Whether you are publishing an article on your blog, live-streaming a video on Facebook or posting a photo on Instagram, you are creating content. In some ways then, marketing is synonymous with content because, without it, there are few ways to reach out to your prospective customer.

Content marketing is a strategy that must go hand-in-hand throughout a customer journey. There are essentially four stages here – Awareness, Interest, Desire, and Action. Content marketing can be used to influence a buyer’s thoughts and action in each of these different stages.

Create Awareness

A customer journey begins with the prospective buyer’s realization that they have a problem and need a solution. Perhaps they have been experiencing frequent headaches and want to know what’s wrong. Or, they are in need of cash and want to know how they can make some extra bucks.

Customers who realize a problem start addressing it through their own personal research. They could perhaps search Google for relevant queries. Or, they could post on Quora or one of the many niche forums seeking help from those who may have the answers.

At this stage of the buying process, content marketing should not be about selling your product. That is spam and your product or service is never quite trusted by the customer.

What you should instead work on is helping the customer build their awareness of the problem or by teaching them how to solve their issue.

Mayo Clinic is a site that ranks high on Google when you search for a keyword like “chronic headaches”. The page ranks high because it is extremely detailed and actually helps a visitor understand the possible causes. Sure, they do have a call-to-action on the sidebar nudging visitors to book an appointment, but from a visitor’s perspective, they get their questions answered from the site. The organization gets a positive brand equity through the process.

 

Another example of content marketing used to create awareness is Oberlo. It’s a Shopify company that lets aspiring entrepreneurs set up their own drop shipping based eCommerce store. This is a lot of jargon that not everybody understands right away.

One way to create awareness is by creating an elaborate piece about what dropshipping is and how it could be used to make money. But that is only going to reach prospects who are already aware of the term.

An alternate strategy is to reach the same customer demographic when they are seeking answers to some fundamental questions – like what kind of businesses make money. The idea here is to answer the visitor’s questions about business ideas and at the same time introducing the concept of setting up an online store that sells products from other vendors. The visitor does not really need to know what dropshipping is at this point to become a customer down the line.

There can also be instances where the prospective customer is not aware of their need. The content marketing strategy, in this case, must focus on being ‘discovered’. Social media is a great place for content marketing campaigns of this kind.

Dry Steppers is an interesting product that acts as a raincoat for your sneakers. This is not something you think you need till you see one. The content marketing strategy, in this case, is to create a video that tells a viewer what it does and why it’s useful. A successful social media content marketing campaign relies on the producer’s ability to make the video interesting and shareable. And that is something they have achieved here.

Building Interest and Desire

The Dry Steppers example above is a good example of a campaign that creates awareness as well as interest and desire among the target group. This does not work for all industries, however. Even if a buyer is aware of a product category and how it can solve any possible issues, they do not act on it till they are adequately interested in a particular brand and there is a desire to own it.

Let us go back to the example of people looking for money-making business ideas. Once they learn about the various models that exist, they start looking for case studies and success stories. This provides them with a template to follow for success.

GoDaddy targets users at this stage of the buying cycle. Take the example of this article about YouTuber Karina Garcia. There are perhaps millions of people who dream of climbing their way to success with YouTube videos. This article chronicles the success story of one such vlogger.

But follow the article and you will see that the article is not simply about making money with videos but about how this YouTube sensation uses a GoDaddy product to run her own online store selling DIY slime kits. The objective here is to generate interest among aspiring entrepreneurs to use GoDaddy to sell their own products.

The text is not, however, the best format to generate desire. Stunning visuals do the trick instead. Ikea, a name that must be familiar to most readers here, does it best. Take a look at one of their recent photos on their blog.

This is not a stock photo. Instead, it’s a pretty room decked up with products available on the IKEA  store. The article goes on to link to each of these different products in the article.

Who doesn’t dream of living in a house like this? With this blog post, Ikea generates the desire and shows how they can fulfill the dream.

Calling for Action

There are two ways to make use of content to trigger action. The most common strategy is publishing a sales copy (or landing page). The objective here is to target customers on the verge of conversion with content solely focused on converting them. There are hundreds of really well-written literature on this subject already.

We will instead focus on the other form of triggering action – by producing content that people on the verge of conversion look for. A buyer who is already interested in buying a website would search using keywords like “Best hosting company” or “Best server deals”.

Alternately, a customer looking for a property loan may search for something like “cheapest property loans”. You may write compelling content targeting these keywords.

While this strategy is effective, targeting such “money keywords” can also be incredibly expensive.

Wells Fargo approaches the topic of triggering action differently. They take competitors out of the equation by creating microsites that serve to build mailing lists that target specific categories of loan-seekers.

Take this microsite from Wells Fargo for example. This blog specifically targets students in the process of applying for colleges. Articles here discuss everything from preparing for PSATs to college tours and applications. Students subscribing to the newsletter are then targeted with student loan messages during the admissions process.

Bottom Line

At the risk of sounding cliched, content is indeed the king. Be it text, videos or visuals, content can be used at all stages of a marketing process. The examples provided here in this article are simply a small sample of the ways content can be used to captivate your buyer. The opportunities that exist here are truly limitless.

 

About the Author: Anand Srinivasan is the founder of Hubbion, a project management app that has been ranked in the top 20 by Capterra.