For marketers, it’s nearly impossible to get through a day without hearing about or discussing content in one way or another. As the core of your strategy, you can not view content as a bunch of one-off projects. The creation of it needs to come out of one comprehensive strategy.
Because it is such an important piece of the marketing puzzle these days, it needs to be incorporated in every phase of the customer journey. While people often split this journey into three phases, Awareness, Consideration, and Content, I believe there is a bit more to it than that, which is why I’ve developed the Marketing Hourglass which consists of seven stages: Know, Like, Trust, Try, Buy, Repeat, and Refer. These phases will get a person from their first encounter with your business and then past your point of purchase where they not only turn into a customer but a loyal fan and advocate for your business.
As a person moves through the customer journey, you must hit them with content throughout the process to keep them engaged with your business, and the best way to do this is to match the content you’d like to develop with the various phases of the Marketing Hourglass.
Mapping the Customer Journey
When it comes to the customer journey, it’s important that you don’t get ahead of yourself. I often see small businesses trying to convince prospects that they can solve their problems before they even know they have one.
In order to map out your customer journey, you must understand who your audience is, and I mean really understand their wants, needs and pain points, as well as the types of questions they’d ask themselves before they even seek a solution like yours.
You must be aware of what your customer’s journey looks like in order to develop content for each stage of it. To help you do so, I’ve described the stages below as well as recommended content to go along with each stage to help you brainstorm what would work best for your business.
Know
The Know stage is the phase where people first become aware of your business, and it’s your job to put a piece of content out there that get’s their attention.
Types of content:
- Blog posts answering common client challenges (to help boost SEO)
- Advertising (consider paid search and paid social) promoting content upgrades to boost lead conversion
- Presentations at speaking engagements
- Social media
Like
Once you attract a person to your website, you enter the second stage of the Marketing Hourglass: Like. At this point, you need to give them reasons to keep wanting more and move towards gaining permission to continue the conversation.
Types of content:
- eNewsletters for lead nurturing and to demonstrate expertise, knowledge, and resources over time
- Blog content around specific topics
- Social media
- Webinars
- White papers
Trust
I believe Trust is the most important step but arguably the most tedious and time-consuming. Building trust is a marathon, not a sprint. The more a person trusts you and your company, the more likely they’ll be to buy from you.
Types of content:
- Reviews
- Success stories
- Client testimonials
- Webinars
- Ebooks
- Custom presentations
- How tos
- Client readiness packets
- Proposal documents
- Customer-generated videos
- Case studies
Try
If you’ve built trust to the point where people begin wondering how your solution might work for them, it’s time to enter the Try stage of the hourglass. Try is a phase that many people skip due to the desire to leap rather than lead, however, I think it’s the easiest phase to move people to the purchase.
Here, the content needs to represent a sample of the end result. By creating content in this phase that demonstrates how much better your product or service is than the competition, you can differentiate your business.
Types of content:
- Ebooks
- Online or offline seminars
- Webinars
- Workshops
- Audits
- Evaluations
- Video demos
- FAQs
Buy
This is the step all businesses want, but you must look at it as just another stepping stone to growing your list of thrilled customers (who become brand advocates). For this stage, the focus is maintaining a good experience for the prospect. In order to continue to deliver a remarkable customer experience, you’ve got to continue to educate through content.
Types of content:
- New customer kits
- Quick start guides
- Customer stories
- User manuals
Repeat
To keep customers coming back time and time again, don’t wait for them to call you. You need to stay top of mind, and a great way to do this is to provide them with high-level content.
One of the best ways to get repeat business is to make sure your customers understand the value they receive by doing business with you. In the Repeat phase, you need to consider adding a results review process as well as additional upsell and cross sell touchpoints.
Types of content:
- Start an auto responder series that provides education on additional solutions
- Handwritten notes for no reason
- Send press clippings systematically
- Customer-only newsletters
Refer
The whole point of the Marketing Hourglass is to turn happy clients into referral clients. To do this, you must build processes and campaigns that make it easy for your brand champions to refer your business.
Types of content:
- eBooks, videos, or gift certificates that your customers and strategic partners can co-brand and distribute
- Feature your client stories in your marketing materials
- Create a hot 100 prospect list and share it with clients for introductions
Keep in mind, you don’t always have to reinvent the wheel when it comes to content development. You can repurpose old content (i.e. turning educational videos into written blog posts) and you can even optimize and re-publish previous well-performing content to give it new life.
Creating content can be time-consuming, but by mapping it out along with certain themes and the customer journey, your life will become much easier.
What types of content do you find helpful in each stage of the journey?