3 ways to map content to the buyer journey

A 2020 Demand Gen Benchmark Study revealed that 51% marketers use data to inform campaigns.

This may sound like good news, but then you consider the 49% of marketers who aren't doing this.

But I understand. This kind of content analysis can be difficult. This is not something you can learn in college, or in a book. YouTube videos are only a starting point.

It takes years of practice, trial and error, failure, and a lot of testing. Ironically, once you believe you know the process, your buyer's journey changes completely and you start over.

Let's look at some basics that will help you succeed and teach you how to use analysis and insights to create content that sells.

Before we move on, let me explain what insights and analysis mean to me.

Performance analytics is not what I mean. It is a good practice to optimize search campaigns, email campaigns, and other forms outbound marketing.

This is what I mean by the research that must be done before campaigns or content are created.

Search Volume Still Works

This is not a new or advanced way to map content. This is something smart marketers have done for years, but it's worth discussing and adding context.

Semrush and Alexa allow marketers to perform keyword research. This allows them to understand different searches in Google and the monthly volume. This data provides information about the search popularity and demand for keywords and phrases used by buyers.

This data, although it is simplified, can inform you on the keywords you bid on in paid searches and act as an editorial calendar for any content or YouTube videos that you plan to post.

Another technique to increase search volume is continuous optimization of your search visibility via Google Search Console. This will provide insight into the keywords and phrases that are most popular in Google and which ones drive clicks to your site. This is the beauty of this approach: you can optimize your content to include longtail keywords as many times as you want.

Relevancy Driven by Audience Insights

This is a great way to find content for your B2B buyer journey. This hypothesis states that buyers search for content in the same way they speak. Let me explain.

B2B buyers, IT decision-makers, and others aren't afraid to tell the world about their lives and work. Analytics teams can use this information to create social audiences based upon the job function and business. It's much easier to create audiences for CIOs, COOs and the head of IT, as well as engineers, developers, and all those in between.

Once you have built audiences, you can monitor their conversations over time, or, in some cases, even in real-time. This is known as audience conversation analysis.

This is a collection of their social media mentions. They are grouped together and categorized by common terms based on the volume of use. This will allow you to analyze the topics, hashtags, key words, phrases and key words they are talking about on social media.

Similar to search, this audience analysis can be used to inform your keyword strategy, SEO, or social content for engagement.

Media analysis is not just for PR

Analyzing media can give valuable insight for anyone, not only PR professionals. This type of data is not used by most PR professionals.

This hypothesis states that the media is at forefront of technology and that journalists and reporters are covering top trends, challenges and opportunities in the market based on interviews they have with the C-suite.

You can identify the top media publications your audience reads to uncover hidden themes, topics, and narratives.

A audience analysis identifies top media publications that people are most likely to read, share and have an affinity with. The data is already available for you to use.

You would perform a coverage analysis in this instance, which is similar to the above conversation analysis. In this instance, the data source is the actual media sites, such as forbes.com and fortune.com. The article's headlines and keywords are also grouped together and categorized according to volume of usage.

The result is the same. These insights can be used to inform your outbound and inbound marketing efforts.

Understanding the buyer's journey starts with acknowledging its dynamic nature and constant change. What is predictable is the way buyers use Google and the conversations that they have on social media. These two are constant and they don't change often over long periods of time.

Michael Brito, a digital strategist, is the Global Head for Analytics at Zeno Group. He is also an adjunct professor at San Jose State University and a TEDx speaker. You can reach him via social media, or visit his blog on social media marketing.