Generating Customer Demand and Nurturing Leads & Prospects
Generating Customer Demand and Nurturing Leads & Prospects
9 Content Marketing
Learning Objectives
By the end of this chapter, you should be able to:
- Develop a content marketing strategy
- Map appropriate content types across your conversion funnel
- Explain the purpose of content calendars
- Describe several content marketing do’s and don’ts
Content Marketing and the Customer Journey
To start the discussion of content marketing, let’s first review some key concepts and how they tie into a content marketing strategy. As mentioned in the Customer Journey Mapping chapter, we have broken down the customer journey into the following five stages:
- Awareness
A prospective customer learns about an organization, product, or service.
- Engagement
A relationship develops between the prospective customer and the organization via several, positive interactions.
- Conversion
The prospective customer decides to buy a product or service from the organization.
- Retention
The customer has a strong and loyal relationship with the organization and becomes a regular customer or active user.
- Advocacy
A regular customer is satisfied with the organization’s products and/or services and recommends them to others.
Since organizations want to market to and support prospective customers at every stage of this journey, it is essential to plan specific content for each stage along this journey. The following image highlights different content categories as customers move through the customer journey.
On the left-hand side, we see the five customer journey stages – awareness, engagement, conversion, retention, and advocacy. And next to each of these stages, there are a few content categories that might be helpful to prospects and/or customers. For each stage, organizations should ask:
- What information is our target audience seeking?
- How can we best support / help them?
- Which pain points and questions can we address proactively?
- And how can we move them more quickly to the next stage?
Simply stated, as your target customers move through each of these stages, marketers need to identify the specific content that is most important at that stage. Please note that the content details and requirements will be significantly influenced by the type of organization, the customer persona, and the specific customer journey. But let’s look at some common types of content across a customer journey.
Top of Funnel (Awareness, Initial Engagement)
At the top of the funnel, organizations are usually trying to drive awareness. As a result, many of the goals associated with this stage include:
- increase traffic
- increase our social media fans and followers
- increase media coverage
To achieve these goals, organizations need to create and map content that matches the needs of customer personas in the awareness stage of a customer journey. Typically, this would include content that brings awareness of your organization, products, services, and solutions. Often this stage includes con