When you begin to develop a Content Strategy it’s important to have a wide variety of purposeful content. In my Content Marketing Buzzwords blog I discussed the Buyers Journey and Personas. While understanding the Buyers Journey is one thing, implementing it as a content strategy is different. Today I discuss how to prepare your Content Strategy for the Awareness and Interest Stages of the Buyers Journey.
Table of Contents
Your Goal: Creating Valuable Content
Digital Marketing is about creating authentic connections and relationships between customer and business. You will hear “Content is King” often and it’s definitely true. No matter what content you create you need to make sure it is valuable in some way to the reader.
When creating content consider the following:
- Is this High Quality: Is it easy to consume? Does it provide valuable information?
- Is this Unique: Are you providing content in a new or unique way? Could someone find the same information easier somwhere else?
- Is this Relevant: Is it relevant to your intended audience AND your business? Sometimes you can have a mix of one or the other.
Awareness Content
Most content is created for the Awareness Stage of the Buyers Journey. During the Awareness Stage, your customer is doing their research. Consider someone planning on buying a pool. To start the Buyer will start by looking at how much it costs to own a pool. They may be trying to consider what maintenance is required. They aren’t convinced about buying a pool just yet but they are interested.
The Awareness Stage is the easiest stage to get blog content to rank organically. Usually topics and keywords like “How Much it Costs to Own a Pool” are a lot less competitive than “Pool Installation”.
While blogs are great, you can use a wide variety of mediums to create valuable Awareness content. Still using Pools as an example you could make a video on how to clean a pool. Get creative!
Examples of Awareness Content
- Blogs
- Infographics
- Videos
Evaluating the Success of Awareness Content (KPI)
With Awareness Content the goal is to get people to notice your business. While you may get some leads or sales from Awareness content, that isn’t the main goal of someone at the Awareness stage. Some Key Performance Indicators (KPI) for Awareness Content can be viewed on Google Analytics or Google Search Console:
- New Visitors
- Returning Visitors (week by week)
- Time Spent on Page
- Pages per Visit
- Google Search Clicks
- Google Search Impressions
- Google Search Average Impression
Interest Content
Creating content for the Interest Stage of the Buyers Journey is difficult. Using our pool example, the customer knows they want a pool and are now trying to find an installer, like you! Trying to compete organically for keywords like “Toronto Pool Installers” or “Best Pool Installer Near Me” is almost impossible.
While difficult, that’s ok! We use our awareness pieces to push us to the top of a customers list once they are done researching. You will also use Call to Actions on your awareness pieces to push your customer to your Interest Content.
Examples of Interest Content
- Landing Pages
- Service Pages
- Google Ads
- Social Media Ads
Another form of Interest Content is creating content that convinces people to give you their contact information. The idea with this is to get the customers information to put them on an E-Mail campaign. With an E-Mail campaign you can keep semi-regular contact with the customer through promotions or related content.
If someone is willing to give up their valuable contact info they expect something equally valuable in return. Marketers call this content Gated Content. Gated Content will need to be very unique or valuable and can take much longer to create.
Examples of Gated Content
- Half-Gated Blogs
- Webinars
- EBooks
- Templates
- White Papers
Evaluating the Success of Interest Content (KPI)
Since Interest and Gated Content take more time to create the KPI is usually solely tied to leads. If an EBook isn’t getting any downloads it isn’t performing well. It’s important to consider Awareness Performance KPIs in order to find out WHY the content isn’t doing well.
- Are people not landing on the page?
- Are people visiting the page but not downloading it?
- Are people downloading the content and immidiately unsubscribing?
Once you can identify why the content isn’t performing you can adjust your strategy.
Creating a Diverse Content Strategy is Key
When planning your Content Strategy you will want to create a wide variety of content. Make sure to create content with varying topics that appeal to different Personas and different stages of the Buyers Journey. What type of content have you had the most success with? Let me know in the comments.