How do you match content to your buyer's journey?

Don't just look at demographics. Dive deep into the minds of your ideal customers; empathize with their struggles, aspirations, and desires to create content that truly speaks their language.

Effective Buyer Persona Research: Social Listening: Monitor unfiltered conversations for audience insights. Shadowing & Immersion: Immerse in customers' worlds, discover behaviors. Empathy Mapping: Visualize customer feelings, thoughts, actions. Customer Service Collaboration: Gather feedback, pain points. Online Community Exploration: Engage for unique perspectives. Competitor Analysis: Study competitors' customers, reviews. User-Generated Content: Explore reviews, social media. Offline Networking: Connect at events for insights. Customer Journey Mapping: Identify touchpoints, pain points. Data Augmentation: Use third-party data for broader view.

If you can recite the name of every one of your current customers, don't do this. Instead, create content for one specific person. Identify a client you like, and make content that solves their existing problems. Or make content that reflects on how you've solved their previous problems. Or make content that they are likely to share. If you don't have a client, stop. Don't try to match content to your buyer's journey (you don't have a buyer yet!) Find the person you want to serve, and the problems they have that you would love to solve. Make content about those.

A buyer's journey is a convenient fiction for the boardrooms of large companies. Its a messy complicated thing presented in a format suitable for a 30 minute discussion. If you're actually trying to make content for your buyers, the buyer's journey fiction is useless. I mean, you should understand that they have different stages, but if you don't have a budget to segment by stage, then the stages don't matter. Instead, understand one specific client or buyer, and what specific stage they are in, right now. Make content for that stage. Over time, you'll create the right content to cover nearly every stage. You don't need a map. Just get started.

Remember, the buyer's journey is not a one-size-fits-all path; stay agile and adapt your content strategy as your audience evolves and their needs change.

This is a fiction presented by Tech Target and Google to promote Adwords in 2011, and it became doctrine when Hubspot repackaged it as an ebook. Testimonials and reviews work at every stage of the funnel: this is why sites like Clutch and G2 succeed. Webinars offer salaried employees a plausible reason to be sitting at their desk, watching a screen, disengaged, rather than doing more meaningful work. If your buyers work from home, these might get a lot of registrations but you won't have a lot of engagement. There are two types of content that matter: 1. Content that helps your buyer get closer to solving their problem 2. Content that gets you in front of your buyer with positive vibes Whenever possible, combine the two.

If you are in the B2B space, SEO is not your winning tactic as of 2023. Google is rapidly changing search result pages to integrate Bard and fend off OpenAI, and this disrupts the entire model where SEO was a winning strategy. Yes, you should do some work to make your content more relevant for the algorithms. But increasingly this looks more like cross posting on different channels, and less like trying to win the SEO game.

Embrace the power of A/B testing; experiment with different content formats and headlines to discover what truly sets your audience's hearts on fire. And, while you're at it, stay curious and listen to the data whispers; uncover hidden patterns and insights to fine-tune your content for maximum impact and engagement.

This is BigCo tactical advice. Good, effective content marketing does not look like a piece of bait on the end of a fish hook. Effective content marketing looks more like a repackaged version of your paid product. Content is the free version of your product or service, to share with customers who don't trust you enough to pay for your product or service. "Measure and improve" sounds nice, but if your content is solving problems for your clients, you are improving their lives, and that is the goal. If you write another listicle and hope its going to get ranked in Google? Unless your product is a time machine that takes us all back to 2013, this is going to fail. Sorry.