickly take advantage of audit findings to strengthen your content marketing by closing gaps, exploiting opportunities, and building on strengths.

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STEP 4. BUYER PERSONAS

Insights into buyer personas can supercharge your content marketing. Buyer personas help you see content and the purchase process through the eyes of customers.

See Content Through Customers’ Eyes

Especially on carefully considered purchases, buyer personas make a critical difference. Always apply buyer personas to carefully considered purchases such as:

• A car, a house, a mortgage, a college education or a retirement plan

• Large B2B purchases that involve large teams and take months to decide, such as software, hardware, professional services and facilities.

Who are buyer personas for? “Every marketer who questions the wisdom of making stuff up,” says Adele Revella.

To gain deep buyer insights, identify 10 to 12 customers who’ve made buying decisions in the past 3 to 6 months. Interview them by phone or in person while their memories of the buying process are still fresh.

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Interview a mix of customers – those who bought from your company, who bought from competitors, or who stuck with the status quo and didn’t buy yet. Each will offer a different kind of insight.

Deep insights into buyers define the path forward for content marketing. Don’t try to fake it or take shortcuts with buyer persona research. Demographics, segmentation studies, and quantitative research can’t serve as a substitute for buyer persona research.

You can’t get buyer persona insights indirectly, from sales, distributors, or product developers. You’ll only get these insights from buyers.

Without buyer persona insights, you’re forced to fly blind, making stuff up based on second-hand information. That’s a road to failure.

When you interview buyers to create buyer personas, what you’re going after are insights like these from Adele Revella’s book, Buyer Personas.

1. Priority Initiatives: Gain a view into the genesis of buyers’ decisions to make a change. What were the triggering events and pain points? Who were the people that set buyers’ decision-making into motion? What pushed buyers to go beyond the status quo and set out on a buying journey?

2. Success Factors: See why buyers keep moving forward. What positive changes did buyers expect to gain? Or, which scenarios did buyers believe would change after the purchase? What would change in terms of practical outcomes, business outcomes and buyers’ personal aspirations?

3. Perceived Barriers: See the obstacles that buyers encounter – and must resolve. What prevented buyers from addressing the problem(s) sooner? Did certain people get in the way of change? Did previous negative experiences cause buyers to shy away? Were needed capabilities missing from the solutions that buyers considered?

4. Decision Criteria: Peer into the “what and how” of buying decisions. Which specific features or capabilities were most important to buyers during the buying journey? What exactly did buyers want to learn?

5. Buyer’s Journey: Observe the internal workings of teams behind buying decisions. Who has input, who’s the recommender and who’s the decision-

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maker? Who all was involved? What did buyers do to evaluate the options? What are the learning habits of various team members?

Buyer persona insights can make you the customer expert in your company. You’ll extend the authority of marketing inside your company with insights like these, so you:

• Become a strategic resource to the company, someone invited into strategic discussions of buyer behavior.

• Help set product strategies based on buyer insights.

• Build buyer personas for new products, avoiding unforeseen obstacles to successful product launches.

• Link specific features in product concepts to benefits that buyers expect, gaining buyers’ input before committing to product launches.

• Envision buyers’ needs years in advance, so you can help guide the company’s overall strategic planning.

“Content is more about brains than budget. Deep content makes your customers smarter.”

Ann Handley

With insightful buyer personas, you’ll understand:

• What problems are buyers trying to solve, exactly?

• What triggers their search for a solution?

• Which information do they need and where do they go to find it?

• Which obstacles do they have to overcome, and how?

• Who exactly is involved in the buying process – who provides input, who makes the recommendation, who renders the final decision?

Buyer personas reveal new ways to make your buyers smarter. The more generously you teach buyers, the more likely it is that you’ll attract the smart customers that you love working with. That’s the karma you get from great content.

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STEP 5. MESSAGE MAP

What is a Message Map?

It’s a handy simple communications tool to help you tell your business story even better. A Message Map simplifies, clarifies and amplifies your story by capturing it all on one page.

A Message Map also helps you avoid the #1 reason that people leave websites: the lack of a message.

Anatomy of a Message Map

A Message Map starts with 1 main message or “home base,” supported by 3 positive points. It boils your message down to 7 seconds, 23 words or less.

By design, a Message Map starts with one main message called your “home base.” Home base is the one point you emphasize in all your communications – the main thing you want people to know about your business: what’s in it for me? (WIIFM?)

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For example, to get quoted in news media, reporters need you to tell your story in short sound bites. Leading companies such as Intel and AT&T use Message Maps to tell their story in just 7 seconds or 23 words – the length of a news sound bite.

If you can’t tell your story that quick, reporters may not get it. Neither will many other people, since their attention spans are short.

Expand Your Message Gracefully

A Message Map helps you expand your story gracefully, like opening an accordion.

With a Message Map, your message fits the length and time constraints of any event or medium. Once you win audiences’ initial interest in 7 seconds, you can expand your story to 2 minutes, 5 minutes, 20 minutes or more.

To gain buy-in to your message from the top, co-create your Message Map with the executive team. It may take a facilitator to help you get all the executives onto the same page.

A Message Map that’s co-created with execs becomes your pre-approved message. Once it’s supported by the executives who created it together, it makes your job easier.

A pre-approved message saves you a tremendous amount of time. It speeds up business communications, enabling real-time news content. A Message Map:

• Frames the story for all your communications – digital, print and personal

• Helps you rapidly respond to questions from buyers, customers, employees, investors, news media, analysts and influencers

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• Enables you to get people interested in your business message by tying it into today’s news (known as newsjacking)

• Helps you stay on message by keeping your message to all audiences completely consistent, regardless of medium, audience or date.

A Message Map focuses on audiences by answering their #1 question: what’s in it for me (WIIFM)?

Everyone who hears about your business only wants to know what you can do for them. With a Message Map in front of you, you have a constant reminder of what audiences need to know – a ready answer to the question WIIFM?

Virgin Chicago Hotel Message Map

Here’s a basic Message Map for the Virgin Chicago Hotel.

To break through, focus on a single home base message. Multiple messages don’t have a chance with audiences because they’re just too confusing, says neuroscientist Dr. Carmen Simon.

It will take time and repetition for your audiences to learn, remember, and believe your

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home base message. You’ll need to repeat your message consistently, keeping it fresh with variations, many times before it truly sinks in with your audiences.

By applying the discipline to keep your home base message consistent, you can earn a special place in your audiences’ brains – called place cells. While other areas of the brain quickly run out of room for short-term memories, people’s place cells never run short of capacity.

Your Message Map needs to support its home base with 3 or 4 positive points. No more and no less.

Why? Three is a magic number, the minimum number of points to that lets humans recognize a pattern. Two points aren’t enough; they may be a sheer coincidence. More than four points can become clutter – too much for any audience to absorb.

In a fully fleshed-out Message Map, proof points support the positive points. Examples, anecdotes, facts and figures support the proof points. When they’re all together on a one-page Message Map, you’re in complete command of your story.

Here’s more on the anatomy of a Message Map.

When you capture your whole story on a Message Map, you create a single source of truth for the whole company. You get everyone speaking the same language, telling the same story, and staying on message.

Get Everyone on the Same Page with Your Message

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A Message Map puts you in control of your company’s story. It makes your story easier to tell. It addresses the questions on the minds of your customers, employees, investors and influencers. Most important, it helps you tell your story in a way that wins support from the people who have a stake in your business.

Once your Message Map is ready to go, share the same consistent message across all media. For maximum impact, make sure that the same consistent message appears on your website, social media, news releases, brochures, emails and in meetings, trade shows and events.

Your Message Map becomes a handy, useful communications tool for everyone who talks with customers, employees, investors and influencers.

After 20 years using Message Maps, here’s what one entrepreneur says.

“Message Maps have added to our success over the years. There’s no doubt in my mind… It’s just a fantastic tool. It’s your road map … You don’t get lost.

“Whether you’re doing a radio interview or TV interview or talking to your sales team or a newspaper writer, it’s like it’s your Cliff Notes. It’s there in front of me.

“The Message Map makes it so much easier for [employees]. They’ve all told me that. It gives them so much more confidence and ability and consistency.

“The consistency is so important because the same message that I’m delivering, everybody else is delivering. I think that that’s what employees like.

“We’re basically delivering the same story. That just makes it that much more powerful and consistent.”

– Ron Rubin

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Ron Rubin is a successful entrepreneur who has used Message Maps for 20 years in two businesses, The Republic of Tea and The Rubin Family of Wines. He’s among the pioneers who started using Message Maps in the early 1990s, working with Message Map co-creator Tripp Frohlichstein.

Here’s a case history about how The Republic of Tea and The Rubin Family of Wines use Message Maps.

Can your company tell its whole story on one page? And keep everyone on the same story? Yes, with a Message Map, you can keep people on message – even in a Fortune 50 company.

“When the products are the same, the better story wins.” Tim Riesterer

“Those who tell the stories, rule the world.” Hopi saying

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STEP 6. MAP CONTENT TO BUYERS’ JOURNEY

To succeed, content marketing must make a buyer’s path clear.

Buyers seek to answer specific questions and prefer different media types at each step in the buying journey.

Build a Clear Path for Buyers with Content

The buying process is like crossing a river on stepping stones. Buyers need a clear path to follow, all the way to a purchase, or they’ll hesitate to buy.

If the content that buyers need is missing, that’s a gap — a missing stepping stone — that forces them to turn back.

Closing the gaps leads to more customers and cash. Smart content marketers offer buyers the right content type throughout the buying journey.

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Here’s a video on How to Speed the Journey from Content to Cash.

Analyze your buyer’s journey by breaking it down into 4 steps. At each step, buyers are trying to answer specific questions, gain confirmation, and build confidence in the decision they’re about to make. So, content has different jobs to do at each step along the way.

In most companies, content is missing for 1 or 2 steps in the buyer’s journey. Pieces of missing content lead to lost sales.

Here’s how to cover all 4 steps in the buyer’s journey with appropriate content.

4 Steps in a Buyers’ Journey

1. Recognition 2. Evaluation 3. Resolution 4. Purchase

Buyers

Recognize Needs

Buyers

Evaluate Options

Buyers

Resolve Concerns

Buyers

Negotiate Contracts

Buyers ask

Problem? Serious? Need to change?

Buyers ask

Best service? Best product? Cheaper?

Buyers seek confirmation

From peers, experts, analysts, Google

Buyers

Finalize vendors Sign contract Arrange payment

Marketing

Helps buyers recognize problems

Marketing

Compares and differentiates

Marketing

Reduces risk through third parties

Marketing

Reinforces buyers’ decisions

Buyers take 4 separate steps during carefully considered purchases. Content has different jobs to do at each step in the journey.

Which media should you use at each step in the buying journey? Research on business-to-business (B2B) technology buyers by Eccolo Media sheds light on this question.

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While the findings below apply specifically to B2B tech buyers, you can learn about your buyers’ content usage through buyer persona research (page 19).

STEP 1

Blogs may launch the buyers’ journey. At this step, buyers prefer blogs (used by 37%) over infographics (27%), videos (26%) and white papers (26%). Regularly published blogs can generate thousands of followers, translating into one-fourth or more of your website traffic.

STEP 2

Buyers seek blogs, videos, white papers and more. In this step, buyers consult blogs (30%), videos (30%), white papers (30%) and case studies (29%) almost equally. When customers click on a white paper, they expect to find ways to address a specific problem, including an objective comparison of alternative approaches. They reject thinly veiled product information that pretends to be a white paper.

STEP 3

Buyers read case studies and detailed technology guides. Buyers seek third-party support via social proof, testimonials, and reviews from people like them. Bolster your credibility by including stories from customers and influencers such as trade media and industry analysts. During this step, buyers gravitate to case studies (32%), followed by detailed technology guides (30%), white papers (28%) and videos (27%).

STEP 4

As a sale closes, buyers use content less, but they still need it. Content marketing needs to reinforce buyers’ decisions. Offer infographics (22%) and detailed technology guides (22%).

Here’s an infographic on how to map content to a buyers’ journey.

After the sale, buyers continue to consume content. Even after the sale is closed, buyers expect content marketing to continue as the users’ journey begins. Almost 3 out of 4 buyers in large firms (72%) say it’s important or very important to receive ongoing content after their purchase — specifically white papers, case studies and technology guides.

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Content marketing following the sale builds stronger customer relationships, which can lead to future sales. A content marketer’s job is never done!

Surprisingly, most companies do not have content to fit the needs of buyers during all 4 steps in the buyers’ journey. One marketer that does offer content for the entire buyers’ journey is Service Experts in Plano, Texas.

Here’s a case study on Service Experts, which offers content for all 4 steps in the buyers’ journey.

“The old rules of marketing don’t apply; you hereby have permission to make up new ones.”

Anne Janzer

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STEP 7. ALL-IN ANALYTICS REVIEW

How can you be sure you’re getting business results? Review all your analytics regularly.

Due to organization structures, only a few companies gather analytics from separate marketing and PR functions to study them holistically.

It’s crucial to perform regular reviews of all the analytics your company tracks. All-in analytics reviews enable you to improve content marketing performance over time.

All-In Analytics Reviews Enable Better Hypotheses

As you analyze results of content marketing, it’s crucial to look holistically. View all the functions’ analytics together, rather than one silo at a time.

Gather monthly data on your website, email, public relations, social media, print and event performance. Ideally, you’ll want to capture at least two years of data. Show data in the form of a fever chart, so you can see long-terms trends clearly – rather than just looking at snapshots of recent results.

Why two years of data? With 24 months of data, trend lines become clearer, cleaner, and more pronounced. By looking at all the content metrics together, you’ll see interactions between media appear:

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• Did content peak seasonally?

• Did trade shows drive media coverage?

• Did news coverage drive web traffic?

• Did contests drive user-generated content?

In a long-term fever chart, peaks and valleys emerge naturally. Seasonality shows. So, 24 or more months of data give you the context to understand what’s going on.

Below is an example of analytics from a company that schedules content to peak during the Consumer Electronics Show (CES).

One Trade Show Drives This Company’s Content Schedule

Concentrating all its content around a single trade show enabled this brand to break out.

Assign a dedicated resource to regularly gather all your content metrics and build a monthly presentation. Share all the metrics regularly with all the people who create your content (including your staff, agencies and freelancers).

Numbers alone can’t tell the whole story. But all-in analytics can, because this approach breaks down functional siloes that create blind spots about content marketing performance.

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Instead of allowing each separate function to look at snapshots of its own results separately, round up all the results your content is getting companywide.

When your marketing team comes together for the all-in analytics presentation, ask them to develop hypotheses individually about what drove the metrics. Were peaks and valleys driven by:

• Topics?

• Timing – time of day, day of the week?

• Media type?

• News stories?

• Headlines?

• Formats?

• Seasonality?

• Competitive activity?

• New messaging?

• New products?

• Geographic markets?

Once your team develops a set of competing hypotheses about what’s behind the numbers, you can perform content experiments and tests to prove or disprove each hypothesis. For example, you can A/B test headlines, media types, timing, and much more.

That’s how all-in analytics enable you to fine-tune your content marketing over time, so that your content beats competitors more and more often.

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Crystal Clear Communications helps you fast-forward your content marketing

Consulting

Crystal Clear Communications is a marketing change agent that provides insightful content marketing to clients nationwide. Services include marketing strategy, competitive content audits, buyer persona research, Message Maps, and more.

Workshops

We conduct content marketing workshops for clients and for members of the Association of National Advertisers (ANA). We offer a full-day content marketing overview, and in-depth workshops on each topic covered in this guidebook.

Speaking

George Stenitzer is a highly-rated speaker at business and industry meetings. He helps businesses learn to become even more successful by seeing marketing and communications through the eyes of customers.

For weekly updates on content marketing, subscribe to our blog.

GEORGE STENITZER

Founder & Chief Content Officer

Crystal Clear Comms, LLC

[email protected]

+1-630-383-6047

@riverwordguy

linkedin.com/in/stenitzer

Fast-Forward Your Content Marketing® is a registered trademark of Crystal Clear Comms, LLC.

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