Accompanying the customer along their journey as they progress through the sales funnel should be one of the most important goals in content marketing. The other equally important goal is to build brand awareness. Unfortunately, despite realizing that content marketing can help fulfill the goals, many businesses have not taken the right initiatives or failed to capitalize on them. The reasons for failure, as enumerated by the experts of an SEO company in India, include the inability of the companies to cover all aspects of the customer journey, wasting resources in duplicate content, failing to create unique content, and extending up to unsuccessful outreach efforts.   

Developing a comprehensive content strategy by ensuring that it engages potential customers throughout their journey and generating backlinks for higher rankings and easy discoverability is essential to ensure the success of any content marketing campaign.

Mapping the customer journey

The content must serve the dual purpose of branding and convey value to the audience while playing a pivotal role in planning and executing the campaign. Your content should be much more than what you tell your audience. To develop your content, you must focus upon what should be helpful for your audience to learn and what they want to learn. You must focus more on solutions as well as your business and the industry as a whole.  Being aware of where those are coming from should be a key focus area in your content development plan.

 Aim to build customer personas based on the journey of various customer groups and never miss out on the opportunity of answering some common questions that arise during each phase of the journey. As you try to build relationships with the target audience and target buyers, you should align the customer lifecycle with your sales funnel because it is an important requirement from a business standpoint.

Search patterns change as the journey progresses

During the awareness phase of the customer journey, queries are primarily informational as customers want to know the options available and explore other people’s reactions to the information served to them. 

As customers enter the next phase of the funnel, they want to educate themselves and would prefer to consume how-to articles, various studies, and listen to influencers. On progressing further through the funnel, customers reach the consideration and evaluation phases. They want to narrow their options and look at reviews and case studies besides comparing prices.     

The engagement with customers continues even beyond purchase as you could teach your customers how to get the most from your products or services. On completing the mapping process of customers’ journeys, you should use the information to develop suitable supporting topics for content. 

Keep clear of irrelevant content topics

You can build the universe of your content topic that revolves around the customer personas and help to focus on themes that are closest to the customer types. Ensure that you minimize wasteful efforts in creating content so that you can make optimal use of your resources. 

Manage your assets well – You already have an inventory of content that is valuable assets and your capital. Taking stock of the assets available should help to know where to start from.  It helps to avoid wastage of resources by creating duplicate content. You would have a clear idea about the opportunities of refurbishing some old content that could still be relevant and make a list of items for fresh creation from scratch. The exercise of assessing your inventory of assets should also help to identify gaps in your editorial calendar. 

Infuse your goals and brand in the content – Taking a cue from market and brand insights should allow you to create content in much better ways and make the content serve some essential business aspects. It will enable you to create a consistent tone for your content by infusing the brand guidelines into it. Besides addressing topical issues in your industry, you can even customize your content for some specific purpose, like social sharing that creates a distinct identity of your content.

Create unique but optimized content

Topic validation – The content creation process starts by validating the content topic to ensure that it will be relevant and exciting for the audience. Conduct keyword research and use the search volume of the targeted keywords as indicators  to gauge the acceptance that the selected topics are likely to receive from the audience,

Align with search intent – Although your target keyword selection might seem to serve your purpose, you must understand the intent of those keywords to be sure about it. By looking at the SERP, you can view the types of content in circulation related to the topic that should provide hints about its usefulness to accomplish your goal. At this stage, you can research the competition to gauge how these topics are performing in SERPs. 

The distinctiveness of content – To create unique content, it is vital to create something that is not yet appearing in the SERPs, for which you must create some distinct identity of your brand and content. You can use some quotes from experts in the content or include some infographics to make it different and easily distinguishable from other types of content. Having gone through the steps discussed so far, it is time to share the brief with some content writers specializing in selected topics.

Editing and optimizing – Once you have the draft content ready, apply the best practices of SEO. Use various on page optimization techniques like title tag optimization, internal linking, and structured data that allow the audience to find more information about your content and move along their journey. 

Focus on link building

Give attention to gathering high-quality backlinks from reliable sources that should drive your link building campaign. Before accepting links, consider how relevant the content you want to link to and its scale and scope. Consider the engagement level of the content and how much eager would be the audience to consume it. 

Adapt robust link building strategies that are still the backbone of any successful SEO campaign. 

Author Bio:  Lalit Sharma is the founder and CEO of Ranking By SEO, a leading SEO company in India. He has been working in SEO industry since 2005. He can be seen contributing to SEMrush, SocialMediaToday, and Entrepreneur etc. Connect with him on Twitter.