Every digital marketer worth his salt has identified a buyer’s journey–maybe more than one for different audiences or different personas. If you are doing it right, you are targeting your content to the personas and the steps in the buyer’s journey. By doing so, you are making your content persuasive, with the goal of moving people to the next step. I am seeing many smart marketers re-orienting their content marketing in this way. They are using analytics to show which content is working and which is not. Very smart.
But what I am not seeing is important, too.
I see far fewer marketers who are using the buyer’s journey to analyze broad swaths of content to see how their buyers are actually progressing. But it’s the logical next step.
After all, if you’ve aligned your content to the buyer’s journey, you can actually identify which content belongs to each step, so your analytics system can track buyers moving from step to step. Just as you can calculate a conversion rate for those who actually buy, you can calculate micro-conversion rates for each step.
I did experimental work for IBM on this in 1999, and Avinash Kaushik names the concept micro-conversions a few years later. (I had called them mini-conversions, but Avinash’s name stuck–and what you call them isn’t the big news here.) It’s taken a while for marketers to really decide to orient their content marketing around personas and the buyer’s journey, but we really shouldn’t be waiting this long to take this obvious next step.
I’m sure that some marketers out there are doing it, but I don’t see it as often as I would expect. What about you? If you’re serious about content marketing and analytics, are you putting them together to see the big picture?
