To infinity and thrive!⁠ This is my favourite schematic of the customer journey and the role content plays in every step of it.⁠ It is proof alone that content is king in your communications strategy and every single customer ‘touch point’.

Customer journey map

What does yours look like? Your customer journey map covers the various routes a customer takes to complete a transaction on your website. That ‘transaction’ might be a purchase, booking, download, sign-up, browser close, cart abandonment, or enquiry.

You determine most of those journeys, by establishing what you want users to do on your site and how quickly you want them to find what they need and to do what you want them to do.

Some of those transactions might be deemed negative, like abandoning a shopping basket without completing a purchase. But in those instances that’s where another journey begins.

Infinity loop modelling

What your customer journey looks like visually will depend entirely on you and whether you prefer spreadsheets or schematics. Me and my right brain dominance prefer schematics!

The infinity loop model is the simplest way to kickstart the conversation and spark ideas. It’s a 5-step loop to use alongside the six open question storytelling method (who, what, where, when, why, how) to imagine all the queries possibly proffered by a user at each stage. Those questions become your content opportunities…

1 - Inspiration

What content do you need to create to inspire a new user to dwell a while on your website and steer them towards converting into a customer?

2 - Decision

Once you’ve nudged the user along to the decision making stage, it’s all about how you create persuasive content to convince them to complete their purchase.

3 - Action

At this point the user becomes a customer and it would be easy to put a tick against their name, a notch on your sales tally, or a sign off and focus on the next newbie. But that would be wasteful. Let the customer loyalty nurturing begin. What content can you create to keep them enthusiastic about their purchase or booking?

4 - Validation

Now’s the time to keep the conversation rolling between you and your new customer while their purchase or booking is still fresh. If what you do and what they’ve ordered is likely to be shared with their friends, consider how can you be part of that conversation between them. What kind of content will help them share their excitement with their friends?

5 - Participation

During and after their experience of your website, your service, your product and your brand, people will invariably talk about it. Obviously, the better the experience the better it is for all concerned. So assuming their brand experience went swimmingly, what content can you create to make it easier for them to share far and wide? What channel will you deliver through? How easily will you enable them to share it on other channels? When will you tempt them to use you again (with or without a loyalty discount or value add)?

Content is king

With a long list of questions that any customer might subliminally or literally require an answer to while experiencing your website, what next? You need to answer them!

Content format options

It would be easy to assume from the above five steps that when talking about content, I mean written content. Not necessarily. In its broadest sense, content is any written, recorded, still or moving, visual or aural creation that informs, educates or inspires its audience.

I’m a lover of the written word and that’s my favourite form of content consumption. But I also enjoy creating video content for those who better absorb information that way (or for users of Instagram, specifically). And I’ve done my fair share of radio interviews to know that if I had the time I’d be comfortable hosting a podcast. Everyone is different and has a personal preference for content consumption based on how their brain works and availability of time.

Whichever format you find easiest to create or most lapped up by your customers, is right for you. Whichever you choose, content is still king in your communications strategy.

Content channel options

Digital customer experiences require website content (written and visual) and an email marketing programme (or a few) to support the routes to customer conversion.

Retargeting visitors to your website as they wander innocently around the internet after visiting your site is another option providing your privacy policy is up to scratch. Social media is typically the cheapest route to market here, but there are plentiful other options.

Repurposing content that you’ve created for email marketing and blog posts is perfect fodder for social media activity. Just because you’ve created said content for a specific step in the user journey doesn’t mean it won’t pique the interests of your wider community.

Ultimately, any content that answers a possible customer question could leave you needing to write frequently asked questions - to the point, occasionally technical content or ‘how to’ guidance on using your site, service or product.

Content strategy

The infinity loop exercise may leave you with a daunting list of content to create. The trick is to prioritise it alongside your organisational goals and your roadmap. The aim of content in your communications strategy is to support your conversion objectives. And well created content will serve multiple purposes across product, marketing, SEO, brand and customer service.

How do you plan what content you need to find, excite and retain your brand fans?⁠ If you need a hand applying the infinity loop to your communications strategy thinking, drop me a line.