How to Cater your Content to the Buyer’s Journey and Buyer Persona
And why doing so is the first step in an effective content strategy
**Note: This post is part of a larger series on Content Marketing which will be posted on Amazon in the form of an Ebook.**
As a business, you need to publish a lot of content for your audience. Content is the foundation for building trust and moving your buyer through each stage of the buyer journey. In order to create a long-term content strategy, the first step is to define exactly who your buyer is and what stages they’ll go through before they purchase your product.
What is a buyer persona?
A buyer persona is a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer based on market research and real data about your existing customers.
Some of the things that will help you formulate your buyer persona include demographics, desires, challenges, goals, behavior patterns, and interests of your desired customer.
Example of a Buyer Persona
Here’s is a possible Buyer Persona that might fit the content strategy efforts of an ad agency.
Demographics: Middle-Upper Class,
Background: Working Professional and a B2C Business Owner
Goals: Bottom line to grow business quarter to quarter
Challenges: Is proficient in managing a business, but is having trouble marketing and getting his product in the hands of more people.
Could get even more specific based on the business’s current clients as time progresses as well.
What is the buyer’s journey?
The buyer’s journey is a series of steps and research that a buyer will go through from initial contact with your business to the end goal of purchasing your service or product.
The buyer’s journey will typically follow these 3 steps:
- Awareness
- Consideration
- Decision
And your content marketing plan should be dedicated to helping the buyer on each step of the journey. Your strategy includes figuring out which type of content you want to show to your audience along each step of the way and understanding why that piece of content will get them from one stage to the next.
Awareness Stage
In this stage, you DON’T want to tell the reader about your product. Leave your sales team out of it. There’s nothing worse than learning about an industry for the first time and getting inundated with offers and advertisements of people trying to sell you their product.
The awareness stage is all about educating the reader in whatever niche you’re product is in. If you’re selling a point of sales system to a restaurant than your awareness content might be all about writing about the certain problems people often face when running a restaurant and actionable advice to solve those problems based on action and not by buying a new product.
This is the stage where the buyer realizes they have a problem and starts doing research to learn more about it and potential ways to solve their problem.
If you have a B2C business(for this example let’s say you sell golf equipment) then your awareness stage of content creation might involve writing about how to shave strokes off your game by including tips on improving swing mechanics. You want to focus on adding as much value as possible to your audience as possible.
This stage is where you build up the most trust. As they say, the typical buyer needs 3–7 points of contact with your business before they’ll make a purchase. This is the first impression they have of your business so you better make it a good one.
You might consider writing an ebook for this stage in exchange for an email. Then you can funnel them into an email drip campaign that makes them more familiar with your business and adds even more value into their life.
Consideration Stage
At this stage, the potential buyer is already familiar with your business and your industry. They’re wondering why they should consider your services over that of a competitor. At this point, they haven’t fully committed to either you or your competitor so you still have work to do. The buyer wants to understand all the potential solutions to their problems, including yours.
The content that you might create for this stage could include a questionnaire, a webinar, or automated emails. In order to better understand this stage you should ask yourself:
- How do buyers approach educating themselves on each solution?
- What are the perceived pros and cons of each solution?
- How do buyers ultimately end up deciding which solution is best for them?
- Which buyer persona would like our solution over the competitor and which persona is less appealing? And how do we appeal to the types of people that are less apt to consider our solution?
Decision Stage
At this stage, the buyer is ready to make their decision and are at the final stages before pulling out their credit cards. All they need is the final push and initiative to choose your product over the competitors.
Your job here is to answer any questions they may have and provide information about why your product is worth their money over the competitors.
This might include offering a free online consultation or creating a list of pros and cons of your product over the competitor.
Be creative and realize that the buyer has most of the information they need in relation to your product and that you don’t need to give them an intro course to who you are and what you’re offering.
But overall, by understanding your business’s buyer persona and the buyer’s journey that all consumers travel through you’ll better be able to strategize about exactly what type of content you’ll be creating in the future.
