If you have a brand, knowing how it works and knowing how to make a content map is one of the fundamental activities these days. But, you are probably asking yourself, "why?" "what is so important about content maps?" "what are they for?" In this post we tell you everything you need to know about content maps and how to apply them to the sales process. Keep reading!
what is a content map?
As you already know, and if we don't remind you, inbound marketing focuses on some fundamental pillars among which is content marketing. As defined by wikipedia: content marketing is the "art of understanding exactly what users need to know to deliver it in a relevant and convincing way". That is, knowing what leads need and being able to offer it from our brand in the best possible way in order to attract them to our company and turn them into future customers. It is not only a commercial strategy, it is a useful and effective way to distribute our promotional content.
Because of this, in recent years the use of content marketing is growing a lot as it allows brands to know what users need at all times and how to offer it to them. Sharing relevant and valuable content for the target audience allows our brand to establish itself as an expert in our sector. In addition, knowing how to accompany the user in their buying process will allow the conversion to a future customer to be much more feasible and easier to achieve.
But for content marketing to be truly effective, the content created must be really useful and meaningful for our target audience.
To make sure that we meet our objective, we must establish a content map that will allow us to carry out our content marketing strategy. It will be the most effective tool to achieve our content marketing plan .
The content map, therefore, is the tool that allows you to know what personalised content you have to deliver to each user (according to their needs) and at the exact moment you have to do it. That is why, if you are carrying out a content marketing strategy, creating a map is essential for your strategic marketing process.
Steps to create your content map applied to sales
Before you start creating your content map applied to sales, it is important that you take into account two fundamental elements in inbound marketing that will help you a lot in your process.
- Know and design your buyer personas: It is essential that you know in depth the profile of your ideal customer: their needs, their concerns, their interests, their preferences when it comes to consuming content..
All this information will help you a lot when creating a content map, as you will know how to better identify what topics to write about, in what formats to present the content, in what channels to distribute it, etc.
Buyer personas are the cornerstone to start our inbound marketing process and therefore are essential in our content map. The better we know our ideal customers and what their preferences and needs are, the easier it will be to design the content map and, therefore, personalised content.
- Knowing our customer's buyer journey: It is just as important to know our buyer persona as their "buying journey", i.e. the journey your buyer persona takes from the moment a need arises and they start researching how to solve it until they make a purchase or contract.
This "buying journey" can be divided into three stages:
- Discovery: The user discovers that they have a certain problem or need, and they want to solve it. They begin to conduct introductory searches related to the problem, not the product. Their intention is to educate themselves to understand their situation.
- Consideration: In this phase, the user investigates and evaluates the different alternatives to solve their problem and thus be able to choose the one that best fits their situation. It is important that they end up choosing us and not the competition, which is why we must personalise our content.
- Decision: This is when the user finally chooses one of the alternatives and looks for the best provider to carry it out.
The combination of these two factors, knowing the buyer persona and their buying process, allows us to create our content map and know how to define what objectives we want to achieve and how far we are going to go in the process of attracting users.
Once you have completed these first two steps, you need to know what type of audience you want to target with your content map because, depending on who you are going to target, you will find two different content maps:
- B2B Marketing: This is when your potential customers are other companies, the purchasing processes are usually longer and more complex. In this case, you will need more content to convince in the discovery phase.
- B2C Marketing: if your business is aimed at the end consumer, you should understand what needs, doubts or concerns the user has and prepare the content accordingly. If it is an impulse purchase, for example, you can create more content related to the decision phase. In sectors linked to hobbies (for example, make-up, food, motor...) working the discovery phase with content not related to the purchase can help you to work on your position as an expert in the market.
Now that you know what content mapping is and in what formats it is usually found, it's time to apply it to your business! It is essential that in any content marketing action you build a good strategy as a base, and for that you should invest time in creating tools like this one.
After all,a map is what allows us to know where we want to go and how we should do it.
