By edevaney@hubspot.com (Erik Devaney)

Content mapping allows you to deliver highly targeted, personalized content at every stage of the buyer’s journey, pushing leads and prospects toward a purchase decision. In this post, we’ll go over what a content map is and how you can start content mapping for your brand.

Let’s get started.

Why are content maps important?

Creating a content map is important because it personalizes your audience’s experience with your brand. They’re not receiving a one-messaging-fits-all offer or email. Instead, they get content that speaks to them at the right moment.

The idea of a content map may seem new, but it’s not. Marketers hear it all the time: The content you create needs to be personalized. It needs to be aligned with the wants and needs of your customers (and prospective customers). It needs to resonate with them. It needs to feel like it was created just for them.

On its surface, this sounds like great advice. Personalization, giving people content that they’re actually interested in … it makes perfect sense. But coming up with the actual topics that make for a highly targeted content strategy isn’t that easy.

To help you brainstorm and map out content ideas for targeting specific segments of your audience, we’ve created a new free template resource: Content Mapping Template: Using Buyer Personas & Lifecycle Stages to Create Targeted Content.

Download Your Free Template Now

I’ll talk more about how you can use this template in a bit. But first, let’s take a look at how this whole “content mapping” business works.

And when you have this concept down, you’ll want to check out HubSpot Academy’s free content marketing training resource page to learn how to map a content strategy for your business.

Content mapping supports the customer journey and creates a more cohesive, personalized customer experience.

When it comes to content, one size rarely fits all. To ensure that your company’s content is effective at generating and nurturing leads, you need to deliver the right content, to the right people, at the right time. Content mapping is the process of doing just that.

With content mapping, the goal is to target content according to:

• A buyer persona, e.g. The characteristics of the person who will be consuming the content.
• The buyer’s lifecycle stage, e.g. how close that person is to making a purchase.

Let’s go over these two qualities right now.

Buyer Personas

Buyer personas are fictional, generalized representations of your ideal customers. They help you understand your customers (and prospective customers) better, and make it easier for you to tailor content to the specific needs, behaviors, and concerns of different groups.

The strongest buyer personas are based on market research as well as on insights you gather from your actual customer base (through surveys, interviews, etc.). Depending on your business, you could have as few as one or two personas, or dozens. If you’re just getting started …read more

Source:: HubSpot Blog

Author: Aaron