As you most likely know, content marketing is an essential part of online marketing as a whole. However, when creating content, you need to understand that it’s not just a way to improve your search engine rankings in order to bring in traffic. Content is necessary to help nurture your leads as well as to find them. In order to properly nurture your leads, you need to create content that will help guide them through the buying cycle. This means that you should provide different types of content through different channels that will meet consumers’ needs at each stage of their buyer’s journey. The following are the four main stages of the buyer’s journey you should create content for:

1. Discovery – The discovery stage is the stage at which consumers are searching for information about a particular problem or need. Providing valuable short-form content on your blog as well as on social media that is helpful and not promotional is a good start. You may also want to run a few PPC ads to help drive leads in the discovery stage to your blog.
2. Awareness – During this stage, you’ll want to position yourself as a company that can provide a solution to their problems or needs. You’ll want to provide them with more in-depth content that informs and educates them, such as newsletters, whitepapers, eBooks and tutorials.
3. Evaluation – Now you’ll want to begin educating your leads about your products and services to show them that your company is best suited to meet their needs. You can do this by providing case studies, product demos, FAQs, product webinars and more. A good way to deliver this content is via email marketing.
4. Purchase – Once your leads are in the purchase stage, they are ready to commit to your products or services. Give that final little push by providing a live product demo, a consultation, a coupon or even a free trial.

By creating content that is tailored to these stages of the buyers journey, you’ll meet the needs of your leads in a much more effective fashion. At Fasturtle, we can help you formulate a successful content marketing plan that leverages a number of different channels, including email and social media, that targets your leads at every stage of the buying cycle. For more information on how we can help you develop a customized email marketing strategy, contact us at Fasturtle today.