Have you bought a tub of ice cream on impulse? We’re all guilty of that.
Ever bought a laptop without checking its features and reviews a hundred times? I’m sure you haven’t.
The intent and journey to both of these purchases vary hugely. A successful sales plan starts with knowing your buyer’s journey and providing content based on their goal.
People rarely land on your website and buy what you offer right away. 71% didn’t know the solution when they first used Google. They start with a generic search.
They won’t search for your brand unless they already know it, and that’s hardly the case.
You need content created to cater to each stage of the buyer’s journey so you meet your readers at their buying stage.
How can you create content for the buyer’s journey, and how will it align with your buyer’s stage? This article answers all your questions.
You’ll get:
- An understanding of the buyer’s journey
- The content format used for the different stages of the buyer’s journey
- Ways to map content to the buyer’s journey
Understanding The Buyer’s Journey: What’s It Made Of?
It’s the process of a reader going from an unaware stage to making the buying decision and becoming your customer.
It has three essential stages. Let’s see what each stage is using an example:
Awareness stage, aka “I’m facing a problem”
Let’s meet Mark, an HR professional at a multinational corporate firm. Recently, he’s observed a dip in employee performance in his branch. He can’t seem to find the root cause, so he turns to Google and asks, “Reasons for decreasing employee performance.”
He gets a list of articles discussing the problems employees face that cause a lack of performance. After reading several of them, he narrows down the problem to poor mental health and sleep cycle due to excess work.
Currently, Mark is in the awareness stage. He’s become aware of his problem and wants to explore and learn more about it.
Brands create informational and educational content to meet their readers at the awareness stage. Since this stage doesn’t have a buying intent, the focus is to provide educational value to the readers so they can find a solution.
Consideration stage, aka “How do I solve it?”
After finding the cause of his problem, Mark naturally searches for ways to fix it. He knows the pain point; what remains now is narrowing down the best way to solve it.
As an HR professional, he may research strategies to help his employees relax. Google may show him webinar ideas that he can conduct at work or a guide that explains ways to reduce overwork without affecting output.
This is also when he’ll start noticing some repetitive brand names offering solutions to help him give the “Aha” moment (when he finds exactly what he needs to fix the problem).
The consideration stage is just that: considering all possible solutions and landing on the right fit.
At this stage, the brands work on guiding their potential buyers as they explore their options and evaluate different solutions for their problems.
Decision stage, aka “What’s the right solution for my problem?”
Going back to the HR example, now that Mark’s found the best solution for his problem, say a platform that conducts webinars for stress management and offers mobile apps to track work hours, what comes next is finding the best provider for this service.
It’s when he vets every brand he comes across in the earlier stages before he makes the final purchase decision.
In the decision stage, brands aim to smooth the readers’ journey from knowing them to becoming customers. They’ll try to make choosing them the best decision you make. The best content strategy offers a frictionless ride for buyers.
Important Note: Unaware stage
Awareness is not always the first stage of the buyer’s journey. Mark knew he had a problem, but what about those who don’t know they’re in the middle of one?
These people make up the majority of the buyers’ pool.
Getting into the awareness stage comes after they come across your content. It could be through an ad, a social media post, or an article on search engines. They can even hear about you from your existing customers.
Whatever the channel, if your content doesn’t target this group, you’re missing out on a great opportunity.
The best way to convert these people from the unaware stage to the awareness stage:
Do surveys to find the first touchpoints of your customers, leads, and audience with your content. What was the first time they heard about you when they didn’t know a problem existed?
That’s your guide to creating content that meets your unaware audience at their first touchpoint. Deduce the percentage of customers you’ll tackle in the unaware stage and spend content efforts accordingly.
How Do You Create Content For The Buyer’s Journey?
The key is understanding what content the buyer needs the most. And the search intent holds the answer.
Let’s see how we can create that:
Create buyer persona
To begin with, we need a buyer’s persona. This is a “fictitious person” to whom you attribute the characteristics of your potential buyer. It’s impossible to sell if you don’t know to whom you’re selling, right?
A buyer’s persona ensures you don’t sell to everyone, ultimately bringing no sales.
You give this persona a name, gender, age, occupation, and qualifications and determine its demographics. As this persona stands for your entire audience, it helps you predict the problems they face and what solutions you can use.
Here’ how you can gather information to create a buyer persona:
- Be where they are: Join Facebook groups, Instagram communities, forums, and other networking platforms to collect inside discussions. They’re a treasure trove for marketers.
- Surveys: Question your existing audience. Draw patterns of how their journey and interaction with your brand.
- Divide your audience into groups: As we discussed in the beginning, not every buyer has the same intent. A freelancer might buy Slack to communicate with clients, while a startup will use it for large-scale collaboration and extensive integrations. Dividing your audience according to intent also helps map the content to the buyer’s journey.
| Suggested reading: How to do content research
Once you have a buyer persona, you know how to create content for each stage.
Tailoring Content for the Awareness Stage
Let’s continue with the example of the corporate HR Mark. When he realizes a problem, he searches for reasons for poor employee performance. He learns about the various reasons the company is failing its employees due to poor work-life management.
At this stage, Mark wants to learn more about the problem to build a more complete picture. He’ll spend most of the time researching and confirming his theories rather than actively looking for solutions. The content in this stage is inclined towards educating the buyers, not selling to them.
Characteristics of the awareness stage buyer mindset:
- They are just identifying challenges or goals, often prompted by pain points, curiosities, or changes in their circumstances.
- Their knowledge of the problem space and potential solutions is limited.
- They are open to learning but may not yet appreciate the value of specific products/services.
- Their searches tend to be broad, focusing on high-level topic introductions and definitions.
For this stage, we need:
- Educational Blog Posts/Articles
- Infographics
- eBooks/White Papers
- Video Content
- Podcasts
- Social media posts
The main channels buyers discover you through will be:
- Website Traffic
- SEO
- Organic social traffic
When developing awareness-stage content, keep these best practices in mind:
- Focus on Problems, Not Solutions
- Use an Educational, Unbiased Tone
- Optimize for Search Intent
- Offer Next Steps and Calls-to-Action
Engaging Buyers in the Consideration Stage
After researching, Mark concludes that he needs a program that offers constant guidance and assistance and a regular employee check. He finds apps and platforms that provide this for organizations.
As he goes about finding how these tools bring results, he’ll read:
- Live interactions
- Expert guides
- FAQs and Solution Pages
- Webinars and workshops
- E-books
At this stage, the buyers are still not ready to buy. They’re considering whether it’s worthwhile to invest in the solution and whether it will solve the problem.
The focus should be creating informative content that answers all questions first and foremost, with no gatekeeping.
Brands mostly create content highlighting how they’ve successfully helped other buyers and show how they’re better than their competitors.
Strategies for Effective Consideration Content:
- Highlight Unique Value Proposition: Go beyond surface-level features to articulate how your solution uniquely resolves the buyer’s core concerns better than the competition.
- Address Common Questions/Objections: Don’t shy away from tough subjects like pricing, weaknesses, or implementation roadblocks. Transparency builds trust.
- Use Storytelling and Social Proof: Real-world examples, case studies from existing customers, and data-driven insights make the value you offer tangible.
- User-Generated Content: Leverage your user community’s reviews, testimonials, and crowdsourced insight to lend third-party credibility.
Converting Prospects in the Decision Stage
Thanks to the crystal-clear information you provided earlier, your buyers are now ready to purchase.
You’ve overcome their fear and indecision, so they’re ready to give you their card details, right? Not yet. It doesn’t end here. You now need to make them trust you as the best solution.
What you need now is content that displays your authority:
- Case studies
- Reviews
- Expert guides
- Free samples
- Consultations
- Product demos
- Testimonials
These content types ensure you clear any remaining obstacles. Your website, email marketing, and chat support play crucial roles in providing buyers with a frictionless path ahead.
Best Practices for Decision-Stage Content:
- Clear Calls-to-Action: Every decision-stage asset should funnel toward branded, straightforward CTAs that make it seamless for buyers to request pricing, schedule a consultation, start a trial, or simply purchase.
- Leverage Social Proof: From customer logos and testimonial spotlights to integration badges and security certifications, reinforce credibility with third-party validation.
- Emphasize After-Sale Support: Buyers want confidence that they’ll receive ongoing assistance and service even after becoming customers. Highlight your product training, tech support, customer success programs, and robust knowledge bases.
- Convey Unique Value: Differentiate your offering by doubling down on your unique strengths, innovations, and key differentiators that set you apart from alternatives. Use success metrics that quantify superiority.
- Speak to Decision-Maker Roles: In B2B contexts, develop content tracks for distinct personas, such as executives, technical evaluators, sales leaders, etc.
Mapping Your Content to The Buyer’s Journey: Understanding Buyer Psychology
Content and intent are like peanut butter and jelly. You can’t have one without the other.
Intent determines how you map your content throughout the buyer’s journey. Whatever content format you have—blog posts, guides, ebooks, videos—where to place it is determined by what the buyer intends.
Consider the topic of” Web Hosting.” Every buyer’s decision is never based on a single intent.
As in the table, the intent shows different stages of the buyer’s journey and different content formats. Note that for the same intent, the content format changed when the buyer moved forward in the journey.
What you need now is conducting a content audit as it helps with:
- Identifying the intent you missed to target.
- Defining your goal for each content piece.
- Mapping content to where it belongs.
- Identifying touch points for new buyers.
| Suggested Reading: Strategies for Reviving Your Blog Posts
Buyers vs Customers: How to Retain Customers?
Buyer’s journey is just the beginning. Once buyers have made a purchase, they enter your customer cycle, and retaining customers requires different methods than what it needs to nurture buyers throughout their journey.
Your customers already know the benefits of your product, so they don’t need a second convincing. They need you to take it a notch higher and make them see that their decision was right. According to Harvard Business Review, increasing customer retention by 5% leads to a 25%-95% profit increase.
Content you need for retaining customers:
- Updates and upgrades
- 1:1 consultations
- Tutorials
- Customized guides
- Incentives and recognition programs
- Private forums
- Knowledge bases
- Interactive webinars for peer-to-peer support
- Customer spotlight videos/stories on innovative use cases
Two examples stand out for me when it comes to customer retention content.
First is my favorite email marketing tool, ConvertKit. You receive a recap email of all the customer-support content they publish every week—case studies, YouTube customer spotlight videos, and guides—so you get what you need and learn new ways of developing your business.
I recently purchased a theme toolkit from Envato Elements, and I love the free theme upgrades they send me every month.
Customer retention content varies hugely from the content for the buyer’s journey, but it’s equally important that your content strategy is incomplete without it.
Though not part of the buyer’s journey, optimize your customer retention content, as retaining ten customers is easier than converting one lead.
One-size-fits-all content fails to resonate in our hyper-personalized world. 72% of consumers say they now only engage with personalized messaging. To truly connect with buyers throughout their journey, you must customize content experiences using real-time data.
Content for giving a personalized experience:
- Dynamically display blog content recommendations based on visitors’ previously engaged topics/downloads.
- Tailor in-app messages, demos, and guidance flows based on user roles and product usage patterns.
- Automatically highlight relevant customer case studies matching an account’s industry, company size, and use cases.
- Adapt nurture campaign content for each prospect based on their progression through the buyer’s journey funnel.
Advanced SEO Strategies for Each Journey Stage
Gone are those days when you could write random blog posts and call them an SEO strategy. You need a tightly kneaded weaving of topic clusters for each journey stage.
The topic cluster approach means creating a pillar page comprehensively covering a broad topic with supporting cluster content linking to that piece. It signals topical authority.
Incorporating SEO strategies for the buyer’s journey goes beyond traditional SEO tactics. It requires a nuanced understanding of the reader’s needs at each journey stage, especially when only .63% of users check the second page of SERP. You need a strong SEO strategy to get your brand known to your buyers from the start of their journey.
For example: HubSpot has linked its pillar page “What is Inbound Marketing” to content from all stages of the buyer’s journey. The post lies in the awareness stage, equipping the readers with all the details of inbound marketing. At the same time, HubSpot has nailed creating internal linking and topic clusters by linking to:
- Awareness level blog with informational intent.
- Product pages that lie on the decision stage.
- A growth page with a collection of client case studies helping readers build trust.
One page built a cluster to move readers from unsure to trusting HubSpot with their problems.
| Suggested reading: 14 Ways to promote your blog for free
Final Thoughts
The buyer’s journey is hardly linear. Unless you already know the product, you won’t buy it without proper research. Even when you research, you don’t make the final decision the same day you started the research. Some readers even drop the thought of buying the product.
The buyer’s journey is as complicated as the human behavior. But, using a strategic approach to create content for the buyer’s journey and mapping it at the right places will increase your potential for conversion.
Have got any questions? Let’s connect on LinkedIn.
Frequently Asked Questions
1. Why is it important to create content for each stage of the buyer’s journey?
Creating content tailored to each stage of the buyer’s journey ensures that you meet potential customers where they are in their decision-making process. It helps guide them from recognizing a problem to considering your solution and ultimately deciding that your offering is the right choice for them.
2. How do I identify the stages of the buyer’s journey for my audience?
You can identify the stages of your audience’s buyer’s journey by understanding their needs, questions, and concerns at each step. Surveys, customer interviews, and analyzing search intent can provide insights into what information your audience seeks at different stages.
3. Can the buyer’s journey vary between different audiences?
Yes, the buyer’s journey can vary based on factors like the audience’s industry, role, and personal preferences. It’s important to create buyer personas to tailor your content strategy to different segments of your audience.
4. How can I ensure my content is engaging for potential buyers?
To ensure your content is engaging, focus on providing value, addressing common questions and concerns, and using a tone that resonates with your audience. Also, use formats that your audience prefers, such as video, text, or interactive content, and include clear calls-to-action to guide them to the next step.
