📝 What Is Content Mapping?
Why is content mapping essential for bloggers?
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As a blogger or marketer, you know you have to produce high-quality content to keep attracting readers and improve your SEO. After all, research shows that small businesses with blogs receive over 125% more growth in leads than their non-blogging counterparts. In addition, 61% of online shoppers in the U.S. have gone on to make purchases after reading a blog.
But aimlessly churning out blog post after blog post will not necessarily lead to you achieving your goals. Long-term success requires a more strategic approach to delivering content in a timely manner as it relates to the needs of your target audience. This is where content mapping comes in.
What is content mapping?
Content mapping is a strategic process that aligns your content output with the needs of the customer. It is a strategic approach to ensuring a customer accesses the right piece of content at the right time. It is also a valuable tool in converting leads into buyers. In short, content mapping allows you to match your content with customer intent, thereby increasing your chances to get positive results.
For example, a target customer who is discovering your blog for the first time is unlikely to want to carry out a conversion action right away. In this case, your content should be helping them to get to know more about your brand and how you can help them with a problem they are having. On the other hand, there is a higher likelihood that someone who is already familiar with your content might be looking to take some action once they return to your website. In this case, it is probably more useful to display more action-based content.
According to the Alexa blog, content mapping assists with the following:
Understanding how your content assists target customers with getting the information they need at each stage of the customer journey.
Figuring out what points along the journey people engage with your content to get a particular result.
Using the information to better support customers with your content in the future
In addition, there are six steps in the content matching process. These are:
Creating one or more buyer/reader personas
Build a map outlining the customer journey
Work out which content works best in each customer journey phase
Design a catalog for all the content you currently have
Start pairing your content with the appropriate customer journey phase
Look for gaps that may require more or a different type of content
Benefits of content mapping
Content mapping presents various benefits for anyone in the field of content marketing. As it relates specifically to bloggers, there are a number of reasons why you should pay attention to using this resource.
Allows alignment of content with reader personas
Like buyer persona, reader personas are in-depth profiles developed based on the personalities and attributes of the average reader in a blog’s target audience. They help you figure out stuff such as the main demographic, reading habits, income level, educational background, and the goals and values of visitors to your blog.
Bloggers create reader personas to better understand what kind of content real-life visitors to their blog will generally be interested in and what outcomes they might be after. If your blog covers more than one topic, you will, ideally, need to create more than one reader persona. Content mapping will allow you to better align your blog posts with the reader personas you have developed. This will eventually lead to better results such as reduced bounce rates, improved conversion rates, and improved ROI potential for bloggers with monetization ambitions.
Makes it easier to plot the reader’s journey
From discovering your blog for the first time to eventually signing up to your mailing list, downloading an offer or even buying something via your blog or website, the reader’s journey involves several stages. The thing is, they can become uninterested or distracted at any phase, especially if there is no content mapping. With the creation of a content map, you will be able to better plot the reader’s journey, helping them figure out what to do next after reading a blog post, engaging with a particular piece of content, performing an action, and even how to get more benefits from your blog.
Shows you where gaps might exist in your content strategy
While creating a content map, it is highly possible that you will recognize gaps within your content strategy. It could be you haven’t written any or enough blog posts on a particular topic your readers might be interested in. Maybe existing blog posts are missing important details or features (such as a call-to-action, social buttons, or newsletter signup bars, for instance) that would better guide readers along their journey. Or it could be that some older posts have become obsolete and need to be removed or re-written to suit the current needs of target readers. Whatever the case, being able to identify and fill gaps in your content strategy can lead to better results, including improved reader retention.
Leads to better content
In addition to filling possible gaps, content mapping can lead to higher-quality content overall. That’s because you now have a better understanding of your reader persona and what type of content they will respond to. With the information you have uncovered about their journey, you can now eliminate unnecessary details from your articles, know how to frame your topics, and include the right keywords to match search intent. Higher-quality content can lead to better SEO performance, which is
Helps with keyword mapping
Speaking of keywords and SEO, content mapping should support your SEO strategy as well. Keyword mapping is another subject altogether but it is vital for bloggers looking to boost the SEO friendliness of their blog posts. Since part of content mapping involves researching topics best suited for your target readers, it also makes it easier when doing SEO-related activities such as keyword research, keyword placement, and content structuring.
Conclusion
With blogging being such a competitive industry, it is imperative for bloggers to find ways to keep improving traffic and providing more relevant content to suit the intention of readers. Investing in content mapping exercises is one of the main ways to achieve these goals.
Until next time!