[Video] Find the Gaps in Your Content with a Buyer’s Journey

Not getting the results you want to see from your blog content? It could be that your customers are falling through the gaps in your buyer’s journey. Missing content means missing customers—so it’s time to start filling in those gaps with the kind of content your customers are looking for.

[bctt tweet=”Are your customers falling through the gaps in your buyer’s journey?” username=”billkerschbaum”]

What the Heck Is a Buyer’s Journey?

If you think about the process that your customer goes through—from the very beginning of their awareness of a problem to the time when they’re ready to sign on the dotted line with you—they go through a kind of journey. This buyer’s journey has different stages. At each stage, your customer is asking a different set of questions, and they have a different set of needs from you.

Your content should address those questions and needs at each stage along the buyer’s journey.

For your marketing content to be effective, you need to understand the different stages of the buyer’s journey, and what your particular customers are going to ask at each stage. These are the stages:

• Awareness. This is where your customer is first aware that they’ve got a problem. They don’t know what the solution is, they just know they’re feeling some pain. They’ll do some research and they’ll begin to understand exactly what’s going on—what’s causing the pain and what they need to solve it.
• Consideration. At this point they understand the pain, and now they’re looking for the right solution. Your buyers are comparing different options and deciding what solution is best for their particular problem at their particular company.
• Decision. Now your prospect is ready to talk to a salesperson. They’ll have a completely different set of questions that’s getting them ready to actually buy. They may need to vet your product or your service with other stakeholders at their company, so you should be anticipating those questions as well.

The trap a lot of small B2B companies fall into is creating a ton of content for just one stage of the journey, and they forget the other stages. Their prospects are traveling happily along the journey, getting all kinds of great content…then nothing. There’s a gap, and suddenly they’re not getting the kinds of answers they need. So they go searching somewhere else, and you’ve lost them. They fell through the gap in your buyer’s journey, and who knows if they’ll return?

Map Your Content to the Buyer’s Journey

Now that you know what your buyer’s journey looks like and the questions they’ll ask at each stage, you need to map your content to the buyer’s journey. Do an inventory of your existing content—blog articles, videos, downloadable content, everything you’ve got. It doesn’t have to be exhaustive, but it should be representative.

Next, evaluate all that content. Does it answer all of the questions that your customers will be asking throughout the buyers journey? Note the gaps. Maybe your videos are doing a good job, but your blogs have completely ignored an important question at the Awareness stage. D’oh! Don’t sweat it, that’s why you’re doing this mapping, right?

Once you’ve got a good sense of your buyer’s journey and how your content maps to it, create a content calendar that helps you develop a strategic plan to fill in all those gaps.

Hang in there—this can be an involved process, but it’s worth it! If you just don’t have the internal resources to figure this all out, contact me and I’ll be happy to lend a hand.