You race down the straightaway. Faster and faster you go until you see the gaping hole in the track ahead!
You slow the car to determine your next move when you see a fellow racer veer off the track for a shortcut that mysteriously appeared in her lane. Then, you notice other drivers also continuing on the track laid by their teams.
Where is your team? Where is your track?
Race car teams don’t lay the track for their drivers in real life, but your prospective customers may be living through this Mario Kart meets Inception nightmare. They will encounter potholes and sometimes missing pavement if you haven’t created the content they need to answer their questions as they journey.
1. Why Your Customers Need a Content Highway for Their Journey
Your customer has a challenge.
Your business needs to help that customer solve that problem with your product. To achieve the company goal, you need to help the future customer learn about you and then make the decision to choose your product.
Simple, right?
It is if your marketing content is the paved road that makes it easy for your customer to go from identifying their problem to using your product.
When your marketing content answers different questions corresponding to different stages of the customer journey, it is similar to having more of the road paved for your customer.
When you answer more than one question at each stage, it is like having multiple Lanes that your customer can choose to travel at each stage.
Companies win when their customers can stay on a wide paved highway and move quickly to your product.
How confident are you that the content on your website today guides your customers through their buyer journey?
You might feel like that is an impossible ask–that customers have a mind of their own and pick their journey, and you would be right. But there is hope, and more than hope there is a responsibility for marketers to pave the road so that customers can travel that road at any speed and in any direction to their heart’s content.
We all benefit when a helping hand leads the way–whether or not we recognize it. When you guide your customers through the process of understanding challenges, identifying solutions, and executing a plan to achieve goals, you manage customer expectations and keep the customer engaged with your company or product.
Customer journey expert, Pam Didner, explains it this way, “You can see the customer journey is very disjointed, but you are looking from a customer's perspective. All of us have thousands of paths or options of journeys that we go through before we make a purchase decision. The thing that you need to look at as a marketer is what is in your control and how can you craft the journey that you can guide people through.”
Your customers engage in the same five types of activities when they interact with your brand and product category no matter the order they go in or how many times they pass through each: Awareness, Consideration, Conversion (Decision), Retention (Use), and Advocacy.
What makes each of these stages distinct is the type of questions that your customers ask in each stage. Knowing the questions at each stage, you can pave the road with educational, entertaining, and inspiring content.
Sooner or later your customers will come whizzing by. They might not even notice you. That’s ok. You want them focused on where they are going and NOT on the quality of the pavement that gets them there.
“The thing that you need to look at as a marketer is what is in your control and how can you craft the journey that you can guide people through.”
Pam Didner
Do not settle for a torturous and pothole-ridden trail through the wilderness. Why not build a content highway for your customers?
1.1 The Content Highway
Using the word "journey" brings to my mind scenes of a difficult and far-off adventure more than it does a trip to the grocery store.
When we think about our customer’s, or buyer’s, journey, we may picture a windy path through a forest of options. Instead, we should be picturing the customer journey like a superhighway we built for them from the ground up. It’s a highway built so they can find the answers to their problems as they make their way along the journey.
This video illustrates the content superhighway with many lanes paved by your content where the customer may travel with ease.
When new questions or problems arise that your customer needs to be solved, new lanes are created for this so-called highway. Your job as a business is to provide content that keeps your customers progressing forward down the highway. You help your customers transition from one stage to another as old questions are answered and new questions arise.
Each time someone in your target market moves to the next journey stage can be considered a win–a mini conversion. You increase the conversion rate at each stage by
- Creating content that effectively answers your customer’s question (paving the road)
- Answering more of the likely questions (increasing the number of lanes in the content highway).
Building a Content highway involves four steps:
- Know the content that is most helpful at each stage of a customer Journey
- Answer as many questions as possible at each Journey stage
- Evaluate how your content is performing at each stage
- Allocate content creation effort to areas of biggest opportunity
1.2 Answering customer questions with your content
Perhaps the primary purpose of content marketing is to create content that attracts and retains an audience that is likely to benefit from your products and services.
The surest way to achieve this goal is to be a trustworthy and helpful voice for all your customer’s questions related to your product category.
But remember, your potential customer is concerned about solving their problem and getting their questions answered. They couldn't care less about where they are in the journey toward your products.
Think about it. When you have a problem, how often is your first response to ask Google, Siri, or Alexa for help to find a solution to those problems in the shortest amount of time possible? I’m guessing you don’t take time to analyze where you are in the buying process for a particular product or service.
Still, as a marketer, it’s easy to assume your customers proceed through their journey in a straight line from Awareness to Consideration, Conversion, Retention, and on to Advocacy. Wouldn’t that be nice?
And wouldn't it be nice if they consumed your content (like breadcrumbs) one step at a time, progressing down the trail, just like Hansel and Gretel? Unfortunately, people aren’t like that most of the time.
We choose our path. This means each customer’s journey is more likely to look like a winding road.
It’s your job as the company to answer questions. It’s your customer’s job to decide what and when to ask.
Content strategy expert, Jeffrey Jensen from MessageLab, explains it this way, “A user leaving your article isn't bad. In fact, it's going to happen and the content can still be good. But to the highway metaphor, If you fill all the lanes and all the funnel positions with content, they'll come back.”
“If you fill all the lanes and all the funnel positions with content, they'll come back.”
Jeffrey Jensen
1.3 Increasing the number of content lanes
The second way you make your customer’s journey easier is by increasing the number of lanes they can take based on the challenge that is most important to them at that moment.
For example, two potential customers may be ready to learn about potential solutions (moving from Awareness to Consideration). However, Customer 1 may want to jump straight to pricing for different solutions and Customer 2 may want to learn more about the different types of solutions available.
Given that your customers are wanderers, the best you can do is build the content highway as wide and as long as it needs to be. This means answering ALL the questions.
It also means that each piece of content should provide multiple exit options (calls to action) to allow your audience to choose.
This video shares different ways the buttons and links that accompany your content can serve as easy ways for your customers to change lanes and move forward in the way that helps them the most.
2. Answering the Right Questions at the Right Customer Journey Stages:
There is a pattern you can follow to build the content highway with your marketing content.
At first, it may surprise you that the questions within the same journey stage are highly predictable even for wildly different product categories. Checking your content against this pattern provides a process to create content that spans the customer journey (lays more road) and satisfies customer questions within each stage (adding the necessary lanes to the road).
The best way to know a customer’s current journey stage is to know the questions they are asking. Knowing the questions makes it possible to classify your marketing content by journey stage based on the questions the content answers. You can also identify the gaps where you need to provide additional content.
Let’s explore some examples below and in this video.
2.1 Questions in the Awareness stage
During the Awareness stage, your potential customers seek to understand their problems. They also want to understand the potential types of solutions and the challenges when seeking solutions.
Awareness stage questions are things like
- What is ______?
- What are _____?
- Why is _______ important?
You will answer Awareness stage questions with content that helps your customer
- Understand what the category is
- See how others have solved a problem similar to theirs
- Introduce themselves to your brand
- Understand the problem they are facing
- Get inspiration based on ideas and trends
- See how the market has changed
- See what is popular
2.2 Questions in the Consideration stage
During the Consideration stage, the questions change. Now your audience understands the problem they want to solve. They are focused on learning about solutions and collecting alternatives.
Consideration stage questions are things like
- What is a good or best _______?
- How does ______ work?
- Does ______ really work?
You will answer Consideration stage questions with content that helps your customer
- Understand the types of solutions available
- Understand their own needs and preferences
- Understand who the major players are
- See the connection between their situation and a solution
- Understand tradeoffs between different solutions
- Learn what deals are out there
- Get answers to common concerns around a product category
- Get advice on alternatives
- Know the truth about common myths or misconceptions
- Know how to identify quality solutions or appropriate qualifications
2.3 Questions in the Conversion stage
Transition to the conversion stage is marked by questions that will lead to a decision. These questions fall into categories such as price, understanding expected timing and results, reducing the risk of negative outcomes, checking the feasibility of the solution in the customer’s world, and navigating the purchase process.
Conversion stage questions sound like
- Who are _____?
- Does ______ do ________?
- Where can I _______?
- What does _______ mean?
You will answer Conversion stage questions with content that helps your customer
- Understand the key unique benefits of our solution
- Be confident the solution matches their needs based on a review
- Understand details of how your solution works
- Overcome concerns about risks
- Know how much things cost or why there are differences in costs among solutions
- Find the very best alternative
- Find an alternative that is good enough on the important attributes
- Understand timelines for solution availability, use, or outcomes
- Learn the difference and details for how solutions are classified
A note about consideration and conversion content:
Consideration and Conversion stage content should be the priority for your content. You have the most expertise and can provide the most value to your audience in these stages.
This does not mean every piece of content reads like a 1-page sales brochure. Instead, you should answer the questions your customers have at these stages–even if it means you share insights that lead them away from your product or service.
This video highlights the importance and examples of content for these stages.
2.4 Questions in the Retention stage
A customer in the Retention stage is using your product. They want to see the success they believed in when they purchased. They may need to demonstrate to others the value achieved with your product. They may be stuck. Or, they may wonder if they should buy again.
Retention stage questions sound like
- How do you _______?
- How can I ________?
- How to ________?
You will answer Retention stage questions with content that helps your customer
- Feel excited about the performance achieved through the solution
- Answer a specific question about using the product or service
- Have realistic expectations about timelines or resources required for a particular use case
- Know how to expand the use of the product or the service inside their organization
- Feel excited about new capabilities
- Communicate the value of the solution to other stakeholders
- Understand laws and regulations related to the solution
2.5 Questions in the Advocacy stage
Customers in the Advocacy stage are part of a community where they provide value to others–not only receive value from your product or service. This community may live within the customer’s organization. Or, it may be a broad group of users, fans, partners, or peers. These customers are ready to share insight from their own experiences. They think about how they can grow their profile, career, or business as they help others achieve their goals.
Advocacy stage questions sound like
- How do I share ______ with my team?
- Can ______ help me grow my personal brand?
- Where can I share my experience with ______?
- Where do I find others like me interested in _______?
You will answer Advocacy stage questions with content that helps your customer
- Be seen as a leader inside their organization
- Have ideas on how to help the team or others be successful in their roles
- Answer general questions related to a customer's job that will help the customer be successful
- Get more value from a closer relationship with you as the solution provider
3. Tracking Content Performance Throughout the Journey
I'm guessing you're not reporting your content performance according to each customer journey stage.
But imagine if you did.
Imagine if you had each of your pieces of content tagged according to which stage of the customer journey it supported. You would see how your website performs according to its primary role of guiding your customers through their journey.
3.1 Identifying content gaps with Leaky Funnel Analysis
Evaluating content by journey stage may not be as difficult as you think. You can start by tagging by journey stage some of your most important pages in the tool you are using to evaluate website performance such as Google Analytics or HubSpot.
I recently met a marketer who developed a tagging system for website content using Airtable. Shana Haynie is the Senior Manager of Content Marketing at Unit21.ai.
She shared that she is looking for any opportunity she can to scale her content marketing program. “As you create more and more content and scale your efforts across, it becomes challenging to visualize the holes in your content strategy. This is why it is helpful to tag each piece of content in ways that will give you insight into your content repository, for instance, using category tags for things like persona, vertical, topic, or funnel stage. Assuming you have a solid understanding of the customer journey, minimizing content gaps leads to more effective marketing because you are saying the right thing at the right time, ultimately moving prospects further down the funnel toward your desired action. You can't do this if you can't easily identify what is missing and what needs to be prioritized.”
When you have a system like Shana’s, or what I call the Leaky Funnel analysis, you can see the traffic coming into each journey stage. You also see the rate people leave your site from a particular journey stage vs staying engaged with your website content. Leaving your website represents aborting the customer journey, or at the least, redirecting their journey away from your content.
"Minimizing content gaps leads to more effective marketing because you are saying the right thing at the right time, ultimately moving prospects further down the funnel toward your desired action. You can't do this if you can't easily identify what is missing and what needs to be prioritized.”
Shana Haynie
Pro tip: the same logic applies to analytics data available from the new Google Analytics 4. Rather than Pageviews and Exit Rate, you can evaluate the number of Sessions and Engaged Sessions for content at each journey stage.
3.2 Content marketing goals at each journey stage
Measuring traffic and engagement through each journey stage helps identify content gaps. It also gives you a strategic view of content performance.
You need to go one level deeper once you identify a weak spot in your funnel. This table illustrates the likely scenarios.
Each piece of content should help your audience answer a specific question. We gave examples of these questions in a previous section.
Each piece of content should also invite your audience to take the next step in their journey. Your customers think about taking the next step as answering their next question. You think of them taking this next step as achieving the business goal of your content.
You shouldn’t expect everyone that visits your website to follow the same path through your content. You should design multiple ways for your audience to arrive at your content and multiple ways for them to move on to another piece of content.
This diagram shows how you can audit your content to maximize traffic and engagement.
- Identify how the content will help your customers. Next, evaluate how well the content satisfies this goal for your customers.
- Identify the audience question that will motivate your customers to visit the content. Then, evaluate the places content links are distributed and check if the CTAs to your content in those places clearly identify the question answered by the content.
- Identify the next step that you would like your customer to take after consuming the content. This is the business goal for this content. Present a CTA in your content that invites your customer to take the next step. This CTA should be presented in a way that your customer recognizes will help them answer their next question.
- Consider alternative next steps that your customer may take if they need to learn more before they are ready to move forward in their journey. Provide CTAs that act as offramps to content that will answer additional unresolved questions.
“Signing up for a demo” or “buying now” may be appropriate to include with much of your content. However, if these are the only CTAs available you may be missing an opportunity to keep your audience engaged. You do yourself a favor when you present the simplest next step for them to consider.
This is worth saying again. A single piece of content should not bear the weight of the world on its shoulders. That content should be designed around a specific content objective. The content should have a primary CTA that gives your customers the chance to choose that next step. And, it should include other CTAs that provide alternative next steps.
Here is a list of content objectives organized by customer journey stage.
Awareness
- Increase traffic
- Increase ad engagement
- Increase total reach
- Increase brand awareness
Consideration
- Grow leads
- Grow followers
- Grow offers/trials accepted
Conversion
- Grow sales
- Grow revenue
- Grow sign-ups
- Grow users
- Grow visitors
Retention
- Grow renewals
- Grow usage
- Grow upgrades
- Grow repeat purchases
Advocacy
- Grow reviews
- Grow referrals
- Grow event attendance
- Grow community participation
3.3 Getting the most from Google Analytics so that you have a clear idea of content performance
You can use Google Analytics to see traffic and engagement on your website pages. When you tag pages by journey stage and by audience theme, or content pillar, you can summarize how your website is performing across the customer journey.
There are two other approaches that can help you get even more from your Google Analytics data.
Google Analytics allows you to create goals. You can set these goals to be linked to an individual visiting a certain page or completing certain events. With goals set, you will begin to see the value of individual pages contributing to your overall goal.
The other approach is to create custom metrics within your Google Analytics account. Creating custom metrics requires additional technical expertise beyond reviewing traffic and engagement numbers or setting goals.
Both setting goals and creating custom metrics are two approaches that will allow you to tag your pages so that as your audience takes action with your content you'll be able to show traffic and engagement converting into value for your business.
4. Filling Content Gaps:
Can you imagine identifying the missing content (potholes) in your customers' content highway? What about creating that content so it isn't missing? And finally, do you believe what you’ve imagined is achievable with your current resources and level of expertise?
We all have content gaps. Faced with these gaps, your first question may be where to begin. Providing content to fill certain content gaps will be more valuable than filling others.
Marketing guru George B. Thomas has an approach for prioritization that he calls the “V3 of content marketing.”
This is an approach for evaluating your content and prioritizing your efforts so that you optimize the impact of your content in three specific channels. George coaches, “First, you optimize for sales. Second, you optimize for search. Third, you optimize for social.”
Following this order, Conversion stage content is the primary focus when you start. Conversion stage and consideration stage content are key for helping your sales team get the most from their efforts with your future customers. This content is also the most important for helping current website visitors answer the questions that brought them to your website in the first place.
Content optimized for search needs to be about topics people search for. Your customers search for specific answers at each stage of their journey.
- This includes specific searches related to Conversion such as pricing or where to buy.
Still, you will capture more search traffic when you create
- Awareness stage content that highlights your customers’ problems,
- Consideration stage content that compares different types of solutions, and
- Retention stage content that provides answers to frequently asked questions about your product or service.
Content designed for social is content that others want to share. This content may belong to any stage of the journey. The important characteristic is that rather than focusing on a particular brand or product it provides something worth sharing. Shareable content may
- Present new research,
- Give access to otherwise unavailable data,
- Include interesting graphics, provide templates, wizards, or quizzes, or
- Connect to current events and trends.
Filling your content gaps ensures your customers will move along their customer journey. They will also spend more time on your site and be more likely to convert into customers.
Your content gaps will be unique to your business and your audience. You may discover you need more content for a particular journey stage, or you need to improve the content you have to keep the traffic flowing.
“First, you optimize for sales. Second, you optimize for search. Third, you optimize for social.”
George B. Thomas
To reiterate, you should build content for the customer journey from the inside out. Make sure you fill the gaps in the Conversion and Consideration journey stages first.
We’ve already discussed that this content will be of most help to your existing website visitors and your sales team. This video provides another explanation for why Conversion and Consideration content are good investments for growing your audience: you are already an expert in these areas.
5. Cobomba makes creating your content highway easier
Losing prospects because you don’t have the right website content is the worst. But it is easy for content gaps to sneak under the radar. Many companies are unaware of the missing content along the customer journey. This leads to missed opportunities.
You have the responsibility to bridge this gap in your organization. Still, it takes a ton of work to audit your current content, research content topics, and get new content out the door.
Consider Cobomba as one solution for knowing and then closing your content highway gaps.
Cobomba measures the relevance, discoverability, and value of your content. We can show you which audience questions need more attention, which content needs more help being found by your audience, and how well your content is helping your audience move through their customer journey.
Our customers receive detailed content briefs with specific recommendations to highlight your best-performing content, improve relevant but underperforming content, and create new content to fill topic gaps.
We take those recommendations and produce the first draft for your content with the help of AI writing tools.
You will have a headstart on the topics to post about on your blog and on social media when Cobomba identifies gaps in your content and then helps you fill them. You will systematically improve the relevance, discoverability, and performance of your content.
Considering Cobomba?
Most marketers spend too much time researching the content they create and still end up guessing about what will work. Cobomba software uses AI to identify and then track every question your marketing content needs to answer. You receive new content recommendations and first drafts of content every month so you create your content in a flash and attract customers to your company.
You can see for yourself. Request your free content audit today.
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