Is Your Content Strategy Ready For Modern Buyer’s Journey?

Today, we are all digital consumers. Information is everywhere, how we consume this information, interact with brands, and make purchases has changed completely over a decade.

Prospects lead to making nearly 60% of their buying decision even before talking to the sales representative and a prospect initiates a conversation with your company only if he’s already expressed an interest in your business offering. This is the result of a change in the buyer's journey. So what is the change?

Problem-specific, Not Product-Specific

Today, buyers define their own pain points and start seeking solutions online. The modern buyer’s journey begins when buyers identify a specific pain point. They know that something is going on in their life that they have identified as a problem such as raising electricity bills, environmental concerns, or any other thing. They do not start with a product, but instead, they educate themselves on how to solve their problem by reading what experts have written.

Buyer-driven, Not Sales-Driven
Since buyers are independently researching their problems, the modern buyer’s journey is focused on their needs. Instead of attempting to control the buyer’s journey, you need to understand how your company can help them find the best solution.

The buyer’s journey is the path that a potential customer takes from stranger to visitor to buyer. A marketer needs to know about this modern journey to generate high-quality, qualified leads to send on to the sales force. The most important thing which represents you in the digital world is your website. Your website must be optimized for lead generation so that potential customers will want to interact and engage with your site at each stage of their exploration.

Here we present 3 steps that you should follow to ensure your content strategy aligns with your buyer’s journey. This will empower you with a better understanding of what content needs to be made based on a buyer's journey and help your marketing team to conquer the change.

Step 1: Understand the content needs of prospects on different stages of their journey to define your strategy

The prospect will search for different types of content at different stages of his journey and you need to identify those pain points and match your content to his needs.

1. Awareness Stage: At this stage, the prospect is just realizing they need to solve a problem but they are not sure what the actual problem is and how to solve it. For eg., Prospect may want to cut the electric bills and find a futuristic solution as he is currently spending too much on the electricity bill.
2. Consideration Stage: At this stage, the prospect has identified that he needs to go to the renewable source of energy but now his concern is how to do that?
3. Decision Stage: Here the prospect will shortlist his options like signing up for the power company’s “green energy” option, PV panels installed on a roof or insulating the attic, or more. He will evaluate them all to find the best solution for his needs.

Step 2: Decide on the type of content you should produce for each step of the journey

For many renewable energy companies, the content is mainly focused on industry news & updates. While curated industry news is one great component of your energy company’s inbound content strategy, but it is not sufficient for a new buyer’s journey. A diverse mix of content that meets buyers’ needs at each stage can create more valuable interactions and build trust as prospects move towards a purchase.

Awareness
In the awareness stage, a potential buyer wants to invest in new energy technology and can explore a wealth of information online. You can offer useful industry or technology content for free to show prospects that you know your stuff and want to help them—generating trust will create your brand image.
As a business owner, imagine how your company can appeal to newbies in the Awareness Stage with a blog, checklist, or a simple online calculator.

Consideration
In this phase, your potential buyer is fully aware of his needs and researching possible solutions. He’ll evaluate different available options to find the best fit for his needs. This is when all of that feature-focused content on the product you’ve been itching to showcase comes in handy for prospects. In this stage, you can offer a comparison chart that is directly related to your offering. When making a large-scale equipment purchase, people usually need to speak with a human to iron out the details of their solution, but tools like this can point them in the right direction.

A case study also plays an important role at the consideration stage. Case studies let you frame the applications of your technology in ways that resonate with your target buyer. To get the most out of your case studies, personalize their delivery based on what you know about your prospect.

Decision
In this final stage, your prospect compares all solutions and makes a purchase decision based on their research. If you’ve provided great value and built trust with prospects up to this point, they’re much more likely to buy from you. Testimonials, Advanced reports, or white papers also help the customer to finalize their decision.
A free consultation that brings in demos with price quotes and the most attractive financing in a limited-time offer will help your company to close the deal.

Step 3: Finalize the keywords which need to be targeted to reach leads at their right stage

You’re probably wondering how to match the right content with the buyer’s stage? You can use keywords to help buyers find just what they’re looking for at each stage in their journey in a web search. If you use keywords well in all your content then you can increase the chances that buyers will be able to find your stuff in a Google search. The graphic below gives an idea of just what keywords to use for each type of content.

As a marketer, you can take the help of these keywords to create content for your buyers on their journey. You need to map your topics and the keywords at every stage and produce relevant content that resonates with your buyer.

Innovation will always drive the changing needs of buyers and how marketers respond in turn. All companies, big and small, that hope to stay in the game must adapt to these changing journeys in consideration to build their strategies.

Conclusion 

Can you think of at least one piece of content that you can offer for each stage — Awareness, Consideration, and Decision? If not, Straight Growth will be happy to guide and help your marketing team to design relevant content strategies.

Please click the button below to discuss a strategy that will help your customer's and eventually lead your business to reach new heights