Content Mapping: What It is and Why You Should Use It
Posting last-minute content that’s sorta on a schedule and hoping for the best is not a strategic way to use content marketing to grow your business. It’s also not a sustainable way for a business owner to approach content distribution. You need content mapping to best serve your audience with content on a schedule that doesn’t stress you out.
What is Content Mapping?
Content mapping is the process of creating a content plan that guides potential customers through the customer journey effectively. Targeted, strategic content addresses buyers at different stages of their customer lifecycle to get them from Point A to Point B and eventually to a purchase.
Content mapping helps businesses understand their target audience and why they come to their site in the first place. For instance, most potential buyers won’t see your content and purchase from you immediately. They take time to research your brand values, customer reviews, and why they should trust you. It’s your job to organize your content in a way that makes this process simple.
Why is Content Mapping Important?
Not all buyers approach companies in the same way. Content mapping utilizes content to create a personalized buying journey for all potential customers. In turn, you reduce buyer apprehension. And that’s just a few of the benefits of content mapping. There are others too.
Helps You Craft the Right Content
Mapping encourages you to consider your potential clients’ questions and create content that answers them. What pain points are buyers trying to eliminate when they find your product or service? What questions do they Google? Understanding different buyers and their thoughts during the stages of the buying process will help you craft content that meets their needs.
Creates a Regular Publishing Schedule
Why guess about what to publish next when you can have a plan instead? Planning is simple when you’ve mapped out the content you need more of, need to refresh, or need to retire. Having a plan means you publish regularly and strategically instead of trying to figure out at the last minute what to post and where.
Saves You Resources and Time
As a business owner, you don’t have time or resources to waste. Without content mapping, you’re likely posting disjointed content that doesn’t get much traffic. And it may even be taking you longer because you’re trying to figure it all out at the last minute.
Gone are the days of using arbitrary keywords and hoping it goes well. Use content mapping to create content your audience wants and reduce the time waste of trying to find topics at the last minute.
Content mapping also helps you post content where it’s most effective. You’ll have a strategy and plan instead of just guessing. For example, video content will perform better on YouTube or TikTok than on Twitter.
Helps You Better Understand Your Customers
If you’re selling something, you need to know what your audience thinks about it or what leads them to it. Their likes, dislikes, suggestions, and praise are all important to your content planning. You can cultivate content specifically for their buyer journey when you understand them.
Guides Your Customers Through the Purchasing Funnel
A successful content map engages potential buyers and nurtures them to become supporters and advocates of your brand. New and current customers benefit from a developed purchase funnel that fulfills their needs. As a result, your business grows.
If you want help thinking through your customers’ journey, download the free marketing map below!
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Process of Creating a Content Map
You don’t have to wait for the next planning cycle to make a content map. You can do it today by looking at your keyword research, customer data, and website analytics. What’s working well? What should you do more or less of? Make your content plan months or even a year at a time.
Can you imagine how much stress that would relieve to know what you were going to post and where for three or six months? Not only that, but to know that what you were posting was strategic and worthwhile?
To create a content map:
- Define Your Goal. Why do you use content marketing? What do you want from it? Are you trying to boost sales, gain followers, or increase readers? Answer these questions, and you’ll have the information you need to create a more intentional content map.
- Segment Your Audience. Narrow your audience into smaller segments for a content map. Separate them by age, interests, education, occupation, and where they are in the buyer’s journey. Segmenting helps you produce diverse yet specific content for each group.
- Create a Buyer Persona. Buyer personas help you know who you’re creating content for. A buyer persona is a data-based story about an ideal customer in your target audience. Know their age, location, gender, occupation, goals, struggles, shopping habits, and interests. Then focus your content on them.
- Document the Customer Journey. Use your buyer personas to map out what a customer journey will look like. Who are you developing content for, at which points? What keywords do you need to use for them? Consider the decisions your buyer makes and the questions they may have along the way. Also, consider emotions, thoughts, and what information will help your buyers the most.
- Map It Out. Once you know what the buyer’s journey looks like, map out the content you need to create for people at every step of that journey. Then you simply follow your map. Schedule time each week or month to create the content you need.
Outsource the Journey
Creating a content map helps serve your audience with content during every step of their customer journey. It also plans and schedules your content instead of leaving you scrambling at the last minute.
Still, planning a creating content is a big job, especially when you have a business to run. You don’t have to do it all! Contact Content Journey to create and implement a content map for you.
