People do not simply wake up and decide that they are going to buy something that day. Instead, they go through a process that includes research and evaluation before they are ready to commit to a sales call.
That journey is called the buyer’s journey. As consumers become more informed and empowered, it is increasingly important to deeply understand your target audience and their journey so you can create content that helps them while positioning yourself as an authority in your field.
Understanding the Buyer’s Journey in Marketing
Most people start the journey to becoming a customer in the “unaware stage,” when they don’t know they need your product. They might fit the demographics of your ideal client, or buyer persona, but they don’t know about your product yet.
However, they may experience a event that changes their situation or pain that needs to be solved. This kicks off their buyer’s journey.
An individual who wants to start a personal fitness journey could begin by looking up some workout routines online, or finding a physical activity they enjoy and gradually adding it to their routine. They might not decide to buy a gym membership right away. The buyer may look to the internet for more information and to make decisions at different stages of their journey. Our job is to help them with that decision-making process.
Awareness Stage
The awareness stage is when the buyer is experiencing a problem or symptoms of a pain, and their goal is to find a way to alleviate it. They may be looking for resources that will help them to understand their problem better, frame it more clearly, and give it a name.
An example of a search query a prospect might use when they are in the awareness stage is: “How do I get stronger?” At this point, they are not considering solutions or providers; it is still too early for that. Instead, they’re looking to contextualize their problem first. Content marketers should focus on appearing in search engine results in order to build authority and trust with potential customers.
Consideration Stage
The buyer is considering their options and researching the best way to solve their problem. In other words, they are considering potential solutions.
A search inquiry a prospect at the consideration stage might make is: “What’s better: going to a gym or hiring a personal trainer?” The prospect is not yet ready to buy, but they are considering their options and trying to decide which solution is best for them. Your goal should be to educate your indirect competitors on the pros and cons of your product or service.
Decision Stage
Once a buyer has progressed to the decision stage, they have decided on a solution strategy, method, or approach. They are looking to create a list of available vendors and make a final purchase decision from that list.
A prospect at the decision stage would make a search inquiry such as: “Planet Fitness vs. Gold’s Gym.” They are now ready to spend money and will most likely go with a provider that they like and trust, as long as that provider can meet their needs.
Why Creating Content for the Buyer’s Journey Is Important
It is essential to understand your audience in all marketing disciplines in order to know how they think, what answers they seek, and the path they take to find a solution. You can create a content strategy that is based on the stages of the buyer’s journey by researching what content is most effective at each stage.
If you don’t understand your audience, you won’t be able to connect with them and sell your product or service. If you’re a content marketer, this typically means that the content you’re putting out isn’t relatable to your readers, which can result in losing them as readers.
You will need to take into account where they are in their journey, how to connect with them at that stage, and what channels will work best to get the content in front of them. Content marketing on the internet has made it easier for marketers to engage customers throughout their journey. Content is considered to be a very important aspect of an overall marketing strategy by 60% of marketers.
Content creation can be difficult to do correctly, with the right audience and timing in mind.
The first step to developing a content strategy is to identify what kind of content you will need to appeal to your audience based on their journey through the buyer’s journey. We will guide you through this process in terms of the marketing flywheel.
Creating Content for Each Stage of the Buyer’s Journey
After determining who your target buyer is and understanding the steps they take before making a purchase, you can begin creating content that is specific to each stage of the process and designed for each different medium.
This means that you can better target your content to match where your buyer is in their journey, making it more likely that they will convert.
- Awareness Stage: The stage where people look for answers, resources, education, research data, opinions, and insight.
- Consideration Stage: The stage where people are doing heavy research on whether or not your product or service is a good fit for them.
- Decision Stage: The stage where people figure out exactly what it would take to become a customer.
The way your business is set up will affect the path your journey takes. Consider your industry, business model, product, pricing, and target audience when planning your next steps. B2C customers tend to spend less time in the middle of the buyer’s journey than B2B customers. B2B customers usually require more nurturing, engagement, and relationship development before making a purchase. A purchase of $50 sneakers requires less convincing than a $10,000 software investment.
Content Ideas for Each Stage of the Buyer’s Journey
The importance of persona research is due to the fact that audiences can differ a lot depending on the industry and their purpose. If you want to create an effective content marketing strategy, you need to understand the unique process your target audience uses to become aware of and evaluate potential purchases. Only then can you create custom content that will support them at every stage of their journey.
In other words, let’s go back to the beginning and start from the beginning of the buyer’s journey.
At the awareness stage, a buyer is trying to figure out what their problem is, what the possible solutions are, and what their best option is. They want helpful, informative content that will lead them to a solution, such as blog posts, social media posts, and ebooks. When considering someone as a lead, it is important to think about whether or not they are likely to make a purchase from you. If there is no guarantee that they will buy from you, then their value as a lead is not very high. People who like your content might keep going to the middle of the funnel.
The ideal channels for the awareness stage may include:
- Blogging
- Search Engine Marketing
- Social Media Marketing
Creating content that is specific to each stage of the buyer’s journey will help improve understanding and engagement.
Let’s look at how to do that.
Step 1. Create buyer persona(s)
A buyer persona is a “fictional person” you create who represents the common characteristics of your customer. This persona is based on customer research and is used to help you make decisions about your marketing and product strategy. If you know what your audience wants, you can create content that will speak to them.
Creating a buyer persona is not a thought exercise. Unfortunately, many companies treat it as such. They design personas based on their imagination, then they create a document and save it in Google Drive. This document is rarely looked at again.
Buyer personas need to be based on real-world evidence. We need to go outside rather than sitting in a meeting room and thinking them up.
Here’s the three-step process content marketer Adrienne Barnes recommends:
- Get to know your customers – Find your best customers and call them. These are the customers who knew immediately how your product worked or have been using your product without any complaints. Ask them questions about your product, what they like/dislike, the problems they have, their responsibilities, and so on. (Alternatively, you can survey them.)
- Organize the data – Look for patterns among the responses. You’re looking out for commonly repeated phrases, words, and remarks.
- Segment the audience – From the patterns you’ve gathered, you should start to see some specific audiences popping out of the data. These will be your buyer personas.
If you want to learn how to create an ideal buyer persona for your SaaS company, we recommend reading this article. It will teach you the steps you need to take in order to create a persona that accurately reflects your target customer base, and provides valuable insights that can help you better market your product.
Step 2. Find topics that match each stage of the buyer’s journey
Let’s illustrate this step via an example. We’ll use Billy Blogger as our buyer persona. Billy’s goal is to create a blog that will make enough money to allow him to quit his full-time job.
Awareness
At this point, Billy comes to the realization that he has a problem; his website isn’t receiving enough traffic. He is looking for ways to increase the amount of traffic to his website. He learns about the various traffic acquisition methods and decides that Search Engine Optimization could be the solution to his problem. He begins researching and learning more about SEO.
So, if we’re creating content for this stage, we’re actually looking for topics related to:
- Blog traffic
- Website traffic
- SEO
Here’s how to find more relevant topics:
- Go to Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer
- Enter those terms
- Go to the Matching terms report
We’ll change the setting to Questions since the keywords for the “Awareness stage” are mostly informational.
To find more keywords, you can add informational modifiers such as “tips,” “learn,” “resource,” “guide,” “examples,” or “ideas” in the Include box.
There are more than 30,000 keywords, and not all of them fit our buyer persona. We will go through the list and choose the keywords that are relevant.
A possible topic Billy might be interested in is “how to drive traffic to your website.” And we’ve targeted that topic with a blog post.
Consideration
Billy comes to the realization that he needs a tool to help him with SEO. He looks for tools that are available. He compares each product to others as he encounters them, reading reviews to inform his decision. He will try out the different tools that are available for free.
If we’re creating content for this stage, we’re actually looking for topics related to:
- SEO tools.
- Tools for each aspect of SEO (e.g., keyword research tools, link building tools).
- Free versions of tools (e.g., free backlink checker).
- Our brand name.
- Our competitors’ brand names.
Here’s how to find relevant topics:
- Go to Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer
- Enter terms like “seo tools,” “ahrefs,” or “moz”
- Go to the Matching terms report
- In the Include box, add comparison modifiers (e.g., vs, versus, best, top, review, reviews)
We will go through the list and choose the topics that are applicable. Based on the list, it appears that potential customers are comparing our toolset with that of our competitors. For instance, they are looking at features offered by ahrefs vs. semrush. We decided to create a comparison page to address all of these topics.
Decision
In this stage, Billy is close to buying. He is looking at our tool, seeing the list of features, and trying it out, but he has not yet decided to buy it.
We should look for topics related to our brand when creating content for this stage.
To find out how popular a brand is, go to Keywords Explorer and enter the brand name.
If you are a small brand, you may not be able to find many keywords for your brand name. Take a look at your Google Search Console data to see what people are searching for in relation to your brand.
In this stage, people will not always use search engines to find the information they need. The customers are probably already interested in your brand and are just looking for more information about it on your website. Don’t focus too much on the keywords people are searching for, look internally instead.
What other data do you need to examine in order to improve your website? What is preventing buyers from completing a purchase on your website? That is the content you need to create.
Step 3. Create content for each stage
Now that you have the topics for each stage of the buyer’s journey, it’s time to populate your site with content related to those topics.
Chances are you will need to produce various kinds of content for the different steps. For instance, people in the Awareness stage want to learn more about what they’re interested in, so they might read blog posts or watch videos. On the other hand, people in the Consideration stage are trying to decide which option is best for them, so they might look at pages that compare different products.
You can determine what kind of content you should create by analyzing the top-ranking pages for the three Cs of search intent.
1. Content type
There are generally five types of content: blog post, product, category, landing page, or video. The top-ranking pages for “how to increase blog traffic” are all blog posts.
Whereas for “backlink checker,” they’re all landing pages.
2. Content format
This applies mostly to blog posts, which are usually either how-tos, listicles, news articles, opinion pieces, or reviews. This means that if you want to rank for the term “link building”, you should create a guide.
3. Content angle
The main selling point of the content is its main selling point. In other words, people searching for “best SEO tools” want the results to be up-to-date.
Mapping Content Across All Stages of the Buying Cycle
Although there are some commonalities between the buyer’s journeys of different businesses, each business has its own unique journey that cannot be replicated exactly from one business to another. When creating your buyer’s journey, you must understand your audience and what content they need at every stage of their journey.
Doing it well can improve your customer relationships and help increase your overall conversions.
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