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!
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.
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.
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.
This "buying journey" can be divided into three stages:
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:
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.