Online shopping can be a lot like dating. The right customer for your business doesn’t just find your website in search engine results, swoon, and hit Add to Cart immediately. They often have questions before committing long term—and that’s OK.
Your brand’s content should help your ideal customers by anticipating their questions and giving them the information needed to help them through the buying process.
But how do you know what matters to your prospective customers? By building a content map, you can organize and create relevant content that informs and performs at every stage of the customer journey.
What is content mapping?
Content mapping aligns your content strategy with the unique needs and pain points of each stage of the buyer’s journey. It is an exercise in assessing who your buyer is and what information they need. The output of this exercise is a content map: a visual representation of how each blog, video, infographic, and landing page will reach your audience in the moment that matters.
As a buyer moves through their journey from awareness to consideration to making a purchase and becoming a loyal customer, they use different methods to find out about your company and products. Content mapping can help you identify whether you have the right content for each buyer persona at each of these stages.
Content mapping is valuable for designing a content strategy that converts browsers into customers and eventually into evangelists. At the end of the content mapping process, you’ll know how to share your existing content, what new content you need, and where it fits best within the customer’s journey. It also helps you identify where you can improve content optimization and personalize content for your unique target audience.
What are the benefits of content mapping?
Developing a content mapping strategy is more than a theoretical marketing exercise. It has powerful implications for your entire business:
Uncover customer insights
Content mapping forces you to consider your customers’ concerns. As you walk through each buyer persona’s journey, you’ll uncover valuable insights into their motivations and unique informational needs. Content mapping is also a meaningful step toward personalization, helping ensure you have content to address every concern for each unique persona at each stage.
See your content in a new light
Mapping your content helps you consider each piece from a different point of view. For example, customer personas for a company selling organic bedding and linen online might include a consumer buying for their home and a designer shopping for a boutique hotel.
During the consideration stage of their buying journey, the consumer and the designer would have different questions. This means they’ll need different levels of information about specifics like thread counts and delivery timelines in various formats, such as spec sheets or marketing videos. You’ll convert more customers if you can better match your existing content to their buying process.
Identify blind spots
After experiencing your content as your customers do, you’ll identify gaps in their journey that you may not have seen before. The bedding business might realize customers like to review matching sets, but you have no cohesive page to find all products of a specific color range together. To rectify this, it might create collection pages or product categories to showcase different color stories.
Prioritize new content
Content mapping helps you identify where you’re missing the mark. Look at your content map holistically, taking your buyer persona and funnel drop-off data into account. Then, use that information to prioritize which new content ideas can have the greatest impact on improving it.
How to create a content map
- Identify the target audience
- Align with the buying journey
- Set goals for your content creation efforts
- Map your existing content
- Assess how your current content is performing
- Find and fill the gaps
- Create a plan
Here’s how to create your own content map:
1. Identify the target audience
Make sure you have a clear understanding of who you’re trying to reach. You can’t be everything to everyone, so use detailed buyer personas to frame the journey according to your ideal customers. When you create content for this specific audience rather than aiming to please everyone, you have a better chance of selling.
2. Align with the buying journey
Get in your customer’s shoes and connect your content marketing strategy to your customer journey map. Ask yourself:
- What steps do customers take when they first realize they need something?
- How do they prefer to inform themselves? Reading an article? Watching a video?
- What questions do they have when they’re comparing vendors?
- Do they need buy-in from someone else before they can make the purchase?
Use these questions and data from your potential customers’ search queries and user behavior to inform the topics you pick. Then use keyword research tools to identify the specific search terms to target.
3. Set goals for your content creation efforts
The content creation process isn’t a matter of throwing spaghetti at the wall and seeing what sticks. Content pieces should have different objectives that align with the journey. Your marketing email’s goal might be to drive previous customers to the product page of a new release, whereas a blog’s goal might be to encourage newsletter signups.
Differentiate content types in Google Analytics 4 (GA4) using the content groupings feature and set measurable goals for each content category.
4. Map your existing content
Once you know your customers’ goals and how your content can serve them at each step, it’s time to take stock of what you’ve already created.
Create a list of your existing content and match it to each stage of the buyer’s journey. Remember that content means more than your blog. Include anything that supports the buying experience, like product pages, social media posts, downloadable PDFs, collection pages, welcome emails, packaging inserts, and videos.
5. Assess how your current content is performing
Web analytics tools like GA4 and Hotjar can help you gather data about how your content is performing and locate where people drop off during the journey. If customers view a product page but few are adding products to their cart, the content on that page is likely insufficient.
For instance, you may find that long product descriptions and testimonials are less useful here. You may choose to replace them with a short product details section, star ratings, and product-specific reviews.
6. Find and fill the gaps
Once you have your content map, you’ll quickly spot the gaps. Find out where you have the biggest leak in your experience and cross-examine the content meant to address that part of the journey. For example, do you lose more customers during the awareness stage or when they’re getting closer to a decision? From there, strategize to fix the business-critical gaps first, then iterate and optimize.
When deciding what should take priority, focus on high-impact actions first. Ask yourself:
- Which persona has a high lifetime value but isn’t being spoken to?
- Are there stages of the customer journey that are less developed than others?
- Are you leveraging physical and digital channels, or are you just relying on blogs?
Answering these types of questions will help you prioritize where to start.
7. Create a plan
Your content map informs your content development roadmap. Once you know what you’re working with and where your gaps are, you can prioritize and build an editorial calendar. Continue to align your content marketing efforts with your business goals and measure the performance of the pieces you add to your content library.
Content mapping FAQ
What is the buyer’s journey?
The buyer’s journey is the path customers take to purchase and repurchase. It includes four key stages: awareness, consideration, conversion, and loyalty.
What is website content mapping?
Website content mapping is the strategic process of evaluating the existing content on your website to ensure that it addresses the needs and questions of different types of buyers on their path to purchase. This is just as important as creating content fresh—and it frees you up to do so because you’ll know what gaps you need to fill in with a content map.
What is a content map?
A content map is a strategic document that helps you match answers to your customers’ questions at different stages of their buyer’s journey.
Are there tools to help create a content map?
Many content mapping tools exist to brainstorm and align your content to your customer journey. These include:
What is the importance of content mapping?
Content mapping helps you organize your efforts more effectively. Following a content mapping template ensures that your content aligns with the customer journey and guides customers toward a desired action at each stage.
What is mapping content?
Mapping content is the process of creating a plan for your content strategy. It involves outlining your intended audience and their specific needs, pain points, questions, and actions at each buying stage, and then outlining what content is likely to resonate with them as they move through the buyer’s journey. This creates a strategic flow of information from awareness to conversion and retention.
