How To Align Your Content Strategy With Your Customer’s Journey

Do you know the path your customers go through from the moment they are introduced to your product to the moment they actually make a purchase?

Did you know that you can optimize this journey with content?

In this post, we show the importance of content marketing in the customer journey.

What is the buyer’s journey?

The “buyer journey” is a business term for the process a customer goes through from the moment they are introduced to yours product to the point where they buy it.

Almost every aspect of your business can be optimized. This includes the marketing process involved in the customer journey.

You may have an attractive product, but your product page is a mess and doesn’t effectively communicate the usefulness of your product to your user.

Identifying each step in the customer journey can help you optimize its key aspects.

Together, these steps are known as a “customer journey map.”

What are customer journey maps?

A buyer’s journey map is a breakdown of every step involved in the buyer’s journey, from the moment a potential customer learns about your product to the moment they make a purchase.

Creating customer journey maps can help you identify what is and isn’t working for your business in terms of marketing.

By incorporating analytics and other data into your maps, you can really see what’s working and what’s not working for your business and even come up with additional steps to add to the customer journey.

You should create a customer journey map for each revenue stream you have for your business.

How to create a customer journey map

Here’s our three-step guide to creating a customer journey map:

1. Identify customer touch points. These are your sources of income that you generate from customer interactions.
2. Determine the end goal for each touchpoint.
3. Map each stage of each touchpoint.

Let’s discuss each one individually.

1. Identify customer touch points

Think about every source of revenue your business requires interacting with a customer.

For example, display ads aren’t a user touchpoint because your user doesn’t necessarily need to interact with them in order for you to generate revenue.

Here are the common customer touch points for which you should create customer journey maps:

• Products
• Service, including memberships and subscriptions
• Affiliate links
• Online courses
• Events

You can also consider sponsorships as a touchpoint since you can use the number of clicks you generate for the sponsor to negotiate more lucrative deals in the future.

Whatever touch points you have, identify them before moving on to the next step.

2. Determine the end goal for each touchpoint

This is an easy step. All you need to do is record the action you want users to take with each touchpoint:

• Product
  • The customer completes the purchase.
• Service
  • The customer requests an offer or consultation.
  • The buyer pays a deposit.
  • The user pays a fee for accessing the service.
• Affiliate link
  • The user clicks on the affiliate link.
  • The customer completes the purchase after clicking the affiliate link.
• Online course
  • The customer registers for the course.
  • The customer buys the course.
  • The user pays the subscription for the course.
• Events
  • The client registers for the event.
  • The customer buys a ticket for the event.
• Sponsorship
  • The user clicks on the sponsor’s link.
  • The customer buys the sponsor’s product.

Record the end goal for each touchpoint you’ve identified.

3. Draw each phase between the start and end of each touch point

The customer journey consists of three parts:

1. Awareness
2. Consideration
3. Buy

A buyer’s journey map includes each part of the process that guides customers through all three stages.

For a product, your buyer journey map can be as simple as this:

1. Advertising
   • Blog post.
   • Video on social networks.
   • Advertisements.
2. Product page
   • A page that customers can use to learn more about your product and buy it.
3. Shopping cart
   • A page that customers can use to edit their shopping carts for your store.
4. Order confirmation
   • The page your customer uses to order.
5. Confirmation of receipt
   • A digital receipt that your customer can download for their records.

You can add additional stages to your maps to improve conversions.

For example, instead of taking customers from an ad directly to a product page, you can take them to landing page instead of a lead magnet.

This gives you a chance to get their email address and nurture them before you ask them to buy.

You can also add a step after your customer completes their purchase.

For example, a few weeks after your customer completes a purchase, you can remind them to restock what they bought or suggest similar products.

Get really specific with the buyer’s journey and think about every page your customer visits before they make a purchase and every email they receive.

Write down each step in the order in which they usually appear.

Why you should include content marketing in your customer journey maps

If you have something to sell, you need a way to get the word out. That’s what marketing is all about.

In the digital age, we use content marketing to provide value in our niches and grow our audience.

We can then nurture that audience and promote our products to them.

But why is it content marketing so effective?

For starters, it allows you to attract more leads, which also allows you to get more conversions.

It also allows you to attract higher quality leads who have shown an increased level of interest in your niche or your products.

Finally, content marketing saves you money on customer acquisition by giving you the opportunity to grow an audience that is eager to support your business by purchasing products and using your affiliate links.

Think about these benefits as we cover the main point of this post in the next section.

How to align your content strategy with your buyer’s journey

By now you should have a few things written down:

• Any revenue stream that requires user interaction.
• The ultimate goal for every income stream.
• Customer journey map for each revenue stream.

Now is the time to learn how to align your content strategy with your user journey. You can do this by weaving content into the user journey map, as follows:

1. Identify the problems to target revenue streams.
2. Find solutions to these problems.
3. Create content that covers those solutions.
4. Create social media content that covers these same topics.
5. Use lead magnets to get leads from this content.
6. Nurture leads through your email list.
7. Add all these steps to your customer journey map.

Let’s start with step 1.

1. Identify the problem(s) each revenue stream targets

Write down the primary problem targeting each of your revenue streams.

If your product is a commodity or something that has no clear benefit to your customer, just say “customer wants”. This means it represents a product that your customer has no real purpose for other than what they want it for.

What you are doing here is determining the primary purpose of each of your income streams. Knowing this will make it easier for you to market it.

2. Brainstorm topic ideas that target each problem you identify

Write down possible solutions for each problem you identify.

Following, come up with content ideas who deal with these problems and provide these solutions.

You are not creating content at this time. He just comes up with ideas.

Research the problem your audience has and the solution you plan to offer if you need help coming up with ideas.

You can also research your competitors’ websites to see if they’ve covered the topic at all.

Make sure the ideas you have have keywords you can target.

3. Create blog posts for your best ideas

Turn your best content ideas into blog posts.

Write high-quality content that is as reader-friendly as it is SEO-friendly, and then publish it on your blog.

These posts are designed for the marketing phase. They are meant to attract customers so that you can capture them as potential customers.

4. Create social media content from the same ideas

You should also use these same content ideas create original content on social networks on all platforms used by your audience.

This will complicate your customer journey map since you can’t add opt-in forms to social media posts, but this content will give you an additional marketing resource for your product.

5. Create a main magnet for each blog post

You can go ahead and advertise your products directly in the blog posts you created earlier. You can even drive customers directly to your product page from those blog posts.

However, this may not lead to the desired results.

What you should do instead is create a lead magnet for each blog postthen market that lead magnet through an email signup form. This allows you to capture your reader as a lead and nurture them before they ask for a purchase.

Suitable lead magnets for the sales funnel include eBooks and email courses.

You can even create dedicated lead magnet landing pages, especially if you’ve also created social media posts and need to send your social media audience somewhere on your website.

6. Use email marketing to nurture leads

After capturing your lead, spend the next two to five emails nurturing them by sharing additional tips and insights into the solution you provided in your blog post or social media post.

Then ask customers to buy in the final email. You can send leads directly to your product page or send them to a landing page that contains links to your product page. Whatever you feel is best.

Some merchants offer deals in an attempt to increase conversions, such as a 10% discount that is only available for a limited time.

Other retailers send out their “buy now” emails and then wait to see if customers are willing to buy the product at full price ago offer a discount.

7. Add these steps to your customer journey map

Include each of these additional steps in your customer journey map and collect analytics for each.

This includes the number of visitors you receive to each individual blog post page, the number of likes and views you receive on social media, conversion rate for your email opt-in forms, the number of leads that click on your incentive emails, and finally, your conversion rate for the emails you use to promote your product.

This will allow you to optimize each additional step you add to your sales funnel.

Final thoughts

And that’s the end. Now you know how to align your content strategy with your user journey.

Start working through the above steps. Identify the problems each revenue stream is targeting, brainstorm topic ideas, and then create content based on them.