If a user comes to your site to find high-level information on how to solve their problem, it’s not always realistic to expect that they’ll also be ready to make a purchase right away. Think of it as a business partnership. Two relative strangers have one meeting and then sign docs to be business partners the next day. It could happen, but…unlikely.
Therefore, content created for that type of person should be focused on other goals beyond selling. “Let me convince you” — type content that’s provided too early in the prospect’s decision-making journey may very likely turn them away from your company. On the other hand, making sure the selling content is placed where it’s supposed to be and in the right quantities is crucial for your business.
So, what’s the solution? What can you do to increase the likelihood that the content you’re creating, publishing, and promoting will speak to your intended audience, at the appropriate time and in the appropriate way?
Content mapping is your answer.
In this post, we’ll review:
We also created a content mapping template to help you easily make a content map of your own.
Download the Free Content Mapping Template Bundle
Discover 5 templates to help you build a high-performing and customer-centric content map.
Content mapping is a strategic approach to creating helpful, relevant, informative, and timely content for your intended audience. In other words, it’s a process focused on delivering the right content, to the right people, at the right time, and in a way that matches the reader’s intent. Content mapping can be helpful in identifying gaps and opportunities in your content strategy.
One of the most important components of content mapping involves the creation of buyer personas for different members of your audience (e.g., decision-maker vs. influencer) and their different stages of awareness and interest.
Creating a content map is usually the responsibility of whoever oversees the content program within your organization. Their titles might include Content Director, Content Strategist, Content Marketer, or Generalist Marketing Manager.
Content mapping can help ensure you’re getting the most out of every piece of content that’s being created for your company. It also helps you eliminate content that doesn’t serve a clear purpose.
With the content mapping process implemented, you’ll be sure that:
Here are some helpful steps and best practices for creating your own content map.
Before you can map out your content, it’s important to first have clear descriptions for two key pillars of your content marketing strategy:
In this step, the question to ask yourself is: how does your content strategy tie back to the goal or goals of your company? Your content strategy might help you deliver the exact content that answers readers’ doubts, and so they purchase your product.
Here’s an example of how the business purpose might be formulated:
The main purpose of our content marketing strategy is to develop a culture of consumption and to eventually convert our subscribers into the actual users of the platform. Although the short-term goal is about building the subscription base and communicating the need to actually use this product type, the overall purpose of the blog is to nurture loyal buyers that will keep using our platform.
As an example:
With our content marketing strategy, we help people working in HR enhance their people management skills so that they can help their companies adjust to the changing work environment.
A content marketing statement essentially entails clear, concise answers to the following questions:
Content mapping success starts with knowing who your target audience is. This knowledge helps you connect with their needs, interests, and concerns and, ultimately, create content that addresses them.
Here are some ways to research and segment your target audience.
Use surveys, interviews, focus groups with your customers, and your actual CRM to gain a better understanding of their experience using your product or service.
It’s important to make sure you have direct interactions with your customers, e.g., in the form of in-depth interviews, especially if you offer high-consideration products (e.g., B2B).
After you’ve gathered some real client data, you can segment it into sections. For example:
Google Analytics’ Audience report account can give you detailed insights into your audience, including:
Need more guidance on Google Analytics and how to find and evaluate audience data? Our Beginner’s Definitive Guide to Google Analytics can help.
Social media can be another good way to dive deeper into your audience, even if they’re not yet customers.
Facebook Audience Insights, for example, can be a great starting point for understanding your audience’s demographic profile and other pages they like on Facebook.
“Reader” and “buyer” personas are generalizations of your ideal readers and customers. They are an important part of content mapping because they help you understand these people better and deliver a more targeted message tailored to the specific needs and behaviors of different groups.
Depending on your business, you can have at least one, two, or more audiences that you’re looking to reach. Your reader doesn’t need to be a potential buyer; the “reader” and “buyer” personas may not be the same.
For example, if you organize events, and you write good guides to event planning, virtual events, creating an event budget, etc., not only your potential clients will be reading them. There also might be party entertainers or other specialists. Build trust with them too, because they can recommend their clients cooperate with you.
Note, people tend to rely on their imagination when creating a profile, but relying on actual analytical data is always more effective. With this in mind, make your personas based on the research you’ve done in the previous steps.
Here are some useful characteristics to consider including in your persona profiles:
To make this step easier for you, we’ve developed a persona profile template.
Once you’ve gathered data for your personas, use our Free Semrush Persona tool with pre-created customizable templates.
Now it’s time to think about how your brand can help your audience fulfill their needs and how your content marketing mission fits there.
The brand story explains your “why”: why you are creating content, who you are helping, and how you will help them in a way no one else can. In other words, it’s about the value you provide with your product/service and your content.
Think about the following items when writing your brand story:
After writing the above down, think about some of the core elements that will affect your content:
A customer journey outlines the buying/decision-making process of your customers. Think about the steps that your audiences are going through on their journey, including their actions and emotions.
Let’s say their journey starts with the idea of wearing trendy clothes. In this case, the first step would be to search “fashion trends.”
Think more about what is behind this action:
Each stage of your audience’s journey should correspond to the type of content you’re developing for them. We’ll talk about this soon.
According to our Content Marketing Funnel Study, 50% of surveyed marketers think that encouraging users to move through the funnel is one of the most challenging tasks when building a funnel. The vast majority (87%) of respondents guide their prospects through different buyer journey stages using content.
To help your visitors convert into customers, you should implement content for each stage of the buyer’s journey.
When it comes to creating a funnel strategy, it is commonly believed that there are three main stages of the funnel:
In this stage, you’d be looking to attract the audience’s attention. Here, they start realizing they have a problem and start researching a solution. They have no idea that you’re offering a solution for their problem so far. Your goal is to reach out to these consumers and help them address their concerns and questions (e.g., think ‘informational’ keywords).
In this stage, your readers have a clear understanding of their problem and are actively looking for a solution. They might even be comparing different solution providers at this point. So, you’d want to share content that’s more product-oriented.
In this stage, readers have mapped their strategy for solving their problem and are now ready to make the decision. This is a good place for you to prove you can be the one to meet their needs and answer all potential questions they might have about your solution.
At each stage, user intent is different. Therefore, you need to clarify what content will satisfy the informational needs of your potential customers at a specific step.
Here’s a quick summary of what the study has to say about the effectiveness of different types of content at these stages.
According to 72% of marketers, “how-to” guides attract the most attention here, then infographics (28%), checklists (27%), and ebooks (26%). As for the most effective channel for bringing in traffic, it’s not surprising to have organic search here (70%). Social media (60%) and email marketing (54%) are also very effective.
This data might be explained by the fact that when creating guides optimized for SEO and solving a specific readers’ problem, you show that you are an expert in the field and bring value to your audience.
When generating leads, “how-to” guides and organic traffic remain the most effective format (44%) and channel (69%). Also, product overviews (40%), case studies (34%), and landing pages (31%) come in handy.
When it comes to lead nurturing, email marketing (72%) is the most popular, followed by success stories (43%) and product overviews (38%).
At this step, your goal is to accompany the reader from an initial idea to an in-depth understanding of how your solution helps. That is why product-related content in various forms works well at this stage.
51% of marketers surveyed use product overviews, 49% rely on customer reviews, 43% success stories, 30% use cases, and 25% case studies.
As for the channels, 73% consider email marketing as an effective way to keep the purchase moving forward. Organic search (61%) is the second most efficient channel that brings payments, followed by paid advertising (47%).
Here, customer-generated and case-oriented content are some of the most effective types that help build trust, position your brand as superior to competitors, answer users’ very specific questions, and accelerate the purchase.
Regardless of statistics, there may be other content formats that work better for you in your situation. Consider your specific situation, industry, and personas.
The questions that will bring you closer to understanding what content to use at different funnel stages:
According to the Content Marketing Funnel Study mentioned earlier, 88% of marketers decide what content to create based on keyword research, while 49% rely on in-house knowledge and experience. They use content audits and interviews with sales/customer support teams to decide on future content.
Here are some excellent tactics, including referring to the previous steps, to help you identify the key themes you’d like to cover with your content:
Once you have the list of main topics, go deeper. Content clusters are a way to dive into the subjects that your pillar content has only touched upon. Moreover, they are good for SEO.
Technically, content clusters correlate with сontent hubs on your website — destinations on your site containing pages about a certain topic.
Once you’ve identified general topics to target and gathered them into clusters, you can go deeper into keyword research with the Keyword Magic Tool. Enter your target keyword as a “seed keyword,” find keywords that are easy to target and relevant to your site using the Keyword Difficulty filter, review the keywords and add relevant ones to your list.
To help you reach your target audience, include promoting the content through various channels and media formats to attract the right kind of traffic.
Specific channels can be divided into three broad categories:
Choose the distribution channels depending on:
Connect all the previous steps in an editorial calendar. It should be the most accurate reflection of all of your content and consider:
Download the Content Mapping Template to access the free Content Calendar Template.
Finally, what statistics will you use to measure the results?
Conducting Content Marketing Funnel research, we discovered that marketers choose different metrics to measure content effectiveness at different stages:
These insights can help you measure each content piece’s results. As for your content map, there also must be some reference points. For example, generate 200 leads coming from the blog posts in the next four months with a budget of $5000.
Choose one of the goal-setting frameworks like SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-Bound) or CLEAR (Collaborative, Limited, Emotional, Appreciable, and Refinable) to help you achieve them.
Marketing Calendar — a multi-tool calendar that has built-in task management. You can map out all your campaigns’ actions and processes in the calendar, and it allows for team collaboration.
Topic Research — a tool helping content writers and strategists find the list of related subtopics and ideas for new articles based on their “seed” keyword.
SurveyMonkey — a tool to conduct customer surveys on a regular basis, connect with customers where they are, discover insights.
Google Analytics — a tool to help people understand what visitors are doing on their website, track and analyze your audience.
Facebook Audience Insights — a report from Facebook that gives you deep information about your followers and fans. Other social media analytics (LinkedIn, Twitter, etc.) are also important to track if you are present on those platforms.
ImpactHero is an automated tool that maps your content to customer journey stages, providing actionable insights and recommendations to improve your content performance.
Content mapping is an essential part of developing your content strategy. Build a content map that focuses on your personas, funnel stages, and use research to understand better where your audience is and what interests them.
To speed up the process, use the Content Mapping template pack we created for you, which includes the following items:
Download the Free Content Mapping Template Bundle
Discover 5 templates to help you document your content strategy and make it more customer-centric.
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