The Importance of Having a Content Mapping Strategy
Without a coherent plan that maps content to Brazil Phone Number List your organization’s marketing goals and needs, you’ll end up with a surface-level approach that engages or entices prospects and customers for a while but doesn’t provide them with a concrete next step.
What is content mapping and why should you do it?
Content mapping is the process of intentionally evaluating your overall marketing strategy and sales process to determine what content needs to be created or repositioned to support customers at each stage of the buyer’s journey.
Simply put, a content map is a blueprint for ensuring your team creates assets that target specific audiences, encouraging them to take incremental steps toward conversion.
This is how you plan your content strategy to align with your overall marketing strategy .
Content Mapping:
Support your inbound marketing efforts by ensuring you have collateral that drives high-intent organic traffic, generates leads, and nurtures those leads.
Enhanced overseas marketing by providing leads to sales representatives and helping sales representatives conduct promotional activities.
How to use content mapping to create effective content?
When you follow a map, your content marketing process shifts from being an operation focused on achieving high-level goals, like driving organic traffic, to a coordinated, strategic effort that engages prospects and gently nudges them toward becoming customers.
For example, without the benefit of content mapping , a business might have writers create all kinds of new blog content around a specified string of keywords. These marketers might do a great job of driving the site to rank for the target terms or even getting new users to click on the title.
However, they may not know who their audience is , resulting in low-intent traffic . Even if you get ideal prospects to visit your site, an overabundance of top-of-funnel content or no clear call to action means these users will no longer understand what your company is about.
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What are the benefits of content mapping?
Content mapping is a tried-and-true method for ensuring that marketing collateral is created that aligns closely with customer lifecycle stages, buyer personas, and sales team processes.
Five Benefits of Content Mapping
As part of a coherent and comprehensive content strategy, mapping can help you generate, nurture, and convert leads, which will yield a multitude of benefits.
Easy ideation: Content mapping provides a great start for brainstorming. For example, instead of launching a social media campaign from scratch and thinking about how to encourage fans to stay engaged, your marketing strategy will be cohesive, comprehensive, and integrated.
More Leads: All savvy marketers know that even with the right content, you’re unlikely to make a first impression. With a coherent map, you have content that helps users convert after they’ve grown to trust your brand.
High-quality leads: When each piece of content is neatly aligned with the needs of your target audience, the people who convert on it are more likely to be a good match for your products and services.
Integrated campaigns: Content maps tie together the customer journey with information and tools designed to engage users every step of the way. They are a useful tool for fleshing out comprehensive drip campaigns and other strategies.
Meet the Sales Reps: The sales team are incredibly useful subject matter experts. Creating a content map is a great opportunity to exchange ideas with the people who are closing deals.
Sales capability: working together to support customers
Once marketing-qualified leads are in the hands of trained sales reps, the work of the content map continues. Cross-departmental collaboration and integration with sales enablement tools and platforms are important. This will help marketers support outreach efforts once a lead goes from an email address and a buyer persona to a real, live person.
A step-by-step guide to the content mapping process
Ready to take your content marketing strategy to the next level? Still wondering what it takes to create a content graph? The answer is simple:
Build buyer personas.
Clear marketing channels.
Your own content map template.
A plan to repurpose or generate new content.
The distribution channels are ready.
Below, we will analyze these key points one by one and take you through the whole process step by step.
1. Evaluate your buyer personas and their buying cycles
An effective content map starts with a clear, shared understanding of:
Buyer personas: These are detailed sketches of fictional characters who serve as stand-ins for your different customer segments. They each have different concerns, barriers, and motivations that drive their buying decisions. Work with your sales team to make sure you know exactly who you’re hoping to attract and what they’re thinking.
Sales Cycle: The buyer’s journey is a complex one and varies greatly between industries. Some companies may take months or years to close a deal, exactly as their market expects. In other verticals, the customer journey is very short. Define each stage of the customer’s decision-making process.
2. Use the stages of the sales cycle to develop a marketing funnel
The customer life cycle can be mapped out into marketing funnel stages.
Basically, there are four different stages in the funnel:
1. Awareness
The customer journey buying cycle begins with customers learning about a problem and looking for a solution. Typically, the awareness stage involves discovering a problem they may have previously overlooked, or ways to more effectively overcome a known challenge.
2. The Interest
lifecycle stage is when customers are doing initial research and exploring their options. Rather than trying to sell your product to customers without them showing interest, use this opportunity to become a resource for them and offer your expertise if needed.