Orig Post www.business2community.com | Re-Post So-Mark Consulting 12/11/2015
Every month, WordPress users publish over 56 million blog posts on the platform. Many millions of these are from content marketers trying to capture traffic on search engines and get noticed on social media. Throw in all the other CMS systems out there and you’re looking at tens of millions of competing content pieces produced every month.
In such a crowded field, how can a content marketer stand out?
The answer: the buyer’s journey. This is something few bloggers and content marketers think about, but it has a vital impact on the success of your content marketing efforts. We’ll take a look at the buyer’s journey in more detail below, and discuss how it can help take your marketing to the next level.
What is the Buyer’s Journey?
Every customer goes through different stages before deciding what to buy. These are as follows:
Awareness: This is the stage when the customer becomes aware of, or starts understanding his problems.
Consideration: The stage when customers understand their problems better and start evaluating solutions.
Decision: The final stage where customers decide on a solution after thorough evaluation.
Now obviously, not all purchase decisions follow such a rigid structure (especially impulse purchases), but when it comes to high-ticket purchases, especially in B2B, the buyer’s journey stages hold true.
How the Buyer’s Journey Can Make You a Better Content Marketer
Understanding the buyer’s journey and using it to plan your content marketing can dramatically increase your content success.
This means that you have to stop thinking about SEO and keywords, and start focusing on creating content that helps your customers understand, evaluate and solve their problems.
For example, here’s how HubSpot, a leader at content marketing, creates content that answers different customer questions during the purchase process: