When you create content for your business, you must keep in mind that customers look for different content at different stages. A person browsing new products on a website will need completely different content than a customer looking for instructions on how to use a product. Customer journey mapping will enable you to understand what content you need to create for different customer stages.
A customer journey map is a method of visualizing customers’ interactions and experiences with a business. Content marketing services use this method to understand what types and formats of content work best for various customers. The process maps every step of the customer journey and depicts the entire story of a customer’s experience with your organization.
The process is effective when you create content for your target customers as it gives you detailed insights into the customer journey stages and the possible customer experience. You can take the help of professional digital marketing services or a reputed content marketing company to create relevant content using the mapping.
How to use a customer journey map to create high-quality content?
Here are the following steps you can use a customer journey map to create content for your business.
- Set goals for your customer journey mapping
Do you want to improve your website content only? Or do you want to create other types of content to help your customers? Ask yourself all relevant questions to find the goal of the mapping. You must have clear goals before you start. Know the purpose of the map and what do you aim to achieve with it. Know your audience and their expectations. Also, determine the outcomes and the duration for the mapping.
- Do sufficient research about your customers and collect useful data
Know what your customers expect from your business. Talk to them, ask them questions, and request feedback. Ask your customer-facing colleagues what they observe about customers. You can use surveys, questionnaires, marketing analysis, and more to know more about your customers. Pay attention to their vocabulary and language. After researching your customers, collect useful data to get crucial information about them. That can include their average age, gender, marital status, education level, employment status, purchasing power, buying habits, among others.
- Create personas of your target customers
Personas are fictional characters. They are the representation of your target customers. After you conduct the research and collect the information about your target customers, you can build personas to know what your average user looks like, how they communicate, what content they prefer, and what channels they use. You can also find out their influences and favorite books, blogs, thought leaders, and sources of information.
When you know their traits and personalities, you can design your content to make it more appealing and engaging for them. They can easily understand the message you want to give.
- Create customer journey maps based on the personas
After you have created the personas of your target customers, create maps that describe the path they might take as they interact with you. There, list out the touchpoints and customer stages. A touchpoint is every interaction between a business and a customer. After that, visualize customers’ actions and the progress they make in various stages. Map the pain points or the potential pain areas, which can give a negative experience to your customers. Customer journey maps have all crucial information about the journey of any customer. The information can be:
- The channels they use
- The experience they have
- The actions they take
- The problems they have faced (if any)
- Their expectations from the business and the service they received
- Make the journey as visual as you can
After you create the maps, make the journey of customers as visual as you can. There are three stages of customer journey mapping—pre-purchase, purchase, and post-purchase. Use symbols and colors to show positive and negative experiences. Include every potential customer interaction with your brand on your map. These include packaging, social media, local business directories, magazine advertisements, and more. You can list content ideas and opportunities to solve customers’ problems.
- Identify the best content for each stage of the customer journey
Before you create any content, find out the best ones for each stage of the customer journey. Make yourself familiar with the various types of content and how they work in each stage. Awareness or informative content introduces your brand to new target customers and helps them understand your products and services better. The awareness content includes:
- Blog posts
- Social media posts
- Infographics
- How-to-guides
- Checklists
- Videos
Engagement content engages your target customers, and they include:
- Email newsletters
- Interactive content
- Surveys and polls
- Interactive quizzes
- Assessments
- E-books and more
Evaluation content helps your target customers evaluate your brand and make purchase decisions. These typically include:
- Landing pages
- Webinar
- Reviews and testimonials
- Products and services lists
Purchase content helps in making customers feel confident while they buy your products or services. These usually include:
- Free consultations
- Live demos
- Frequently asked questions
- Free trial sign-up pages and more
Post-purchase content helps customers after their purchase and re-engages them to make further purchases. These include:
- Post-purchase surveys
- Coupons
- User guides
- Feedback notifications
- Help Center articles
- Map your content to different stages of the customer journey
In this, you can create a content map with three categories—Suggested types of content, Existing content, and Needed content. After that, look at the existing content you already have and determine where they belong in each customer journey stage. After that, see what more content you need to create to complete your content map. You can hire a professional content marketing company that can create all this content for you.
Taking everything into account,
The content you create can help you in enhancing your customer experience and business outcomes. The key is to understand what each customer goes through each business process and what content can help them navigate through it smoothly. This is where customer journey mapping proves to be useful in content creation.
