Developing Content For Customers In Various Stages Of Buying Cycle
Saffron Edge
Jun 19, 2016
4 min read
The buyer’s journey is not too hard to understand in a thoughtfully designed sales funnel. A sales funnel is step-by-step progress taken by the customer in the entire life cycle. Traditionally, it’s been split up into three areas:
Awareness: Right from the start when the customer becomes aware of his need of a product in your industry category, searches for options over the web- hopefully, finding your business in the process.
Consideration: By now the customer has narrowed down his choice to 2-3 options and is looking deeper into the choices by directly comparing the pros/cons, processes, etc.). This usually happens for smaller or directly beneficial individuals, but for larger B2B transactions, this is also the stage when the person doing the research may have to present his findings to higher-ups for decision making.
Decision/Purchase: After much of the effort by the sales team and interactions with the customer via email, phones, or social media, this would be the stage where the customer decides to buy from you or not.
A study supports the fact that a customer is already 57% through the sales process before they even contact a sales representative, it’s obvious to have useful content in place on your site. But if you’re basing your content marketing strategy only on that three-step journey, you could be leaving a big hole in your strategy-making process. Ahead in the article, we are going to list out how content can be made and optimized along with the various stages of the buyer’s journey: Developing content for customers in the pre-purchase stage, content for current customers, andcontent for long term/advanced customers. Businesses also need to understand the fact that a customer journey does not end when they become customers. If you stop creating content for people after they became customers, you could be ruining your retention rates or making customers feel that they you left them in cold as soon as you got their money.
Developing Content For Prospects in The Pre-Purchase Stage
To get it all started you must have the data from your previous or current customers that let you know that:
What questions did they have in mind before they purchased your products? How did they skim through your competitors and make a choice of buying from you?
Was there any hiccup or a second thought while making the purchase decision?
Did you have a hard time finding answers to any specific questions about the product/service?
Such case studies could prove to be helpful at any stage of the process. Answers to these questions will let you jump-start right into creating on-site content, whether it is blogs, or FAQ/knowledge base entries. But, to warn you, nobody wants to hard sell or get obsessed with selling and differentiating their product/service in every blog post on their website.Content marketing institute lists some suggestions for types of content that work well for B2B businesses in the pre-purchase stage.
Developing Content For Current Customers
After the sale has happened, there is the vital step of “keeping your commitments” and “maintaining customer loyalty”. So how do you plan to keep your customers happy? Did you guarantee that your product could solve a specific problem faced by the customers? Then it had better deliver. In addition to all this, there are natural emotions or hiccups along the way after making a purchase:
Buyer’s remorse
New influencers and decision-makers
Resentment or aggression
Distrust
Failure to build value
Every customer is bound to go through a post-sale evaluation of the decision they made to purchase the product. Failure on your part to keep commitments and drive home value and you’ll be opening doors for your competitions to make the next sale. For many businesses, this means tailoring content for mainly two departments in charge of project delivery, and customer service. Content regarding project delivery:
Building trust with customers
Addressing customer inquiries
Does your customer understand the features?
Pointing out new needs
Content regarding customer service:
Addressing customer emergencies
Solving common product issues
Continuing to build trust
Explaining sensitive issues
These are some of the key areas where businesses focus on creating content. There are many other issues that might be addressed by content marketing and are unique to your industry. Hence you need to look out for those issues in coordination with the sales team or the customer service team.
Developing Content For Long Term/Advanced Customers
Here you are creating content that helps customers get past the “my product is good enough, but it could be better” area. Now is the time to create customer loyalty or customer advocacy. Within your client base, there will be a small percentage of people who truly love what you sell. In such cases, word-of-mouth still reigns supreme and hence you should create content to encourage these customers to speak about you. Some of the key points that need to be addressed during this stage:
Go the extra mile to provide your customers extra from what they have already purchased. You should always be the next choice of making a purchase whenever the time comes.
Repurposing content for the current customers so that it is easily shareable, enables you to create a sales team outside your business venture. This also lets your business open up to new communities related to your current customers. These communities might not have heard about your business before but may have the need that your products can meet.
Conclusion
Content marketing can fit any size of the business. You just need to answer the common questions or hurdles that your prospects face before making a purchase decision from you, even if they have bought it- are they satisfied with it, what steps is your company taking to ensure that it maintains long-term relationships with the existing clients.
Related Articles
Explore our thought leadership articles offering actionable insights, market microtrends, industry news, and digital topics.
Direct-to-Consumer (DTC) brands have grown to be an increasingly popular option for customers looking for convenience and individualized experiences as ...
The world of SEO keeps on evolving and every change on the online platform acts as a springboard for an ...
Life at saffronDecember 16, 2022
Subscribe to our newsletter
Get fresh stories, case studies, and advice from successful creators and industry experts.
Over the years, our performance marketing experts have redefined brand marketing and customer-centric experiences. We provide strategic direction to our clients for effective, scalable, and profitable outcomes. Do you want to increase your market share? Saffron Edge is here to help ambitious teams like yours, enabling you to convert your ideas to reality!
Collaborating with Saffron Edge has provided our clients with sustainable growth. They can leverage our ability to be inventive and execute campaigns at a great pace. Our team holds a high focus on accomplishing client goals.
We give your marketing plan a growth-oriented approach. We evaluate your business’s key features to curate lucrative growth plans for strategic and long-term growth.
As a DTC business, you need to tackle increasing market competition and personalization. You need to align your campaigns with the latest consumer trends. Leverage our data-driven strategies to scale aggressively.
It is a long established fact that a reader will be distracted by the readable content of a page when looking at its layout. The point of using Lorem Ipsum is that it has a more-or-less normal distribution of letters, as opposed to using 'Content here, content here', making it look like readable English. Many desktop publishing packages and web page editors now use Lorem Ipsum as their default model text, and a search for 'lorem ipsum' will uncover many web sites still in their infancy. Various versions have evolved over the years, sometimes by accident, sometimes on purpose (injected humour and the like).
To unleash your growth accelerating capabilities, we rely on a process of extensive campaign optimization and cost-benefit analysis so that you drive higher conversion rates and ROI.
We launch your campaigns once we have evaluated revenue opportunities and critical growth areas. We also tweak those campaigns according to dynamic market trends and behavioral analytics.
At Saffron Edge, we offer a complete range of services that build up business value, from the initial idea & formulation of product strategy to building a prototype and testing it with users.
Unleash your growth accelerating capabilities with our integrated growth marketing plan designed specifically to uplift business revenue.
The future of marketing is content that is genuinely valuable to your prospects. Saffron Edge is not just the NJ’s best content marketing agency; we are content curators, creative writers, and expert editors. We help create content that helps increase website traffic from all online marketing channels. Wondering why your digital marketing isn’t working to the full potential? Consult Saffron Edge for comprehensive business consultation services. We are a reputed business consultation agency in NJ with over a decade of experience in the industry.
Today, if you aren’t maintaining an active web presence for your business, you are losing out on a lot of potential customers. By just having a website, you open the door to anyone who has a slight interest in taking up your services or the products you have to offer. The power of data is remarkable; when you have data at your disposal your business drives success like never before. Saffron Edge is a New Jersey-based leading Digital Marketing Analytics Agency that employs a data-driven approach to help businesses make strategic decisions to maximize their profits. Our digital marketing strategies have been designed using the leading industry practices, consumer trends, and years of expertise.
We aren’t afraid to pursue multiple experiments that can help us optimize and improve the results. We help our clients grow their base grows organically and build brand advocacy. Let’s achieve tangible business outcomes and deliver superior digital experiences to your customers. Our experts understand the future of eCommerce; that is why we rely on progressive ROI-focused strategies for our clients. End-To-End digital solutions that lead the digital change! We create 'Impactful, People-First, & Goal-Driven Digital Marketing'. We offer end-to-end digital solutions that lead the digital change! We craft human connections using data analytics and strategic market research; it helps us deliver solutions that increase your enterprise value!
Direct-to-consumer brands have to tackle increasing market competition, the need for personalization, and evolving consumer habits. With Saffron Edge's data-driven eCommerce strategies, your DTC business can break through the noise. Establish a deep connection with your consumers and increase your sales!