Content marketing isn’t just about creating and delivering content, but ensuring that potential customers receive the right content at the right time. Customers have different concerns at different stages of the consumer journey – which brands offer the product or service they need, which brand offers a better bargain, what do they get if they choose your brand over others – questions that your content should be able to answer. Content mapping aligns your content with the distinct phases of the customer journey: awareness, consideration, and decision. It’s about understanding what your potential customers need at each moment and crafting content that speaks directly to those needs. Why is this so important? Well, content that does more than just sell – content that educates, inspires, and engages – has the power to build trust and guide customers seamlessly through their buying experience. With a little help from AI content creation tools, you can create relevant content for every stage of your content journey map effortlessly.
In this article, we’ll take a good look at how to map the customer sales journey with your content marketing funnel and what you could gain from this exercise.
Understanding the customer journey
Content mapping to each stage of the customer journey
How to create content with AI based on funnel content mapping
- AI content generation for top of the funnel (awareness stage)
- AI content creation for middle of the funnel (consideration stage)
- AI content creation for bottom of the funnel (decision stage)
Benefits of content journey mapping
Understanding the customer journey
The very first step in building a content marketing strategy should be understanding the customer journey. This familiarity helps you plan and create content that resonates with your audience, creating a seamless and engaging experience as they move from one stage to the next.
Importance of the consumer journey
The customer journey is the roadmap that depicts how a prospective buyer interacts with your brand over time. It starts from their first brush with your content to the decisive moment of purchase. Visualizing this path is crucial because it allows marketers to empathize with customers, anticipate their needs, and respond with the right content at the right time. 73% of consumers according to a PwC survey agree that customer experience is a key driver in purchase decisions. As brands increasingly focus on customer experience (CX) as a competitive differentiator, customer journey mapping becomes an essential tool. It helps businesses understand and improve every touchpoint a customer encounters, ultimately driving satisfaction, loyalty, and conversions.
Stages of the customer journey
The buyer journey consists of three primary stages: awareness, consideration, and decision. These stages are not just theoretical concepts but practical steps that shape how you engage with your audience:
- Awareness Stage: Here, potential customers become aware of a need or problem. They’re learning about your brand and what problems your products or services can solve. Typically, this stage involves exploring informational content on platforms like blogs or social media.
- Consideration Stage: Customers now know their problem and are looking for solutions. They’ll compare various offerings, and this is where your product’s unique selling propositions must shine through. Detailed guides, webinars, and case studies play a significant role in swaying prospects at this stage.
- Decision Stage: At this pivotal step, potential buyers are primed to choose your solution over competitors. Content must provide final reassurances and eliminate any lingering hesitations, often through free trials, consultations, or personalized offers.
Content mapping to each stage of the customer journey
Content plays a significant role in guiding a buyer through each stage of their journey. At every stage, content plays a different role in the customer’s decision making process. For instance –
In the Awareness Stage, content should inform and engage customers. Your aim with content marketing at this stage should be capturing interest and building trust. Think top-of-the-funnel blog posts, infographics, and educational videos that highlight common pain points and general industry insights.
During the Consideration Stage, the focus shifts to positioning your brand as the ideal solution. Here, you need to offer comparative content, product review articles, product guides, and in-depth middle-of-the funnel blogs that demonstrate the advantages of your offerings.
At the Decision Stage, content must gently but firmly tip the scales. This is where testimonials, in-depth FAQs, and case studies shine, addressing any last-minute concerns and reinforcing the credibility of your brand.
How to create content with AI based on funnel content mapping
Content creation is already a challenging task where you have to strike a perfect balance between quality and quantity. Add to it mapping of content to the customer journey, and this becomes a lot more complex. You will need a variety of content for every customer touchpoint, which means even more time and resource investment. This is where an AI content creation platform, like Narrato, can be a great assistant helping you bring down content production time by 5 to 10x.
Here are a few ways you can use AI to create most of your marketing funnel content.
AI content generation for top of the funnel (awareness stage)
When a potential customer first encounters your brand, they require engaging and accessible content to encourage them to learn more.
Blog posts
Blogs are a great form of educational, solution-driven content that can also be engaging for your audience at this stage. To write a blog article in under 15 minutes, use an AI blog writer that let’s you generate long-form articles from just a topic or a refence.
Narrato’s AI blog writer allows you to generate complete blog articles from your topic or from a reference document or URL. The platform also has an SEO content brief generator, that gives you a comprehensive SEO brief for every blog topic. The brief includes suggested keywords, questions, references, structure, and other details that can help you blogs rank better. The best part is that you can also generate the entire article from the SEO brief, which ensures that the article is automatically optimized for the suggest keywords and structure. SEO is extremely important for content meant for the awareness or discovery stage, as your content needs to be found by the right people online.
You can also save your brand voice on Narrato and apply it to content generations. To further refine and edit your blog articles, the editor has an in-line AI writer that lets you expand, rewrite, or improve text and do a lot more.
The time you save on writing and editing your blog posts with AI can be well utilized in making your blog articles more valuable and engaging by adding personal anecdotes and expert opinions. A well-written blog post can help establish your brand as a thought leader.
Social media posts
Social media is another powerful medium to generate brand awareness among prospects. Shareable content that fosters interaction can expand your reach and capture initial interest. AI can help you with this as well. Social media marketing requires a continuous flow of content and a consistent posting schedule in order to stay relevant and visible. Narrato’s AI Content Genie is a revolutionary tool that keeps your content pipeline full all the time. This is an AI autopilot that only takes a one-time input of your website URL and a few themes or keywords around which you need content. Based on this, the AI tool can automatically generate fresh content for your social media accounts every week – no prompt or other inputs required. At the start of each week, you will have a fresh batch of social media posts ready to edit, save, and schedule.
You can also schedule or publish your blog posts and social media posts directly from Narrato. The platform has native integrations with WordPress, Webflow, and all major social media sites.
Apart from the AI Content Genie, Narrato also has an AI social media post generator with several AI templates to create social media posts with notes, themes, links, quotes, and more, tailored to the social media platform you choose.
Ads
Ad campaigns can also help prospects discover your brand and products. Crafting an impactful ad traditionally requires highly skilled copywriters. But even if you don’t have a copywriter on your team, you can still create great ad campaigns using AI today. Narrato’s AI ad copy generator lets you create ads tailored for Google Ads, Facebook & Instagram Ads, LinkedIn Ads, and other channels.
All you need to provide is some details about your product or service, and the AI returns compelling ad copy formatted in the way your target platform needs.
The speed at which you can create ad copy with AI makes it extremely quick and easy to A/B test ads and improve your campaigns in real time based on which ones are performing best.
AI content creation for middle of the funnel (consideration stage)
The middle of the funnel is where nurturing turns potential into promise. Here, content must build upon the trust established in the awareness stage. You would want to invest your time and resources on creating content that offers in-depth views of how your product can solve specific customer issues, encouraging direct engagement.
This can include strategically personalized email campaigns to deepen the connection with your audience, comparison guides that juxtapose your offerings against competitors, or product reviews that help prospects visualize clear value, guiding them closer to conversion.
We have created detailed guides on how to create product comparison articles and how to create product reviews with AI that you might find useful.
Emails
As for your email campaigns, you can use Narrato’s AI email writer which also offers a number of different AI templates for generating marketing and sales emails, from email subject line generator to newsletter generator and more. You can also generate sales email sequences and promotional emails using these templates.
FAQs
One more way to address your prospective buyers’ questions and concerns at this stage is through meaningful and detailed FAQs. Most people researching your product or service would type in their search queries in the form of questions and FAQs can be a great way to appear in these search results.
To generate FAQs for your landing pages, blogs, and other channels, you can use the AI FAQ generator on Narrato. This tool can generate questions and answers on any topic, without you having to brainstorm what your audiences may want to know.
AI content creation for bottom of the funnel (decision stage)
Finally, when prospects reach the bottom of the funnel, it’s about providing that final nudge and getting them to make the purchase. At this stage, you would want to offer free trials and demos to help them experience the product firsthand boosting the potential customer’s confidence in purchasing your product.
Customer case studies and testimonials can also come in very handy. Real-world evidence of your product’s success helps validate a prospect’s decision and extinguish any doubt. If creating a case study looks like too much work for your already busy sales and marketing team, Narrato’s AI case study generator can assist you. To generate a customer case study with AI, you need to provide some basic details to the AI template such as your product and company name, the customer’s names, problems and challenges solved, the impact of your solution, and so on.
From these basic inputs, the AI will create a compelling, well-structured customer case study that you can simply edit and publish.
These strategies are designed to eradicate any reservations and convert engagement into action, leading the customer toward making a purchase. Beyond this decision, continuing to produce content that supports and retains customers through their ongoing journey is an essential follow-up.
Mastering content mapping within the customer journey framework enables businesses to create powerful, tailored interactions that transform casual browsers into loyal advocates. By stepping into your customers’ shoes and mapping content accordingly, you deepen engagement and drive sustained business success.
Benefits of content journey mapping
Some of the stellar benefits of content journey mapping include:
- Enhanced customer experience: One of the primary benefits of content journey mapping is its ability to tremendously enhance the customer experience. This strategy invites you to step into your customer’s shoes and see your brand through their eyes, enabling you to create a seamless and engaging path from start to finish.
- Content precision: With a customer journey map in place, your content can be more precisely tailored to address specific pain points and answer questions your customers may have. For instance, if customers are getting stuck at a particular stage, a helpful how-to video or a detailed guide can offer them the clarity they need to move forward.
- Customer trust and loyalty: By delivering the right message at each stage of the customer journey, your brand appears as a reliable source. When your content consistently meets the evolving needs of your customers and offers transparency into your products and services, it reinforces their confidence in your brand.
Wrapping up
Embarking on a content mapping journey is like drawing up a treasure map. The ultimate prize? Engaging your customers and guiding them seamlessly through their journey with your brand. Valuable content, designed thoughtfully for each stage—from awareness to decision—ensures that you’re not only meeting needs but exceeding expectations.
Remember, at the heart of content mapping is truly understanding your audience. Regularly updating your content strategy, testing new formats, and always keeping your finger on the pulse of your audience’s preferences are key steps. By prioritizing and customizing content at each phase, you stand out amidst the digital noise, build trust, and nurture lasting relationships.
So keep refining your approach, be willing to adapt, and watch your engagement levels soar.
