Most companies write content, post it, and hope the right person sees it at the right time. But did you know that, instead of merely hoping for good results, you can map your content so it’s shared at specific points in time during a buyer’s journey?
Timing is significant when it comes to content marketing. The content a prospect sees during their buyer’s journey should correlate to their place in your sales funnel.
Holding a buyer’s interest and moving him in the right direction through your sales funnel will ensure that when a prospect sees a piece of content that strikes a chord with them, they are moved closer to the sale. This activity is called “Content Mapping.” It’s the process of planning out a buyer’s journey and creating and posting pieces of content—like leaving a trail of breadcrumbs—that lead the buyer through the sales funnel toward the sale.
A typical buyer’s journey has multiple stages. The first stage is often referred to as the Awareness Stage.
The Awareness Stage is the point in time when a prospect has realized and expressed symptoms of a potential problem. At this stage, the prospect doesn’t know he has a problem, or he doesn’t know what the problem is, only that something isn’t right; there’s a distinct sense of discomfort or uneasiness in the business.
How to Capture Prospects Who are in the Awareness Stage
In most cases, a prospect will search the internet to better understand their situation. Still, as mentioned above, those searches will focus on the symptoms his company is experiencing, not a solution, because he won’t yet know what solution to look for until he can define the problem.
The most effective way to connect with prospects at the Awareness Stage, therefore, is with content about their symptoms. This presents a good opportunity to capture the prospect as a lead and then, in future content, strategically lead them from their symptoms to their problem(s) to your solution(s)—more on that below.
If a prospect comes across a solution that doesn’t tie to the symptoms he’s researching, he may not recognize the solution as their solution. For this reason, it’s important to invest the time to plan out and map the content a buyer sees to correlate with where they are in their journey.
Following is an example of how that would work:
Meet Joe the Plumber
Let’s say you’re a plumbing supplies distributor who offers vendor-managed inventory solutions, and you’d like to find more customers for that solution, including Joe Smith, who owns a small commercial plumbing business.
Most of Joe’s employees are on the road, and he’s got a few part-timers who help maintain the shop, keep the trucks stocked up, and order products when needed. Joe believes he’s paying too much in labor, so he’s embarked on a mission to figure out how to reduce labor costs.
Does Joe need a vendor-managed inventory solution? Actually, yes, he does. But if you ask him right now, he will tell you “No.” Right now, he thinks his workers might be wasting time, and so he turns to the internet in search of a solution.
He reads an article on your website called “Time is Money: Six Tips to Creating a More Efficient Plumbing Business.” The article contains ideas and tips that help plumbers run their businesses more efficiently. It contains a tip about reducing paperwork, a few tips about technology, and some tips about organizing inventory.
Joe gravitates toward the technology tip that mentions GPS vehicle tracking. He does a little more research and purchases a GPS for each truck. He expects the tracking system will save some time and money because a big piece of his business is emergency service. He believes the system will reduce the number of dispatch calls and the time spent tracking down his workers.
Once he put the system into use, Joe immediately feels his business is running more efficiently and that he is saving time and money. That is until he processes the next payroll. He sees the new GPS system is saving time with dispatching, but his workers are still clocking longer-than-expected hours.
(As an aside, can you see how a VMI will help Joe with his problem? Joe cannot see it either. This is because he is still at the Awareness Stage, trying to figure out the problem. Read on to see how quickly, though, Joe advances from the Awareness Stage of his buyer’s journey to the Consideration Stage.)
Joe Moves Himself Through Your Pipeline at 2 am. Are You Ready?
Working into the wee hours of the morning, Joe reviews the stop reports from the GPS system and discovers that his drivers spend a lot of time at your will-call counter. In fact, they visit the counter at least three or four times each week, and some stop at the counter more than once a day. Moreover, he notices that some of these stops take up to 45 minutes or longer. That’s a big red flag for Joe.
He then looks around his office at the stacks of receipts and recalls asking his guys to place their parts orders themselves and pick up their supplies on the way to their jobs.
Joe suddenly realizes he has a bigger problem than he thought. Not only does he discover he’s paying his guys to wait around for orders at the counter, but he suddenly grasps that his guys are purchasing supplies that he’s not keeping good track of. He begins to wonder if his guys are stealing from him, knowing he must do something to keep better control of his inventory.
And just like that, Joe has left the Awareness Stage and entered the Consideration Stage of his buyer’s journey!
He understands now that he’s got an inventory problem, and so he turns back to the internet for a solution.
As Joe’s supplier, are you ready to “answer the call,” even though he’s searching for a solution at two in the morning?
Stay tuned for Part 2 to see what additional steps will get Joe into a VMI system.
