Writing Content to Match Buyer’s Journey

After reading all nine books from Digital Marketing for Dummies, I am adamant to craft my content or devise any advertising strategy for Kickstartly.com to based on my buyer’s journey or sales funnel.

Quick definition: A sales funnel is how your customer first come in contact with your product and move through to advocating your product.

Quick overview on Kickstartly: Kickstartly is a field service management app or service business management app that make it easy to schedule, dispatch, estimate, invoice, accept credit cards and get booked online by customers.

For simplicity, I will break down my sales funnel into three stages; top, middle and bottom.

Top of the funnel: Awareness and Discovery

Early in my customers journey, my potential customers are going through a specific pain points and they are researching and learning about these pain points. They probably are still trying to verify their problems and they probably haven’t had a name attached to their problems but only experience symptoms.

The way I see it is like this… a patient (potential customers) developed and experienced symptoms. They don’t know what illness they have. So, they went to see the doctor (me or the internet) to find out what illness they have.

The question I ask when drafting my content at this stage — What is the customers researching before he or she buys my product or services?

Here are several content ideas I have in mind:

1. Are you experiencing these ten problems in running your service business?
2. Ten pain points of running a service business and what you can do to reduce and eliminate these pain points.
3. Common operation problems in running a service business.

The content produced at this stage is predominantly created with a goal of addressing awareness in customers’ pain points. In other words, in the top part of the funnel, I will write content that verify their symptoms and give names to their pain points.

The middle part of the funnel — researching solutions

In the middle part of the funnel, I presume that I will know my customers by now. They are no longer nameless and faceless contacts. The customers know the exact problem they are facing and they are in search mode for solutions. The urgency of researching of solution will highly dependable on whether the solution is a must-have or nice-to-have.

I also presume that at this stage, my customers will be moving away from ‘why’ questions to ‘how’ questions.

In drafting content at this stage, I probably create contents such as below:

1. How to solve X,Y,Z (pain points) problem in my service business?
2. What is a field service management app? and/or What is a service business management app?
3. The case for and against of adopting application to manage my service business.
4. Five reasons to adopt Field Service Management App.
5. What is the alternative to Field Service Management App?

I know that at this stage, my customers are probably not looking to compare and contrast between different solution providers but instead, they just want to look at the general solutions that is available to them.

The bottom part of the funnel — Educated conversion.

I think once my customers know their problem and the best type of solutions to their problem, they are now ready to select the providers that give them most value.

Personally, when choosing to subscribe to any SaaS products, I typed in google search to identify the best vendor that can provide solutions to my problem. I generally looked at features, reviews, pricing, cancellation policy, refund policy and many more. I expect my customers to go through the same process when they search for the best vendor.

When drafting content at this stage, I probably will focus more on frequently -asked-questions, demo videos, live demos, side-by-side competitive feature analysis, pricing, return and cancellation policies type of content.

Ideally, I would like to be featured in popular websites such as Capterra or TechCrunch but I think this will either take time or may not even happen. However, with no VC or other investors pressuring me to grow fast, I can afford to grow slower and more organically. I can focus in making my product better and make my customers the sole influencer of my decisions.

In drafting content for the bottom part of the funnel, I will address the following questions:

Q: What information does our ideal customer need to evaluate our service against our competitors’ products or services?

Q: What information does our customer need to buy our service?

Content that I probably write to address customers’ questions at this stage of the funnel are as per below:

1. Honest comparison of different field service management app provider.

2. Kickstartly features.

3. Kickstartly pricing.

4. Kickstartly user cases.

5. Kickstartly demo login.

6. Kickstartly knowledge base.

7. Kickstartly FAQ.

8. Kickstartly terms of use and privacy policy.

9. Kickstartly reviews.

Although, I am curious… how do I accurately measure the effectiveness of all the content I plan to write above? I mean.. I have a rough estimate of how my buyer’s journey look like and how to satisfy their questions as they move through the sales funnel with content writing. But how do I know each content is pushing my customers along the journey? I think I probably need to identify the right stats to measure conversion at each stage of the funnel. I think like anything else in this startup journey, I will figure the answer to this and I will keep you posted. I will also update link to above as I finish writing my content. Wish me luck! :)