Marketers today are faced with many challenges, none of which are greater than providing their target customers with the right information at the right time.
Capturing your target audience's attention, however, takes a lot of finessing - throwing different types of content at the wall to see what sticks just won't cut it. For most brands, a content marketing strategy is more than just a way to build authority online - it's the process of holding their entire promotional efforts together.
It's content that ultimately builds brand awareness, introduces products, nurtures relationships with potential buyers, acquires more links, and fuels all efforts to increase search visibility.
With that said, some content marketers find it difficult to know what topics are important to cover next. As a result, they start creating pages upon pages of different types of content hoping that some of it will manage to attract new traffic while disregarding their existing content altogether.
That's where a well-designed content map comes into play as part of your content marketing strategy. Creating a content map allows your team to align both the production of your content and the distribution channel to reach your audience at every stage of the buyer's journey.
In this post, I'll cover everything you need to know about creating your own version of a content map - from evaluating traffic-driving content to creating necessary new content.
Content mapping is the process of planning and creating content along different stages of the customer journey at all stages of the buying funnel.
Content marketers must first define how each currently existing content asset relates to a customer’s needs in the hopes that they come across your content in an organic search.
From there, they evaluate the gaps in their current content in order to create new content within each topic cluster to expand their authority in the space and align to different stages of the buyer's journey. Which begs the question...
In simplest terms, the buyer’s journey is a framework that outlines steps a consumer takes from identifying a need, researching relevant information, and making a decision. This process may vary between industries and product types.
In general, however, the process involves going through at least three main stages of a funnel toward a final purchase:
| Awareness | Evaluation | Decision |
| A person realizes they have a particular need or pain point and begin learning more about it. Most buyers exhibit an informational intent at this stage, and their main objective is to explore the problem and general options at their disposal. | Buyers begin to evaluating available solutions, products or vendors. Their research will focus on more transactional or commercial terms, as they look for data to justify their purchase decision. | Finally, a person has collected all the information they need and is ready to make a purchase. They use transactional phrases to find a vendor or a website to buy the item they’ve chosen. |
In short, when choosing products, a buyer:
Recommended Reading: Keyword Mapping Along the Buyer Journey
There are three main benefits of content mapping, apart from allowing you to position content along the buyer’s journey strategically.
Content mapping helps you understand customers better. To map content, you must learn more about them, and how they search for products or services your company offers. All this knowledge is bound to enrich your strategies and improve the results you deliver.
Mapping content uncovers real customer needs. In fact, the process helps overcome one of the greatest challenges marketers face: having to work off assumptions only.
As you’ll see shortly, content mapping removes any guesswork from the process, leaving you with hard facts and data that’s relevant to your buyers.
Finally, content mapping defines your content development roadmap. This is particularly important when you have thousands of keywords to choose from, and struggle to prioritize what to work on next.
We've discussed this idea of forecasting your content needs in an earlier post, SEO Forecasting: How to Identify Your Organic Traffic Potential.
When you’ve mapped content ideas to the buyer’s journey, defining an SEO content strategy becomes ridiculously easy.
First, you must have a good understanding of whom you’re targeting in the search results – your buyer personas. In fact, I don’t believe that you can complete a mapping process without defining your target audience first.
Creating buyer personas is a vast topic, but I'll be brief: a buyer persona is a detailed description of the ideal customer you’re trying to attract to your brand.
The other thing you need is their buying journey. You must define specific steps people take as they seek purchasing products or services like yours. I’ve outlined a generic customer journey above; however, the actual process for your business and products may be shorter or longer.
My recommendation is to research it with the sales team’s help. No one else knows your customers' buying journey better within the organization.
Finally, you need to conduct a content audit to identify what content you have already. You need it for two reasons: 1) to understand what assets you can map to the buyer’s journey, and 2) not to duplicate those assets when creating new content.
Recommended Reading: 5 Actionable Steps to Building a Better Customer Journey
What follows is a two-step process that will help you:
If there’s one thing that’s characteristic to every stage of the buying journey, it’s this:
In the early stages, buyers inquire about their problem and wonder why it is actually important to solve it. Later, when they’ve discovered more about it, they become curious about different ways to solve it. In the final stages of the process, they ponder how to implement a specific solution.
Of course, these questions will also vary depending on the buyer persona and other factors. In general, however, you can assume that they’ll inquire about relevant information at every stage of the buying cycle.
| Cycle Stage | Awareness | Evaluation | Purchase |
| Questions |
What is it? |
How to use it? What steps do I take? |
How to implement it? Has anyone else used this? |
Your content, therefore, should aim to answer specific questions, relevant to the person’s particular stage of the cycle.
So, as the first step, you need to assess which questions you’re already answering. This, in turn, will help you discover the holes in the strategy.
I typically do it this an Excel document, following these four steps:
With this exercise, you’ll quickly realize where in the buying process you’re not providing relevant information.
In this step, we’ll dig deeper into the data to discover what insights would help you fill in the gaps in your strategy.
In particular, we’ll look into various SEO data points to discover audience’s preferences and information needs.
For this walk-through, I’m going to use our platform, seoClarity, and its many content marketing capabilities.
Keywords provide the clearest indication of what information your audience seeks.
But it’s worth it to note that I consider more than just the phrases that drive visitors to the site here. Any other query for which Google positions a page could reveal insights about your target customers’ preferences.
Using Search Analytics, I am able to identify the keywords that are driving traffic to my site.
Sorting by Impressions, I review the terms and phrases for content we already use to target a specific stage of the buyer's journey. I gather these terms and add them to my Content Map with the existing asset's URL. This research typically uncovers interesting insights about the audience’s preferences. I ask, "How are they finding the already published content and with what queries?"
Then, I look at what terms are ranking well and what terms are just out of reach of the SERP. To do this, I filter the results by Avg. Position between 11 and 30. This tells me a couple of things: either this piece of content missed the mark where it was supposed to rank, or there is an opportunity I need to target in a NEW piece of content.
In the example below, based on what Search Analytics is showing me, I can see that there are several terms I can add to my map and use to plan new content or decide to optimize the existing content.
I do this planning within my own content map in an Excel spreadsheet (which I've replicated here as a content mapping template for you to download below).
So, to recap the first step:
Topic Explorer is a great way to find the long tail keywords around the cluster you're researching, or the term that has already been used in another content asset. This way, you can drill down even further to find the more relevant keywords related to that original term that is already driving traffic to your site.
Start with the topic you're researching and conduct a semantic search around that topic. We have covered this workflow in a previous post titled, Why Topic Strategy Matters Most in Keyword Research.
Content Fusion, our AI SEO content writing tool, is a real powerhouse when it comes to improving and enriching existing content.
Content Fusion collates various search query data and analyzes your content with a purpose-built deep learning algorithm to suggest what information could enrich it further.
Once you've found the key terms that are driving traffic to your site for a piece of content, use Content Fusion to show you what opportunities you may have missed in your original publication.
Let's imagine I'm a B2B brand looking to optimize a pillar page of content for the term "IT solutions". I put this phrase into Content Fusion along with the URL of the content I am looking to optimize. Then, I look at the recommended keywords to include in my copy.
I see a few opportunities to include further detail on my page about cyber threats and managed IT services. It's up to me and my content team to then craft additional content to this page based on these suggestions.
Content Fusion even worked to allow a global hospitality brand create 5x content across 800 pages. You can read the full case study here: Creating Content at Massive Scale with Unmatched Industry Insights.
Now you know how to discover holes in your content and also find the exact information to deliver the right content that would better position your brand along the entire buyer’s journey. Content mapping helps you do this strategically. By uncovering how your ideal customers search for your products or services, you identify ways to connect with them, drive those people to your site and engage them with your brand. The Content Mapping Template provided can help you get started with greater content wins today!
Editor's Note: This post was originally published in May 2018 and has been updated to reflect changes in the seoClarity platform.