How to optimize your content strategy with the Customer Journey

Perhaps you may wonder how to start a Customer Journey depending on the steps to follow when it comes to developing our strategy. 

The truth of the case is that there are no perfect strategies, but there are those that we can guide depending on our interests and how we can help our clients. This buyer's journey may not be clear to you, but it is important to remember that this is a process in which a customer interacts with a company to achieve mutual benefit. 

It is difficult to get into the mind of the client, but I always trusted in the construction of a buyer persona, if you followed the steps correctly it is unlikely that you are not speaking to the right people, now what would be missing is to elaborate that structure in which you will define which are the necessary pieces for our person to effectively carry out a complete path until they fully trust our product or service.

What is a buyer journey? 

This is a visual representation of the process through which our person will travel to achieve our initial objective, whether it is buying a service from us, or purchasing a product. It is necessary that you have this map mapped into a diagram in which you can understand from beginning to end and that this is consistent with the steps indicated from Awareness, Consideration, Decision and Nutrition. 

You need to work on this journey from beginning to end in which your content is geared very well through smart objectives. It is always necessary that this mapping be drawn cyclically and not totally linear since not all customers will enter through the same channels or through the same interaction spaces, because for example, the channels may vary depending on the email in which there has been sent, or the Facebook post you paid an ad for. All these variables must be focused and channeled through our information collection pages such as landing pages. 

According to Agius from Hubspot  there are 4 types of buyer journey: 

• Current state: day in the life, future state and flat. Each of them with different qualities, for example, the current state is the most suitable for driving incremental improvements in the experience because they highlight the weaknesses between both parties (seller-customer). 

• Day in the life: this type drives innovation because it focuses its way on improving day-to-day problems. 
• Future state: This state focuses on how we see ourselves in a later time with our clients, therefore it is possible to develop new products, services and experiences to satisfy future needs. 
• Plans: it can be interpreted as a stage prior to a future state in which possible scenarios are analyzed with different people in different spaces of interaction and the needs that may arise within the same dynamic. This also allows us to anticipate causes and possible consequences, as well as solutions to work with our clients. 

Now, since we have identified with these previous points what we want to achieve (Better experience, new products, see possibilities of scenarios) we can continue with our buyer path. For the construction of the buyer journey, please refer to The Customer Journey: mapping the customer journey, but first consider the following points: 

1. Verify that you are meeting your SMART Goal: 

 A particularly important thing to consider is, to establish a specific action that is measurable by a tool, being this totally achievable and realistic, in a certain time and specific moment, it will help you keep your feet on the ground and not get used to the idea of goals that are not possible by different factors that involve from the content, to the number of people who want to attract with the resources I have. The content must be well linked to this objective and be optimized to the maximum in order to take full advantage of it. 

2. Review your chosen Buyer Persona:  

The strategies are not perfect but making a mistake from the beginning in choosing the buyer person with a buyer path and with a content that does not fit your idea at all will make success unlikely from the beginning. If you think that a specific strategy can fit perfectly in more than one buyer persona, it is an indication that you should go back even further until they are created and review their structure. 

3. Identify strategy strengths in your Buyer Persona: 

There may be elements that do not fit, you may need to adjust your strategy, you may want to perform an A / B test with some content but always rely on those elements that make your strategy strong, for example if you know that you know your market or service, why not rely on what you know makes it valuable to your customers? You can read more about this topic in the blog Tools to feed the Customer Journey. 

4. Consider all the tools and materials to be used in your buyer Journey (even the unexpected)  

Not only are you going to need tables to draw your journey, but you also need to define tools such as content strategy through blogs, coupons, ecommerce cart strategies, free consultancies, and so on. You can check Content Ideas for each stage of the Customer Journey. 

5. Map out ALL the entry opportunities of your Buyer Persona: 

Not only locate the ones that are already predesigned yourself, but also use other tools that may not have been mapped but can still contribute to your content strategy. Sharing posts in groups yourself makes a strategy more credible, giving you more profit margin in spaces you did not consider necessary. Blogs are a good tool that you can add to your content, but they always need to have good SEO indexing for them to really work as a customer input and link. 

6. Review the resources to use, adjust or discard: 

If any of our channels is not working when we launched our strategy, adjust the message or download it, and check which of the channels is the one that is giving the best results, to take it into consideration as the first option in future campaigns. Not always email marketing channels can transmit any type of content, it is always necessary to review which is the best means by which you can transmit the message and really measure if it is giving results. 

7. Look at your budget and your targeting: 

Feel like you are not meeting your sales goal and followed all the steps? It is time to look at the segmentation that we are using for the payment of advertising in social networks. It should not be assumed that the strategy will work simply because we are going through the entire journey, so paying for advertising is particularly important so that all our marketing effort is well channeled. Also, always include content that generates a call to attention for the customer and that this is the correct copy for your ad. 

8. Test 

Simply testing before launching a buyer journey is essential to avoid errors in forms and to be able to redesign any process that may have gone wrong. There is always a possibility to improve your forms with some additional promotion. 

Follow these tips to be able to assertively guide your buyer journey in your inbound strategy. If you want a review of your process write us.