To get started your team must understand the problems your business solves better than your competitors. And your website must bring these problems to the forefront of your buyers’ minds.
So let’s assume you have identified your buyer personas. Personas are created by doing an in-depth assessment of what makes your target audience tick. You understand what motivates them, their pain points, and have the solutions they need.
How do you deliver this message? Well, through content. And this content needs to be aligned to the buyers' journey to make it most engaging, relevant and compelling. Follow this process to help you produce the most relevant content needed to facilitate purchase decisions.
It's your content that helps influence a buyer's decision.
Early on visitors either have an awareness of your brand or they don’t. Those who don’t… they are the ones you are trying to reach. Ergo, you need to have content that talks about things other than your brand. You need to educate your visitors.
A blog is the best means of delivering that type of content. Publish articles that consistently demonstrate that you know your industry, you understand their pain point, and no one does it better than you.
This early stage is probably the trickiest because it takes a little finessing to find the right angle for this content. A good place to start is to talk to your sales people. They speak with this audience daily. They have insight into what people are looking for. Then look at your analytics, find things that people are looking for (aka long tail keywords that have brought them to your website already), write more about those topics to open up the top of that funnel.
Next you will want to make sure you have “offers” that provide more detail to the topics that you introduced in your blog posts/content. These offers showcase that you indeed have the know-how and in the end the solutions they are looking for. The offers/call to actions should link to landing pages where you're able to capture contact information and generate leads.
Note: The majority of these leads will not be sales ready. So you will have to nurture them to a point of readiness. At this stage the interest has been established, but you need to continue to educate them and validate that by making sure that you come across as the authority on the subject.
Lead nurturing emails make this process very simple. It helps guide a visitor from that state of unawareness to being more sales ready. Keeping them engaged with your content, inviting them to events or webinars, or asking them to download another offer will also help validate that they are the right fit for you.
In the end it’s the content that drives people to form actions, and you are ultimately guiding that decision making process!
