How to create content for every stage of the buyer's journey
One of the rookie mistakes a writer can make is creating content for everyone and no one in particular. Even I made such a blunder many times early on. However, the rule of content marketing is that writers focus on a target audience and create content for that audience.
Whether you’re a B2B or D2C marketer, chances are you’ll be tasked with writing content that promotes your company’s product or service, if that hasn’t already happened. In that case, you want to keep in mind that your goal is twofold: create content that aligns with what your target buyer wants, no matter where they are in their journey, and guide them down a path to purchase.
In this article, you will learn the importance of the buyer’s journey in marketing, the main stages of the buyer’s journey, and effective techniques to write content for every stage of your ideal buyer’s journey.
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Why is the buyer’s journey important in marketing?
The buyer’s journey describes a person’s entire experience from when they become problem-aware to the point where they become a brand customer.
How do you envision your ideal customer buying from you? Maybe something like this: a freelance marketer has a problem— they want a reliable and fast international payment provider for their freelance business. The marketer searches online, sees your website, visits it, and registers for your solution in a matter of minutes.
It sounds straightforward and less stressful, but this scenario seldom plays out like that in the real world where the average person spends nearly 7 hours a day on the internet browsing through social media, blog posts, short videos, podcasts, etcetera.
Far from simple or predictable, the modern buyer journey is a chaotic landscape with different solutions competing for the interests of prospects. A good grasp of the buyer's journey gives insight into the minds of your prospects and a roadmap for their decision-making process. It helps you to:
Create valuable content that directs your buyer to your company’s product or service.
Optimize your marketing efforts.
Build customer-brand relationships.
Identify opportunities for your customers and brands.
What are the main stages of the buyer’s journey?
In traditional marketing, a buyer is said to be on three stages in their journey namely, awareness, consideration and decision. However, in today’s digital environs, even after a one-time purchase, the buyer can easily switch from one brand to another. In other words, a buyer’s journey doesn’t end with a purchase.
As a marketer, it means that your end goal is not only about getting new customers but turning them into repeat customers. So for this reason, our main stages of the buyer’s journey will include the retention stage.
1. Awareness
Here is the beginning of the buyer’s journey. They’re aware of their problem and are searching to understand it and find a solution. What terms do they use to describe their problem? Where are they actively searching for a solution?
Going back to our earlier example of an ideal buyer, our freelancer has trouble receiving payment from their international clients. So they go online to enter search queries like “How can I receive payment from clients abroad?” or “Which international payment providers serve country X?”
Your goal at this point will be to create content that identifies their pain point and educates them on that specific problem. Though your efforts may not directly lead to conversion, they will gain the buyer’s trust and establish your brand as a thought leader.
2. Consideration
At this stage, your potential buyer is weighing potential solutions that are available to them. They’re comparing different products and services to determine the right fit.
The freelance marketer may enter search queries like “Best international payment providers for freelancers in X” or “Which payment platform is better, Cleva vs Grey?”
This is the ideal time to create content that shows you understand what they hope to achieve from the solution they’re looking for, and the options they’re evaluating. Your goal is to demonstrate how your product can best solve their problem.
3. Decision
The buyer is aware of their problem and they’ve heard or read about your product. But the thing is, they also know your competitors exist.
Credit card in hand, your prospect may be ready to buy but still hesitate because of concerns like pricing, uncertainty about your product's performance, doubt about your company’s reliability, and so on.
In the case of the freelance marketer, they’ve decided on using Cleva so the search query may be “Pros and cons of using Cleva” or “What are the fees for deposits?” Your aim is to minimize the buyer’s hesitation with content that will address possible reasons holding them back.
4. Retention
It’s one thing to finally get your ideal buyer to purchase your product, it’s another thing to make them keep coming.
One study estimates that businesses stand a 60-70% chance of selling to an existing customer but a 5-20% probability of selling to a new customer. The numbers are clear on the importance of satisfying existing customers.
Thinking that your content efforts stop at the decision stage because you’ve got your buyers could be like prematurely counting your eggs before they’re hatched. Why? Because customer churn is a real thing and your buyers are not obligated to stick to your product no matter how great and affordable it is. Not if they find it difficult to use or just don’t feel valued.
Creating content for retention purposes shows that you care about your existing customers and are still committed to providing them with the best experience. It’s a warm way to build brand loyalty because you see your customers as humans, not mere statistics.
At this point, the freelance marketer has selected Cleva as their financial partner for international payments. Apart from a seamless onboarding process, Cleva has to deliver continuous value to keep their new customer satisfied and loyal to their brand. The company could design a referral program to inspire happy customers to recommend their service to friends and family.
Just like we have in this image:
💡 PRO TIP: Rather than view the phases of the buyer’s journey as a rigid formula, think of it as a guide for creating relevant content. One reason is that the buyer’s journey may not always be linear or progressive.
A buyer can enter any phase at any time, consume information from any stage, move back and forth among different stages, get stuck or even exit the journey without purchasing anything. According to Mike Lieberman and Eric Keiles, Co-founders of Square 2 Marketing, the buyer’s journey is no longer linear but cyclical.
What to know before you create content for each stage of the buyer’s journey
1. Know your customer
Aisha Owolabi, Founder of Smarketers Hub and a content marketer herself, weighs in on the importance of researching your audience. She says,
“You can’t sell to people you don’t know. When you understand their needs and map out the buyer’s journey, you can then focus on educating your audience about their problems with relevant content on the channels they care about.”
Before you write, you need to understand who you’re selling to, their pains, when they realized they needed a solution, and how they found you. To get this data, it’s a good idea to go to where your audience usually hangs out.
Are they more active on Reddit, Quora, TikTok, Instagram, or Facebook/WhatsApp/Telegram/Slack communities? Find out what topics they discuss and the language they use to describe their problems. Check for common questions, complaints, or desires.
Once you've identified these patterns, you'll have a clearer picture of your buyer's needs and how they express them.
2. Know your product
Lashay Lewis, Founder of Authority Plug and a long-time content strategist, shares her three-step methods of understanding a product’s use cases. They are:
Consolidate product use cases— Identifying and grouping all the potential ways customers can use a product.
Separate them by ideal customer profile (ICP)— Arranging them based on the different types of users who would benefit most from each use case.
Understand how they use the product contextually— Exploring how prospects may interact with the product in their daily lives to understand the product's role in users' routines, challenges, and goals.
To put things into perspective, the following images show how to build content around a product and its users. The product is a language-learning app with different categories of users.
And this:
Credit to Lashay Lewis because I borrowed this inspiration from her insightful use case mapping chart.
It’s worth saying that you may not have all the answers about the ideal buyer’s persona, how they interact with the product or which features resonate with them the most, and that’s okay. Lean on your team to help out. If you have to, chat with those in product, sales, and even IT to get the answers you need.
3. Know your brand
If you don’t understand what your company does, it will reflect in your content and you won’t get it to perform as you desire it to. So be fully plugged into everything your brand does.
Is yours a niche market? You should be able to explain in simple terms your brand’s core mission, your target audience, your competitors, and how your brand’s solution compares with theirs.
How do you write content for the buyer’s journey?
1. Create a buyer’s persona
You’ll need to analyze existing customer information and conduct surveys or interviews on how users interact with your product. Based on the feedback, segment your audience using selected criteria that include demographics, lifestyle, purchasing behavior, personality traits, region, etc.
Analyze each segment to identify interests, characteristics and challenges unique to them. Then, use the data to develop detailed profiles of your ideal customers within each segment.
It requires understanding a bit of customer psychology to do this.
2. Create the right content
Good marketers know that creating content is not about them but about their customers. In her book, Everybody Writes, Ann Handley says, the only people your content needs to please are your readers.
“If the customer loves your content, so will your boss or client. But the inverse isn’t necessarily true: if only your boss loves it, it won't achieve what your organization needs it to do.”
Here are two processes that can help you to create the right content for your buyer’s journey:
a. Understand search intent
Search intent is the reason someone goes online to search for something.
It could be to get knowledge about a topic (informational), to look for a particular site (navigational), to make a purchase (transactional) or to explore and compare products (commercial). According to Backlinko, 99% of search terms fall within these four intent categories.
To say that Google cares about search intent is like saying the sky is blue. So if your buyer’s journey content doesn’t satisfy search intent, Google won’t bring up your page to where your prospects can easily find you.
Here are 3 ways to understand search intent:
Use keyword research tools to identify search terms your prospects are using to find solutions to their problem.
Use analytic tools to track your site performance to see where visitors spend their time, the actions they take, or the questions they ask your chatbot.
Analyze the SERPs, including the people also ask feature, for top-ranking pages with your target keywords and think of unique angles that set you apart.
Speak directly with current customers on improvements they’d like to see, challenges they face, and how you can better serve them.
b. Conduct keyword research
Let’s say you work for a company whose target audience is marketers in the early stages of their careers. One notable problem most new marketers have is building a portfolio without experience.
The search intent for the ideal buyer at this awareness phase is not to buy your paid marketing portfolio template but to find information on how to design a marketing portfolio without having any experience.
So when creating content for this stage of the buyer’s journey, you want to look for niche topics around “marketing portfolio with no experience”. You can use free tools like Moz Keyword Explorer, Google Keyword Planner, and Free Keyword Research Tool to know how your target audience is searching.
On Moz’s SEO platform, you’ll find something like this:
On Ryan Robinson’s keyword research tool, this is what you’ll get:
Depending on the keyword tool you choose, select the most relevant keywords that match your target audience’s needs.
3. Select the content type for each stage
Content that speaks to everyone and no one is a waste of resources and buyers’ time. But, when you understand the buyer's intent and where they are in their journey, it helps you identify the content that will be most effective and engaging at each stage.
Consider the following stages of the buyer’s journey and how they align with different content types.
1. Awareness stage is where you make your buyer aware of their problem and help them articulate their pain point in a frank yet empathetic manner.
You may choose top of the funnel (TOFU) content format such as:
Blog posts: This is where you explain the buyer’s problems through how-to articles, listicles, or opinion pieces. Blog posts can also be effective in the consideration and retention stages.
Audio/visual content: Educational podcasts and explainer videos are effective for those who prefer their content in this format.
Social ads: Well-crafted ads placed in the right channel can attract prospective customers to your brand and product.
2. Consideration stage is where you present alternatives to your product and create content that highlights your product’s unique value proposition.
You focus on middle-of-the-funnel (MOFU) content that includes:
Product comparison guides: You can create several in-depth posts (written or video) that highlight similar products and emphasize why yours is better. The comparison could be in pricing, use cases, functionality, smooth onboarding or customer support.
To strengthen brand trust, you can also write detailed pros and cons of your product.
E-books: Depending on your niche market, ebooks are useful for explaining complex topics that educate the buyer and position your company as an industry expert.
Case studies: These provide real-life examples of how your solution has met the needs and goals of customers.
Webinars: To educate your audience and establish your brand as a thought leader.
3. Decision stage is where you convince your ideal buyers that your product is the best solution to their problem.
Bottom-of-the-funnel (BOFU) content works best for this stage and retention stage. They include:
User-generated content: Create video content, in which existing customers share positive experiences of how your product or service is improving their lives or businesses. Nothing builds trust faster than seeing respectable people speak highly of a product you’re considering buying.
Demo: This gives your prospects a taste of the benefits open to them if they buy what you’re selling.
4. Retention stage is where you keep your existing customers satisfied and engaged with your product to ensure they continue using it over the long term.
Educational content: Publish tutorials on how new customers can use the product.
Newsletter: Keep them engaged with relevant content that may include news about events, changes in the company, or product launches.
Interactive community: Create a safe environment where users and prospects can interact with one another, share their concerns, and feel valued.
Loyalty program: Reward existing customers with loyalty programs, referral bonuses and incentives.
Once you’ve figured out the right content to create for the right stage, ensure that you maintain some consistency in your efforts. Having a content calendar allows you to stay on top of things. You can use Smarketer’s Hub free content calendar template to publish, track and manage your content activities.
Tips to remember during and after creating the buyer’s journey content
Analyze content performance and adapt: If you’re not getting good results from your content, pull back and restrategize. According to Aisha Owolabi, don’t be afraid to think outside the box and mix and match initiatives to get the attention of your target audience.
Refresh and update your buyer’s persona: Think of your persona as a dynamic individual whose desires, attitudes, and interests could change depending on their circumstance. Regularly monitor customer data for changing trends and habits, and tweak your ideal customer profile.
Include clear and actionable calls to action: For every piece of content, add clear CTAs that match the stage of the buyer’s journey so they know what to do next.
Beyond content creation, what’s next?
As a marketer, you want to write content that matches your buyer’s journey at every point and leads them to buy what you’re selling.
But here’s where it could get tricky. Be careful not to assume you can cover, nor should you try to cover the buyer’s entire journey with one piece. You may create multiple pieces of content that align with different stages because your potential customers will be at multiple stages in their journey.
Beyond creating content that satisfies the buyer’s search intent, you should also care about content distribution across the right channels and site optimization to improve user experience.
You may need to also look inward to see areas of improvement. Is your website mobile-friendly and optimized for speed? How attractive is your landing page? Can your signup process be easier? Is your customer support responsive and helpful?
Getting these answers will help you plan an effective content strategy for getting your ideal buyer to choose your product over hundreds of others.
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