by John Hall
Their search yields hundreds of online articles, think pieces, and videos. A lot of what comes up are ads for private schools that are poorly disguised as helpful content; Ben and Michele dismiss these without a second thought. But they do encounter a few insightful pieces that capture their attention.
One stands out in particular: “Making Sense of Pre-School.” This piece was published on a local parenting site, and it provides a concise, accessible overview. The author, Annabel Bruno, explains major alternative educational philosophies, answers questions about the private versus public debate, and touches on common concerns over tuition. The information is so useful that the piece becomes Ben and Michele’s cheat sheet.
After about two weeks of research, Michele and Ben develop a basic but solid understanding of the options available to them, and they find themselves leaning toward the Waldorf style of education.
More Googling produces more articles—and once again, they encounter a great Annabel Bruno piece: “How to Choose a Waldorf School That’s Right for You.” Annabel’s guidance is so relevant and on-point, it’s as if she’s right there with them. Ben and Michele check out Annabel’s Twitter feed, where they learn that she is the founder of a Waldorf school, the New Toronto Waldorf Academy. They follow the link to the school’s website and pore through its excellent blog. One of the posts has a link to gated content called “Preparing Your Family for Waldorf”; Michele happily enters her e-mail address to receive it. She and Ben read through the document together and talk about it throughout the evening.
A few days later, Michele gets an e-mail from Annabel: “I really hope you’ve found our materials useful, Michele. It can be such a daunting prospect to start thinking about preschool. If you’d like, we can set up a time to talk through some of your questions. In the meantime, here are a few more resources that you might like.”
Included in the e-mail is a link to an article by Mischa Berlin, Annabel’s tech director, about the role of technology in alternative education. This is particularly interesting to Michele and Ben, who have been wondering how they can help Yatri foster a healthy relationship with technology as she gets older.
Over the course of the next year, Annabel remains top of mind for Michele and Ben. How could she not? They follow her on social media, read everything she publishes, and receive her newsletter. The school’s blog has provided an honest glimpse into what sets its preschool apart from the competition. When Yatri turns a year and a half, Ben and Michele get a personal invitation from Annabel to submit an application, along with a video showcasing the highlights of the preschool. By the time she’s two, Yatri is a proud student at the New Toronto Waldorf Academy.
Every Step of the Journey
Michele and Ben’s story is a perfect case study in the power of content to connect with the buyer at every stage of the journey. I use the term buyer because we’re all familiar with the buyer’s journey—not because the practices are limited to literal buyers. The same ideas apply to any audience, regardless of the intent to purchase.
If you’re a recruiter, for example, this can be adapted to your target candidate. The journey that a person takes to your company follows the same phases, and content can influence that journey in much the same way. The strategies outlined are relevant across the board.
For your target buyer (or target employee, target partner, target investor, etc.), the path to your company is a journey. It begins with a need, problem, or desire, which sparks a quest for knowledge. Throughout this process of self-education, your target buyer will encounter the various options that are available to her, which will inevitably include whatever your competition is offering. By proving yourself to be a helpful, trustworthy resource throughout the learning experience, you can help her connect the dots between her need and your company. If she sees a fit, you’ll close the deal.
Notice how the nature of Annabel’s content shifted as the young parents got closer to their purchasing decision. Initially, Ben and Michele simply needed to know what their options were; “Making Sense of Pre-School” helped them do just that. When they began to narrow their focus, Annabel’s content got more context-specific (note that specific does not mean overly promotional; Annabel was still positioning herself as a trusted expert rather than pushing an aggressive sales agenda). Only when Ben and Michele were ready to make a decision did Annabel begin her pitch, and because she had used content to position herself on top of their minds as a trustworthy resource, their decision was easy.
You can see that it’s not enough to create great content—you have to create great content that targets your audience’s needs in the moment. To do this, you have to completely understand each stage of their journey. Once you know how they move through these various stages, you can create a funnel around the journey so that their path leads to you.
On average, the buyer’s journey provides an opportunity for 30 potential touch points to connect with your prospect. The more of these you hit, the greater your chances of remaining top of mind. And content is the most efficient, scalable way to hit as many of those touch points as possible.
Here’s how the journey unfolds and some insight into strategies for using content to stay top of mind at every stage, which will help move your audience through the funnel toward your company (Figure 10.1).
Figure 10.1 Content Marketing Funnel
Problem Identification and Awareness
The journey begins when the buyer becomes aware of a specific problem, opportunity, or need that she’s facing. Her primary need right now is information: What are the options? How can she fulfill this need or address this problem? What are the experiences of others in this situation? What challenges can she expect to face as she moves forward?
During the problem identification stage, the distance between your buyer and her purchasing decision is the greatest it can be. This makes many professionals panic—if we don’t hook ’em early, we’ll lose them forever!—and their anxiety leads them to create shallow content that reads like spam.
If you try to manipulate or deceive your target buyer in her search for objective, useful information, you really will lose her forever. But if you prove yourself to be a credible expert, you can create an initial connection that could span the length of the journey.
Remember how Ben and Michele discovered Annabel’s article on a parenting site they already trusted? At this point, your prospective customers don’t necessarily know who you are. The chances that they’ll visit your site right away are virtually nonexistent.
That’s why it’s so important to leverage third-party credibility into your own. Find out where your target buyers “live” online. What publications do they read? What social media platforms are they using? Publish content through (and specifically for) those channels.
You also need to implement calls to action that direct visitors to your gated content where you can offer them even more value in exchange for some information on their part. If you can get your target buyer to subscribe to e-mail communications, the long-term possibility of conversion skyrockets. Your gated content, therefore, has to provide exceptional value.
The goal with gated content is always to create mutual benefit—your readers get premium access to relevant insight, and you enter valuable information into your database, taking you a step closer to becoming top of mind.
Research and Consideration
The research stage is often the lengthiest of the entire journey, which is why most of your content will be targeted here. Because your audience has so much information to sift through and process, you need to be patient, strategic, and, perhaps most important, consistent. The greater the quantity of tactical, actionable, educational content you publish, the better your chances of staying top of mind throughout what may be a long process.
At this point, you’ve already helped your audience identify key problems and opportunities; now it’s time to explore solutions.
Your goal at this stage is to nurture your best leads through t
he middle of the funnel. To do this, you need to create content that is slightly more company-oriented—focused on your products and services if you’re selling or your company culture if you’re recruiting. Remember, though, that the focus needs to remain squarely on the needs of your audience—you’re an educator, not a salesperson. If the audience feels that you gained their initial trust only to turn around and bombard them with advertising, they’ll drop you quickly.
Although it’s still important to leverage credibility from third-party publications, you also want to encourage your audience to spend more time on your website. Through onsite content, you can further establish yourself as a valuable resource on the buyer journey. And in educating your target audience as they do their research, you’ll demonstrate the way in which you create value—an attractive prospect when thinking about future purchasing decisions.
Decision Making
In the final stage, your audience has developed a pretty thorough understanding of their problem and the potential solutions that are available. They’re now ready to begin evaluating options and make a decision.
By this point, your audience is well aware of your agenda. Still, your job as a thought leader is to remain a trusted resource—if they feel that you don’t have their best interests at heart, you’ll lose credibility, which could cost you the relationship.
Help them weigh the pros and cons of their various options; continue to answer their most pressing questions. Back up the information you provide with empirical evidence—what have others done in the past? How did it work out?
Use your content to make a strong, evidence-based case for your company. If you’re really the best option, explain why. Create comparison guides that make the advantages you offer over the competition crystal clear and comprehensive content that addresses any remaining concerns your audience might have at this point.
If you’re selling your services, this is the point where your sales team enters the picture, and it’s important that they’re ready to leverage the content as a tool for closing the deal. If you’re recruiting talent, this is where your HR director comes in to make sure the candidates you’ve attracted with your content are qualified and a good fit for your company.
Whatever your goal is, make sure your team understands the direct relationship between thought leadership and conversion. Everyone is working toward the same goal, so be sure that communication among team members remains open and honest.
Good content in this final stage communicates urgency, differentiates your company and what you offer from the competition, and helps your audience evaluate their options to make the best decision. If your content does all these things, your chances of converting your audience skyrocket.
Strategic Distribution
Now that we’ve taken a look at what effective content looks like at each point during your audience’s journey, let’s discuss ways you can deliver that content directly to them at exactly the right moment.
To understand just how important strategic distribution is, imagine that you’re on a hiking trail through the desert. You’re thirsty but you’re out of water, so your guide goes to get more. You continue walking. Time passes, and as you get farther along, you get more and more thirsty.
You call your guide, and he tells you that he’s been waiting with the water at the place you started the trek. What the hell? You tell him that you’re not anywhere near the starting point, that you kept walking to your destination. So he catches up with you, and you’re relieved to finally have something to drink.
You put the bottle to your lips and taste coffee—not at all what you’re looking for and not even close to what you need in this moment. You’re frustrated, but he says he’ll be right back with that water you asked for. So you give him one more chance.
More time passes, you keep hiking, and you still haven’t gotten that water. It’s literally all you need in this moment, and the person who is supposed to be helping you isn’t where you need him. You call him, and he tells you that he’s waiting for you at your destination already. Needless to say, this guy has no clue what he’s doing, and you’ll never hire him for a desert adventure again.
When it comes to populating the buyer’s journey with high-impact content, you need to distribute the right content to the right place at the right time.
Being too salesy too early in the journey will scare off your prospect. Post a great article to a publication that your target buyer doesn’t read and you’ll achieve nothing. Although this sounds intuitive, the truth is, in many industries, 60 to 70 percent of content is not strategically distributed—most of it ends up sitting idly on company blogs that few people ever visit.1
Effective distribution connects your content with the right people at the right time and enables you to better hit the trust touch points that help you earn top-of-mind space. To make sure this happens, implement a distribution strategy that targets external publications, internal distribution, social media, and clients directly.
External Publications
My team and I have found that an effective way to get your audience to read your content is to publish it on the sites and blogs they’re already reading. Does the audience you want to earn top-of-mind space with like reading Inc.? Maybe Entrepreneur? These sites have spent considerable time and resources building an engaged following. Create your content with those publication guidelines in mind, contribute it to the editor, and tap into its audience.
By doing this, you’re simultaneously delivering content directly to this audience and being validated as a legitimate expert by virtue of your presence in that respected publication. This is especially important early on when you haven’t yet built up the trust needed to draw your audience to your site.
When it comes to selecting target publications, bigger isn’t necessarily better. Although getting a piece on the front page of the Wall Street Journal would certainly boost your reputation, it isn’t exactly realistic. And even if you did land that front-page sweet spot, it probably wouldn’t be as effective in the long run as publishing on a highly targeted, niche industry publication.
Sure, it doesn’t sound as cool, but you’ll earn more traction by speaking directly to the needs and interests of a smaller audience of highly engaged readers than a vast audience with scattered interests—and your content will be more effective.
Having published both on big-name platforms and on more niche sites, I have witnessed the power of a hypersegmented audience firsthand. For example, articles that my team and I post to smaller niche sites can outperform the content we publish in big marquee publications (in terms of lead generation, which is the primary goal we laid out in our strategy).
Don’t let this deter you from pursuing marquee publications; the visibility can be very powerful, and you can still educate and engage members of those audiences. But you’re better off building your strategy around consistent publishing through a diverse portfolio of external publications. As in an investment portfolio, you don’t typically invest in only the Apples and Googles of the world; you want to diversify. Your publication strategy is similar. Diversify the sites between marquee, niche, trade, and so on, and see what works. Then go back to the sites that helped you reach the goals you set. This can not only help you meet your various goals, it can also help you meet your audiences at different parts of their journey.
Internal Distribution
Don’t forget that your target reader isn’t always exclusively your target buyer. If you’re running a mature content initiative, you and your team will be pumping out a lot of content, and it’s important that everyone on your team read it. It helps improve consistency in your messaging, keeps your team educated about your company or the industry, and optimizes the mileage of your content.
Let’s say you run a software startup. Your head of operations publishes a piece about the lack of diversity in tech boardrooms and how nothing will change until the industry makes tangible commitments to addressing the issue. The piece goes live
, but only a handful of people on your team read it. Later, your sales team is on a call with a prospect who mentions his company’s commitment to hiring for diversity. Had your sales team read the piece, they could have forwarded it to the prospect, which might have gone a long way in forging a meaningful connection around a shared concern.
Missed opportunities like this one can add up. Fortunately, there are some powerful tools that make internal distribution seamless and streamlined. We have a Slack channel populated with our blog posts; whenever a new one is published, Zapier automation notifies the entire team and sends everyone a link to the article. Not only does this help keep everyone informed of what’s happening internally, it sparks conversations about how various departments can best leverage and distribute our content to achieve their respective goals.
Social Media
A strong social distribution strategy can amplify the impact of your content exponentially. Social media provides multiple avenues for delivering your content directly to your audience, and it creates a space for rich, meaningful conversations that bolster your credibility and demonstrate your commitment to the audience.
Focus your social efforts on your target audience’s preferred platforms. Does your target audience spend more time on Twitter than on LinkedIn? What about different audiences? For example, maybe Facebook is a better platform for posting and sharing content about your company culture for potential candidates, and maybe LinkedIn is better for generating leads.
An active, targeted presence on multiple platforms will increase the likelihood of your audience engaging with you, and taking the time to craft posts tailored to those specific platforms is a powerful invitation to interact with your content.