Every kind of important journey needs a milestone – a marker to guide steps along the way. No marker is more important nowadays than content mapping. Content mapping is growing in importance due to the rise in agile marketing. In many instances content makes up the “70” for the 70/20/10 rule behind agile marketing.
Connecting to the customer journey these days, however, is becoming difficult. Potential customers are highly distracted, seeing content across devices – witness a report from eMarketer that notes how consumers are not recalling messages with clarity.
The key to good online marketing has always included good content. But now, providing the right content for the customer at the right time is essential for cutting through the clutter. Mapping solves a few key problems.
First, a ton of content of all ages and reader purposes exists all over the Internet. And the amount of content is not shrinking anytime soon. The Content Marketing Institute, in a joint B2B report with MarketingProfs, noted that 88% of firms are relying on content marketing.
Thus a content map can provide the means to set helpful content for each persona step — awareness, consideration, and decision. A content map is not just about creating the content, but will also be about providing better means to find content.
Second, the content is increasingly being accessed across a number of devices. Just look at the smart assistants from Amazon and Google (as well as Apple’s just-announced Homepod). People are discovering how helpful these assistants are in finding consumer answers. But Amazon’s recent introduction to Echo Show, a variation of the popular IoT device that includes YouTube queries in its results, initiates a new bridge for video content. Content will become another way for smart assistants to sway customers.
To get started, consider where your content is, and ask basic questions of persona and customer intent to form a mapping strategy. The mapping starts with a table of each persona mapped to content activity for each journey point — awareness, consideration, and decision.
The measurement strategy falls in line once the persona and associated activity is determined. For social media, you can use a social media analytics dashboard to note reach, then use analytics solutions to see how customers migrate to a website, app, or other digital media.
This approach also helps prevent a key error in analytics – relying only on siloed metrics and data. While social media analytics can capture activity on a platform, a good content mapping strategy must include analytic solutions to learn how a website, app, or other digital media fit against an overall corporate strategy. And it can trigger other advanced analytics – I know, for example, R programming can be used to import Twitter or Instagram data to determine relationship patterns of hashtags to other data.
It takes time, effort, and discipline to create content that’s really useful. Consumers are savvy, but their online attention is scarce, and dissipated across many channels. Those qualities make it super easy to not do the right things with content: Content mapping can highlight how you can do the right things easier – creating content that engages customers and ultimately increases sales.
