Purposeful web content and customer journey planning


Often content is created by marketers that misses the mark. In my experience one of the main problems is a lack of purpose. Content should be focussed on the customer experience, yes, but the best content will take readers on a journey. This article describes structuring content in a way that is purposeful for your business.

Web sales funnel strategy

This rather crude drawing may look like an upside down triangle but it is in fact supposed to represent a sales funnel. This relates to how a prospect intakes content on your website. It would be lovely if you fed prospects down through the funnel in a linear path.

However, it never works like this as you never know which stage of the funnel your prospects are at. People are interested in different sorts of content for a plethora of reasons.

This means that you need to have campaigns running at all stages all the time. Which in turn means the only way to sustain this model is to have content, as well as goals, related to all three of these stages on your website.

Action

In terms of building your site the most important piece to start on is the “Action” or conversion section. You need to be clear about what you do. You also need to be clear about how somebody can express interest, make contact and/or purchase your products/services online. These requests need to feed through to the correct teams to be processed instantly.

The best place for someone to take action is a webshop and making a purchase. Obviously not all companies have one though. This is where an automation tool is vitally important. Have someone make a request that is then forwarded to the correct team with one or multiple follow up emails being sent to the user that completed the contact form; is the next best set up.

It is best practice to send all form completions to a thank you page on your website too. This enables you to track the numbers that complete forms, in Google Analytics. Where you are also able to see the channel and the campaign that led them to the site in the first place.

Consideration

For this stage you need to show that you can relate to the problems being experienced in your sector. The solutions are your services (described in the “Action” stage) but showing empathy can really help to build rapport with you audience.

Problems (or questions related to solving problems) are more likely to be searched for. This should be considered when constructing your content. Including the sorts of questions that people type into a search engine can improve your SEO.

When speaking about problems it is good to have a call to action that is giving away something of value to the audience. Something that they are willing to exchange their contact information for. It should also be something that lets you know exactly what area interests them.

So for Lucky Promotion we could produce a guide to “setting website conversions for a technology company”, which requires them to exchange their business email address for the content. This would let me know that they are potentially interested in conversion tracking but also that they are interested in the technology industry. Plus they will have given me their business contact email.

This means that they are legitimately interested in receiving a follow up related to this topic, so as long as I give them an unsubscribe. I am being GDPR compliant. If you are a B2C business you would need to confirm opt in via a check box or in a follow up to market to them in the future.

Awareness

This is where you speak about thought leadership pieces – blogs, how-to guides, infographics etc. These pieces of content should always link through to either the “Action” or “Consideration” pieces on your site. It may also be worth setting up secondary conversions like “sign up for the newsletter”.

The main aim for this sort of content is to grab people’s attention and make them aware that your brand exists. The content will link them towards something related to your services to find out more about your company and offerings.

This kind of content is where you can focus on your brand personality and the way that you do business. This will be where the majority of your content sits. It is important to understand which “Consideration” or “Action” content this links to. Having content connected to all three stages is vital to bring structure to the site.

This is my advice for structuring purposeful web content to make meaningful customer journeys. If you have any questions please leave a comment. If you would like assistance with structuring your web content, please get in touch.

John is a data driven marketing specialist and website manager who lives in South East London. When he isn't blogging for us he manages Revenue and Marketing Operations for corporate clients.

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