Aligning Content and Ads Within The Buyers Journey

The buying process typically consists of different stages a customer goes through leading up to their purchase. From looking at your website for the first time, to subscribing to your email list and reading your emails over a period of time, reading your content, to talking to a sales associate and figuring out whether to buy from you.

At any given time, your prospective customers are all at different points in their journeys toward a purchase. It's a marketer's job to give them the fuel to move them along the funnel toward a purchase.

The internet has made it easier for marketers (and salespeople) to engage customers at the various stages of their journey using content marketing. That’s one of the main reasons that 88% of B2B marketers are using custom content marketing (up 86% from 2015), and 76% of marketers plan to produce more content this year.

It’s important to understand your audience: how they think, the answers they seek, and the path they tend to take to find a solution. From that research, you can begin crafting a documented content strategy that maps your content to the various stages of the buyer's journey.

Defining the Buyer's Journey
In most cases, you can base your strategy around a three-stage funnel:

• Top of the Funnel: The "awareness" stage, where people looking for answers, resources, education, research data, opinions, and insight.
• Middle of the Funnel: The "evaluation" stage, where people are doing heavy research on whether or not your product or service is a good fit for them.
• Bottom of the Funnel: The "purchase" stage, where people are figuring out exactly what it would take to become a customer.

Keep in mind your funnel may look very different depending on factors like your industry, business model, product, pricing, and audience. A $50 pair of sneakers, for instance, requires a lot less handholding when it comes to making purchase decisions than a $100,000 business software investment.

Top of the Funnel: Awareness

At this point, a buyer is trying to solve problems, get an answer, or meet a need. They’re looking for top-level educational content to help direct them to a solution, like blog posts, social content, and ebooks. Their value as a lead is low because there’s no guarantee that they’ll buy from you. But those who find your content helpful and interesting may journey on to the middle of the funnel.

Middle of the Funnel: Evaluation

When someone moves into the middle of your funnel, it means you’ve captured their attention. They know they have a problem that has to be solved, and now they’re trying to discover the best solution. The need for a future purchase commitment creeps up as they’re evaluation their options.

While the top of the funnel is designed to educate a prospect, this is the stage where you want to show why your solutions in particular are the best fit.

Bottom of the Funnel: Purchase

The bottom of the funnel is where someone is making the actual purchase decision. They're ready to buy, but that still doesn’t guarantee that they’re going to buy from you. That’s the last choice they have to make: Where do they get the solution they’re seeking?

In most cases, leads at the bottom of your funnel just need that final nudge and that compelling call-to-action to get them to make a purchase decision. The right offer and content at this stage can have a dramatic impact on lifting your conversions.

Content for Each Stage in the Funnel

Content Ideas for the Awareness Stage

According to Adweek, 81% of shoppers conduct online research before making a purchase. There’s a good chance that a majority of your audience falls into that category. Remember, these people are looking for information and answers relating to a problem that points back to a product/service need.

One of the most powerful ways to capture their attention is through optimized, high-value written content like blog posts, ebooks and white papers, and reports with original research. Don’t feel limited to written content though; amazing top-of-funnel content can also include videos, social media content, courses and certifications, and other forms of educational content.

Content Ideas for the Evaluation Stage

Blogs are a great way to attract attention to your website, but they lack the personal engagement side of marketing that helps businesses qualify prospects and nurture relationships. This kind of engagement is necessary, especially for people in the middle of the funnel.

Evaluation is arguably the most critical point in the buyer’s journey because this is where prospective customers start eliminating solutions that aren’t a good fit.

Unfortunately, a surprising 68% of B2B organizations haven’t even defined the stages in their sales funnels. Without defining the stages in their funnel, they can't possibly nurture leads effectively -- meaning they're making little to no concerted effort to move customers to the purchase stage.

Companies with refined middle-of-the-funnel engagement and lead management strategy see a 4–10 times higher response rate compared to generic email blasts and outreach. Nurtured leads produce, on average, a 20% lift in sales opportunities. That's not something good marketers take lightly.

People in the middle of your sales funnel are likely to be looking to you for content showing that you're the experts in your industry. That's why the most effective types of content in the evaluation stage are things like expert guides, webinars, live interactions, and whitepapers that compare your features and benefits with that of your competitors.

Content Ideas for the Purchase Stage
The more time you spend online, the more you'll see bottom-of-the-funnel content all over the internet. Websites are full of calls-to-action for trial offers, demos, downloads, and estimate request buttons -- despite the fact that the majority of their audience isn’t ready to buy initially.

In fact, Google and CEB's The Digital Evolution in B2B Marketing report shows that people get up to 60% of the way through a buying process before they’re ready to talk to anyone about making a purchase.

By itself, a bottom-of-the-funnel offer isn’t likely to close a lot of leads into customers. However, when you have it mapped appropriately to the buyer journey, you’re combining the compelling nature of that final offer with all the engagement you’ve created leading up to that point. You’re far more likely to nail the close and see that lift in conversions.

The most effective types of content in the purchase stage tend to be case studies, trial offers, demos, and product literature.

Create a More Engaging Buyer’s Journey
Every business has a unique sales funnel, sculpted and designed around their buyer’s unique journey. It’s a recipe that can’t necessarily be replicated from one business to another. When creating your own buyer's journey, there are a number of factors specific to your business to take into consideration.

That said, the general approach remains the same: Understand your audience, develop your funnel around your industry and audience intent, and create a documented content marketing strategy that maps custom content specifically to each phase of their journey through the funnel.

Do it well, and this process will have the greatest possible impact on your customer relationships, as well as the greatest possible lift in your overall conversions.