Few buyer journeys start and end with clicking a giant “buy now” button at the top of a homepage or product page. A great blog alone won’t be enough to turn subscribers into buyers if the benefits of what is being sold aren’t crystal clear. The average user spends most of their journey in the messy middle of the consideration stage, making it the trickiest stage to get right and often the most neglected. Follow the tips below to create and execute a symmetrical buyer journey-based content strategy.

Creating a Winning Content Strategy for Buyer Journeys

What makes a winning content strategy?

A successful content strategy relies on an honest assessment and comprehensive understanding of four interdependent components:

• Your end goal
• Your audience
• Your product
• Your resources

Your editorial and content calendars should combine these four components to guide users through all stages of their decision-making process.

Know Your End Goal

You might be writing into the void without knowing what you hope to achieve. Up to 80% of successful content marketers say they have a documented content strategy. You may have several goals, but setting a single overarching SMART goal linked to a specific buyer journey stage will pull your ideas together during the keyword research phase and prevent your team from writing in circles. Keep your smaller goals close at hand, though, because they will often ladder up to your larger goal.

Content marketing is one of the best investments your business can make because a successful content hub is a gift that keeps giving. Some content goals you might want to consider include:

• Increasing online visibility (awareness)
• Driving more organic traffic (awareness)
• Increasing engagement rate (consideration)
• Improving lead quality (consideration)
• Increasing conversion rate (decision)
• Generating more revenue (decision)

The goals outlined above are Specific, Measurable, and Attainable. How Realistic they are depends on your target result (i.e., the percent or number you’re using to define success) and your Timeline. Your timeline will vary based on your initiative (goals related to product launches and seasonal trends will have shorter timelines), but always remember that content marketing – especially SEO – is a long-term strategy, not a short-term sprint. Quarterly goals might be appropriate for paid advertising, but 6-12 months is a more realistic timeline for SEO.

Know Your Audience

The most important qualifier of your content’s popularity will always be your audience, which is why creating buyer personas is essential to any marketing strategy. A well-crafted buyer persona should include:

• Basic demographic information like profession, age range, location, and gender.
• Personal values and sociopolitical motivators.
• Hobbies, interests, and lifestyle choices.
• Research habits and preferred sources of information.
• Motivations and pain points.
• Paths to purchase and potential deterrents.

Basic demographic information can probably be gleaned from your sales data, but connecting all the puzzle pieces that make up your buyer personas will likely require additional research. Look for trends in customer survey answers, social media replies, industry forum discussions, and comments left on review aggregator websites. Resist the urge to use competitor data in this stage. Tools like Semrush or Ahrefs provide valuable insight into user search behavior but make it too easy to overlook the user needs your competitors aren’t meeting. Don’t assume your competitors have all the answers. You might notice some overlap between your target audience and your nearest rival’s, but your buyer personas should never be exact replicas of a competitor’s.

Know Your Product

Connecting the unique features of your brand, product or service to your audience’s unique challenges, goals, and values is the crux of a successful content marketing strategy. Theoretically, knowing your product should be the easiest part of the equation, but you’d be surprised how easy it is to leave an important stone or two unturned, such as how your product aligns with your audience’s values.

In a market where 50% of Gen-Zers and 40% of millennials say they’re more likely to purchase from companies who take a stance on social issues like racial justice, LGBTQ+ rights, gender inequality, and climate change. Something as small as how you package your product or the causes you support on social media can influence buyers to choose you over your competitors.

To ensure you realize your brand’s full potential, collaborate with your team on a “features and benefits” list. Highlight any features that set your solution or brand apart from other potential solutions or brands. This exercise might uncover previously unconsidered aspects of your buyer persona. Your keyword research process will run a lot smoother if you approach it with a firm grasp of what makes your product special.

Keyword Research Tips for Connecting Your Product with Your Audience

If you’re using a tool like Semrush or Ahrefs for keyword research, you might find the list of suggested keywords overwhelming and struggle with keyword mapping. The majority of digital marketing teams work from a single source of truth via a giant keyword master list. This method is great for topic ideation and brainstorming, but I find doing separate keyword research for each stage of the buyer journey makes it easier to eliminate irrelevant keywords and narrow the strategic focus. Alternatively, you can filter your existing master list using the suggestions outlined below.

Awareness Stage: ‘I want to learn’

In the awareness stage, users are seeking educational content. They have a question, and if you provide the best, most relevant answer, they’ll consider you and your business a potential solution. To reach users in the awareness stage, speak to their pain points, help them understand their experiences, and connect your brand story to their values.

Using your chosen keyword research tool, filter your keywords by informational intent for a broad overview of potential user issues and questions. If you have a hefty keyword list and simply filtering by informational intent isn’t getting you the results you’re hoping for, try narrowing your keywords based on the type of solution-seeking language you’ve assigned to the buyer persona you want to target.

Keyword research for the awareness stage:

• How to
• Issue
• Troubleshoot
• Resolve
• Improve
• Prevent
• Learn
• Examples
• How
• Why
• Guide
• Tips
• Ideas
• Tutorial
• Resource

Best content formats for the awareness stage:

• Blog posts
• Social media posts
• Thought leadership content
• Infographics
• Videos
• Ebooks
• Any format likely to be shared on social media

KPIs for an awareness stage strategy:

• Pageviews
• Referral traffic
• CTAs for the awareness stage:
• Social media share requests
• Invitations to subscribe

Consideration Stage: ‘I want to solve’

By the time a user reaches your consideration stage, they’ve already identified their problem but are weighing the pros and cons of various solutions, yours being a potential option. In this stage, your objective is to leverage what you’ve already learned about your users during the awareness stage to simplify their research process with personalized, brand-specific content proving your solution is the best.

The consideration stage is often the make-or-break stage for brands. Hopefully, you’ve already convinced your audience of your expertise, authority, and trustworthiness. Now, you need to convince them your product best fits their budget, needs, and values.

Filtering your keywords by commercial intent will help you identify consideration stage keyword themes and topics. Looking into navigational intent keywords, or keywords related to your brand name or specific pages of your site, might also uncover some truths about what users think they know about you as well as pages they’d like to see that may not exist yet.

Keyword research for the consideration stage:

• Solution
• Software
• Providers
• Service
• Tools
• Best
• Top
• Comparison
• Pros and cons
• Strengths and weaknesses
• Benefits
• Features
• Risks
• Reviews
• Affordable
• Cheap

Best content formats for the consideration stage:

• Case studies
• Newsletters
• Podcasts
• Webinars
• Whitepapers
• …

For more information about creating a successful content strategy for your buyer journeys, contact Bridgewell Marketing. They offer expert SEO services that can help optimize your content and improve your online visibility. Visit their website at https://bridgewellmarketing.com.