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Hello and welcome to another edition of Coast TV - I'm Mike Hall and today I thought we'd
have a look at Matching Content with Buying Stage. So this is in the context of a content
marketing campaign - we see a lot of people creating content but taking a little bit of
a scatter-gun approach to it, so they've jumped upon the content marketing bandwagon which
is fantastic, but they perhaps haven't put a great deal of thought into where in the
buying cycle the person they've created that content for actually is. 80% of sales (it
is said) happen between the 5th and 12th contact with an organisation - only 2%happen after
the first interaction, so really we need to be nurturing that entire buying cycle and
making sure that we create content that sort of covers everything from the early stage
right through to that late stage. To give you a real life example of this, so recently
I took up golf, and I needed some golf clubs. Now I didn't really know anything about what
clubs there were and all that sort of stuff, so I was very much at this early stage. At
that stage what I'm looking at is what brands of golf club are there, which brands are good
for beginners, what sort of prices are we looking at, that sort of stuff. Then as I
move on to the mid stage I'm looking at perhaps a little bit more in depth stuff like length
of club, the advantages of a short club over a longer club and perhaps the grip, that sort
of stuff - maybe what sort of accessories I might need. At that point, once I've got
all that information I'm then in a position where I might be ready to buy. At that point
I might go and read some reviews, I might perhaps buy a magazine and see what they're
recommending in there or go into the pro shop and ask and find out what they recommend.
That's a real good real life example of an every day scenario actually of a buying cycle,
and that can very, very much be applied to content marketing. Everyone that buys a product
or a service is going to go through this early, mid, late stage system, so we need to make
sure that we're creating content that caters for everyone. Now we (a couple of months ago)
created a content marketing guide, and within that guide this is one of the points that
we talk about - I'll include a link to it below after this. The example we give is a
cloud computing company and how they might create content to cater for their customers.
Now in the early stage we want to look at stuff that's investigative, it's helpful,
educating, it's introductory, so we're looking at things like "What is Cloud Computing?",
"Cloud Computing Explained", "The Future of Cloud Computing" - this is very much geared
towards people that are perhaps not even the buyer - the actual decision maker, these might
be influencers that we're looking at, and they might not properly understand what cloud
computing is so we're educating them. As they move on they understand what cloud computing
is, we need to make them aware of the types of solutions that there are - we're shaping
that solution, we're giving them further information and choice - "How Prepared are you for Cloud
Computing?", "Types of Cloud Computing". At the late stage, once they've got all this
information which they need to be able to reach that late stage, that's when we want
to be helping them to buy and providing them with proof, that's what they're after. "Buyer's
Guide to Cloud Computing" or "How to Integrate Cloud Computing into your Organisation", perhaps
even case studies at this point. Now the reason this is so important is because if you show
someone at this early stage a case study, it's not going to make any sense to them,
there's no context for it, so it's not going to be that useful. Similarly, if you were
to target someone at this late stage with "What is Cloud Computing?", that's not going
to be of interest to them because they know what cloud computing is, they've reached that
decision, that point where they even know what types of cloud computing there are - they
just want to buy, so we need to be really thinking about where in that buying cycle
they are. Now as I say, this is one of many sort of tips and guides I guess within our
content marketing guide, I'll link to it below, as always we welcome any questions or comments
or anything like that, I'd be happy to reply to them in the comments section below. That's
it for now, I'll look forward to seeing you again next time.