Content mapping and the customer journey
Every single content asset that you produce should be mapped with the customer journey in mind.
When building a content strategy, every piece of content that will be produced needs to be mapped out, linking it to personas, platforms and to your other pieces of content.
But, very important, you also need to link it to your customer journey. The customer journey is built around stages, each requiring a different approach in what you can expect from your audience. Here is an example of a customer journey:
- Realization: at this stage, you need to establish credibility;
- Awareness: once here, you need to establish authority;
- Evaluation: establishing trust is key at this stage;
- Purchase: you finally need to demonstrate value.
Customer journeys can vary from one product or sector to another, but they are mostly constructed this way.
As you can imagine, the calls to action and the format of the content you will produce for each stage is very different.
You can’t ask someone to buy your product if they are at the realization stage, they don’t even know if they really need your product yet. At this stage, you might want them to join your social media profiles, or you might want to do some guest blogging.
In the same logic, at the purchase stage there is no need to publish testimonials or customer stories, they know you are legit, but they want to know what value they’ll get from their purchase.
In a recent article, Chris Giarratana published a great chart of the types of calls to action and content that you can work with at each stage. You will, of course, need to start from there and adapt it to your specific situation, but it is a great starting point in making sure you are considering the customer journey in your content mapping phase.