Marketing teams worldwide spend significant amount of time thinking about their specific customer profiles and how to best match their offers to each one, from brainstorming ideas on how to segment customers based on specific attributes, to planning out the most appropriate email marketing campaigns to increase their CTR.
All of these efforts are often concentrated under content marketing strategies to best generate, nurture, and maintain leads. To truly understand eventual impact on the customer experience, from initial interest and research, to the point of sale and continued loyalty, it helps to examine the impact of such activities by looking at the ways in which customer journeys, or “the journey your customers take from awareness of your brand or products to conversion and beyond”, can elevate your content marketing strategy.
Below is a brief look at four ways mapping customer journeys can elevate your brand’s content marketing strategy:
1. Smarter and more relevant story telling
Content marketers face the daily task of determining what content to write, where to distribute the messages, and when and how frequently to post. By mapping a customer journey, marketers are better able to breakdown a larger message and pinpoint the most relevant features to reel in potential customers. This may start with a simple story about a product, but evolve into more defined brand positioning.
2. Closing sales more effectively
The path customers take to realize ‘brand commitment and beyond’ can provide marketers with deep insights into how to best direct messages to targeted leads. Understanding your customer journey essentially equips marketers with actionable customer insights that allow them to react effectively to their target audience – this can often improve the ability to close a sale. In fact, nearly 90% of experienced, senior-level marketers believe that “…it’s absolutely critical or very important to create a cohesive customer journey across all touch points and channels.”
3. Creating a brand reputation for quality content
Mapping customer journeys also naturally encourages brands to continue engaging with leads and existing client. This constant interaction, which often involves pivoting content marketing strategies to better align the message to the intended beneficiary, as well as determining which multi-channels to penetrate, can serve to drastically improve your content marketing strategy by creating a coherent brand that is deeply devoted to the entire customer experience. Content that is well-constructed and targeted will surely follow.
4. Personalizing call-to-actions to speed up the sales cycle
For some data-driven marketers, the numbers speak for themselves. This point is dedicated to them. When determining the main points involved in the customer journey, brand marketers develop personalized call-to-actions in a more seamless process, thus shortening the distance to the final selling point. Such call-to-actions can then be followed up by targeted messages to keep recent converters continuously interested in your product, with the ultimate goal of facilitating their path to becoming brand ambassadors. After all, who wouldn’t want to promote your brand after you amply provided him/her with personalized content recommendations that guided the purchasing decision from initial interest to checkout.
So why do we need a content journey?
At this point, we already hope you have some answers J
Content journeys enable brand marketers to effectively create a product story that attracts followers, those potential customers that feel or about to establish a feeling of loyalty to your product or service, to continue through the various stages of the sales funnel.
The challenges in mapping content journeys lie not only within the brainstorming portion, but in genuinely finding ways to to translate creative strategies to attract and generate potential leads and readers to move ahead in the sales cycle. This reality requires true brand commitment and awareness to your unique offering.
Have other insights regarding content journeys and their impact on content marketing strategies? Please share your thoughts in the comments section – we are eager to learn!