‘Customer journey’ is a phrase that businesses use all the time, isn’t it? The term is probably quite common among your sales team, who focus on moving leads through the funnel from top to bottom; from the awareness stage to the consideration stage to the final decision stage.
What businesses don’t always do, however, is apply this phrase to their content strategy.
But they should.
Creating a content strategy that supports the customer journey is a great way to see results.
Why the customer journey matters
A significant part of building a content strategy is learning more about your target audience; it’s about understanding what they need, and shaping your approach to content to meet that need.
But that’s the simple version. In reality, it’s a little more complex than that.
The truth is that a potential customer won’t just have a single, constant need. What they’re looking for will change and adapt as they move between the different stages of the customer journey.
We all do it.
Think about how you shop yourself. Imagine you’ve just gone to make yourself a cup of tea, only to find that your kettle has broken. You’ve become aware of the problem, and your need right now is simple: you need a new kettle. You’re not even thinking about what sort of kettle you want, you just know that you need one.
It’s only later, when you’re looking at the different options available, that your need changes. Now, you need to know more about each model so you can compare features.
Once you pick a model, your need changes again. Now, you need to be able to justify your decision.
We look at this in more detail when we explore content mapping and search intent, so we won’t dive in too deeply here. But what this shows is that we can’t produce content randomly. If we take a random approach, we’ll be investing resources into creating content that doesn’t meet audience needs. That’s why creating a content strategy for the customer journey is so crucial. We can strategically plan and organise content so that it appeals to the right people, at the right time.
And it’s not just about content topics, either. With a strong content strategy in place, it becomes easier to publish different types of content that have the biggest impact at various stages. These can include blog posts and articles, product descriptions, videos, tutorials, reports, white papers, and more.
Developing useful content
Anyone can develop content. But it’s only with a content strategy that you can develop useful content. At the end of the day, that’s what really matters. We all know that content is important. But the problem is that so many businesses are just churning it out for the sake of it. Content has to have a purpose; it has to bring value. And we can ensure it’s pushing us closer towards our goals when we create content that’s relevant and interesting to our audience, across all stages of their journey.
