The stages of the buyer’s journey typically include: Discovering, Learning, Choosing, and Procuring.

By leveraging a framework for content with a purpose, you can provide a balanced content approach that ignites intellectual, emotional, and passionate engagement with your buyers – all of which are imperative to keeping prospects moving through the buyer’s journey. Conversely, if you do not employ all classes of content, you will lose prospects at some stage. Indeed, every marketer and sales rep has suffered three common content pitfalls with buyers that result in losing them at some stage in the buying cycle to a competitive alternative.

First, you may focus purely on informational content, so your product may sound great to the buyer, but they leave in Choosing stating, “Nice product, but we have gone with another vendor that understands our needs better.”

Second, you provide both informational and contextual content, but you have no emotional connection to the buyer so they exit very late in the sales process. In fact, you may be left guessing as to why they chose a different product because they simply disappeared.

Or third, you provide too much fluff content and not enough specificity and product details, so your buyer immediately leaves in Learning because they “don’t understand what your product can do.” Actually, you will likely never even know this buyer exists because they will not choose to engage before looking elsewhere to solve their business needs.

Likewise, successes can come in multiple forms as well.

First, you provide buyers with informational and contextual content and start to establish an emotional connection as well. The buyer reaches Procuring stating, “I want you guys to win, to be the vendor I work with.”

Second, you provide motivational content on top of establishing an emotional connection and a foundation of trust and credibility, thereby spurring buyers into action that were previously stuck in their buying process stating, “We weren’t ready to move on this, but now we are.”

And third, you engage your buyer leveraging every class of content up through motivational and inspirational and the buyer gloriously declares, “Let’s find a way to do business together.”

When used in its entirety, the content with a purpose framework ensures that you engage with prospects in all the ways you need to engage with them in order to convert them. As a result, you establish a more relevant and powerful connection with buyers, from understanding your product and company to feeling good about your company, and finally to being motivated and inspired to act.

Read part one of this blog, A Framework for B2B Content Marketing Success.

Originally publishing in the Content Marketing Institute blog.