Before we begin, let's take a moment to revisit the buyer's
journey. The buyer's journey has a similar corresponding
marketing funnel, and when both are used side-by-side, I like to
call them the "marketing machine." The marketing
machine relates each buyer's journey stage to a corresponding
marketing funnel stage; the awareness stage relates to visit
and lead, the consideration stage relates to marketing
qualified lead, or MQL, and sales qualified lead, or SQL,
and the decision stage relates to opportunity and customer.
These funnels are designed to help you visualize and guide a
prospect through the stages of the buyer's journey so that
you can effectively measure your funnel and provide a tailored
message to that prospect at their particular stage in the
buyer's journey. It's important to understand the
relationship between both funnels because they're
working toward the same goal; attracting your prospects,
converting them into leads, closing them into customers, and
eventually delighting them, turning them into evangelists. A
marketing machine is not developed overnight. It takes a
lot of time and planning to build. This is where long-term
content planning comes in. So what's involved in developing
a long-term content plan? There are three steps you must take to
create a long-term content plan; setting marketing goals,
auditing or assessing your organization's initiatives and
assets, and identifying the buyer's journey for your buyer
personas. The ultimate objective here is to have a unifying
document you can use to keep track of your long-term content
marketing initiatives. First, let's talk about setting your
marketing goals. By setting marketing goals, you can develop
a long-term vision and short-term motivation. Goals
help you organize your time and resources so you can make the
most of your content creation efforts. Each piece of content
created for a marketing initiative should be tied to a
goal that's also directly related to the overarching goals
of the organization. This will help you stay laser-focused with
the content creation process. Let's take a second to think
about this. If your company's quarterly customer goal is 15
new customers and you know the number of leads needed to
generate 15 customers is 50 leads, and if you know the
number of website visits needed to generate 50 leads is 1,000
visits, then you need to take into consideration the content
needed to hit your visits goal. Each goal you set should be a
SMART goal. That is specific, measurable, attainable,
relevant, and timely. A potential SMART goal example
could be increase quarterly site visits by 20%. That's 5,000
per quarter to 6,000 per quarter by the end of the year. The
second step in creating a long-term content plan is
auditing or assessing your organization's initiatives and
assets. Your audit is going to consist of two parts. First,
auditing your content assets, and second, auditing your
event-based priorities. Let's begin with the content audit.
Your goal with the content audit is to identify all of the
marketing assets you have at your disposal and potentially
identify gaps or opportunities in your content strategy. There
comes a point for every marketer who has been generating content
for a while when they realize they have no idea where all of
their content is or how much they actually have. Content has
likely been created by you, your predecessors, or other
individuals in the marketing department, including subject
matter experts from other departments, and is scattered
just about everywhere. By doing your content audit, you'll be
able to identify resources that you already have, which could
save you hours of content creation time in the future. No
use in duplicating your efforts. When it comes to documenting a
content audit, there should be a place for you to insert all of
your assets and properly categorize them based on content
title, buyer's journey stage, marketing funnel stage, format
or type of content, which buyer persona this is targeting, and
any additional notes that provide value or context. Now,
it's time to do some digging for content assets, such as
guides, worksheets, or sales collateral. I'd recommend
systematically combing through the following dark corners where
content can typically be hiding, like that old file manager or
marketing folder on your computer. Ask your sales team
what type of collateral they use. Check in with the more
tenured employees (you'll be surprised at the wealth of
knowledge here). Pore through your customer relationship
management system, also known as a CRM, and your content
management system, also known as a CMS. Okay, I think you get the
picture here. Let's take a look at a content audit from a
HubSpot customer by the name of Maren Schmidt. Maren offers
advice and resources backed by more than 30 years of experience
working with young children. Notice how Maren already has
content spanning the awareness, consideration, and decision
stages of the buyer's journey for multiple buyer personas, and
each piece of content corresponds to a specific
lifecycle stage. Additionally, Maren has many different types
of content formats to offer her buyer personas, like an ebook, a
study guide, and a webinar. Note how Maren uses the "Notes"
field to explain the contents of her content offer, though she
may not need this for each piece of content in her audit. Now
that Maren has documented her assets, she'll be able to
refer to this audit in the future to pinpoint what content
she already has and how it can help with future content
creation initiatives. The second part to completing your audit is
to conduct an audit on your event-based initiatives. What I
mean by this is you'll need to take into account any upcoming
projects, priorities, or events that might involve content
creation. Doing this exercise will help you identify content
that could support each initiative, but also, and more
importantly, it can give you an opportunity to see how you can
connect this content back to the buyer's journey through an
inbound marketing campaign. An event-based audit should be
organized by the following areas: upcoming priorities by
month, initiative overview, theme, prospective blog post
topics based on buyer personas, and an inbound marketing
campaign that ties together your efforts. Take a look at what
Maren did for her event-based audit. You can see that Maren
has a few events and workshops that she might need content for.
You can also see that the content is grouped into an
overall theme for the next three months with associated blog
topics that integrate with an inbound marketing campaign
called "Preparing Your Home the Montessori Way," which is
an ebook. Try and imagine for a minute if Maren only planned the
month, initiative overview, and theme without keywords and blog
post topics that associate with a relevant inbound marketing
campaign. Yes, she would have noted that there are a series of
events coming up in the next few months, but she would have
missed out on the opportunity to tie everything together with a
series of blog posts that could lead to a relevant content offer
that would provide value to her marketing machine. Simply adding
these two columns maximizes your content potential and forces you
to think bigger than just the events at hand. There's one
last important step needed to create a sustainable long-term
content plan and that's identifying the buyer's
journey for your buyer personas. Remember, you're creating
content that's meant to attract and pull your buyer
personas through every stage of the buyer's journey: from the
awareness stage where it's more problem-based, through the
consideration stage where you're discussing a solution,
and ending in the decision stage where you're recommending next
steps. Simply identifying this content will give you ideas to
work with in the future. But before you can identify the
buyer's journey, you first need to know your buyer
personas. Keeping this in mind, let's take a look at one of
Maren's buyer persona's, Montessori Mom Meena. Here's
an overview of Meena as a buyer persona. Meena's a devoted
mother, a working professional, and married with at least one
child under the age of six. Meena wants to understand child
development and do what's best for her children, understand how
to set limits for behavior, and have effective communication
tools to use with her children. Meena's challenges are her
children won't listen and she has to deal with tantrums, all
of which overwhelm her as a parent. Maren knows that Meena
uses Google to find answers to problems she's looking to
solve. Great. Now that you know who Meena is, let's take
a look at what the buyer's journey might look like for her
in more detail. To start, you know it's important for Meena
to do what's best for her children, so what about an
awareness stage ebook that lists parenting problems you can
avoid. This is something that would bring value to Meena's
search. Then, once Meena's been educated on parenting
problems to avoid, what about following up with consideration
stage information like a questionnaire regarding family
needs to help her understand a possible solution - in this
case, Montessori. The questionnaire outlines both the
needs of the child as well as the parent. But maybe Meena
needs a little more information that will lead her to the
decision stage, something that educates her more on how to best
prepare for Montessori. What about a free consideration stage
workshop that explains how to prepare your home the Montessori
way? That could do the trick. And now that Meena has found a
solution to her problem, she's ready to make a decision. What
about offering Meena a one-hour strategy consultation to discuss
next steps for her child and Montessori? Sounds about right.
That's an example of a complete buyer's journey. A
buyer's journey is ever-evolving. The more you
learn about your buyer personas, the more you'll be able to
refine the buyer's journey and grow it over time. But it starts
with first identifying the content needed to complete the
buyer's journey, which you can then plan over the course of a
year to keep your content creation sustainable.