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Case Study: How Patagonia and Caterpillar Match Content to the Buyer’s Journey

Let’s review the Buyer’s Journey:

Buyer's Journey, Creating Better Content

In looking at this process, you can see that some customers would be at each of these four stages of the Buyer’s Journey leading up to a purchase. Let’s quickly review the type of content you should deliver to these customers at each stage:

Unaware: These are customers that don’t know who you are or what you do. The content you create for these customers should be focused heavily on the customer, and light on the brand. When you create content that talks about the customer, it gets their attention, and you will need their attention to move the customer closer to a sale. When you hear companies talk about wanting to ‘build awareness’ via social media and content marketing, these are the customers they are wanting to reach.

Slightly Aware: These are customers who are beginning to understand who your brand is, and what it does. Content aimed at these customers should help them understand how your brand’s products and services fit into their lives. So at this stage, you want to shift your content a bit to begin to discuss your product and services, but in the context of ‘Here’s how our stuff can help you”. In that way you are communicating that you know and understand who the customer is, and also that you know how your products and services can help them.

Interested: Customers at this stage are now considering making a purchase. So your content should shift more toward the product itself. NOW is when you can FINALLY start to sell your brand’s products and services. Customers at this stage are doing research in your products and services and those of your competitors, before making a purchase decision.

Ready to Buy! Customers at this stage are…ready to buy! Your content should do one thing, help them complete the sale.

 

Most company blogs create content that’s focused on either customers who are Unaware (building awareness) or customers who are Slightly Aware (helping customers understand how your products and services fit into their lives). So let’s look at two company blogs that cater its content to each of these groups. This will help you understand what such content would look like if you are trying to reach the same group for the same reason.

 

Case Study of a Company Blog that Focuses on Unaware Customers: Patagonia’s The Cleanest Line Blog

If you want to create content that raises awareness, you focus almost exclusively on what’s important to the audience you are trying to connect with, current and potential customers. You talk about the ideas, themes and beliefs that are important to your potential customers, because that’s how you get them to pay attention to your content.

Patagonia does a wonderful job of creating customer-centric content on its blog, The Cleanest Line. Its content is focused on ideas, themes and causes that are important to its customers, but which are also important to the brand and its founders:

  • Protecting the environment
  • Sustainability
  • Being active outdoors and enjoying nature

Almost all of the content on The Cleanest Line is focused on one or more of these areas. By positioning its content in this way, Patagonia is communicating the values and beliefs that are important to the brand. As a result, it attracts the awareness of people that share those same values and beliefs.

The content being created at The Cleanest Line is almost completely focused on topics other than the clothing that Patagonia sells. This is how you create content that builds awareness; By NOT directly selling to the customer.

As a sidenote, The Cleanest Line has changed a bit over the years, from a standalone site and blog, to now being completely integrated into Patagonia’s main website. Also, the posts are now called ‘Stories’, which I like and I think that encourages people to read the content by identifying it as being ‘stories’.

So check out The Cleanest Line, and note how the content is focused on what’s important to the customer, and almost none of it directly promotes its clothing or sells to those same customers. This is how you position your content if you want to build awareness.

 

Case Study of a Company Blog That Focuses on Slightly Aware Customers: Caterpillar’s On the Level Blog

Now let’s talk about how content changes when you create it for slightly aware customers. To reach customers at this stage, you still want to talk about what’s important to these customers, but you also want to talk about how your company’s products and services fit into the lives in your customer’s lives. Additionally, since this audience does have some awareness of your company, it will include some current customers. This is why your content transitions from being completely about the customer in the Unaware stage, to being about the connection between the customer and the company in the Slightly Aware stage.

With that in mind, let’s look at Caterpillar’s On the Level Blog. As soon as you see the topics of the posts on the blog, you can immediately see that the content is focused on connecting with project managers on construction sites. The content focuses on issues and problems that will be encountered on the construction site, and also focuses on how Caterpillar products and services will help managers succeed with their projects. Also note how the content here is different than the content you see on Patagonia’s The Cleanest Line blog. Patagonia almost never blogs about its products, Caterpillar does often. Also, note how the focus of the content is more narrowly defined on the Caterpillar blog.  This makes sense, as Caterpillar is speaking to a smaller audience. This is a byproduct of trying to reach an audience that is further along the Buyer’s Journey.

Here’s some of the posts up on the On the Level Construction Blog:

buyer's journey

As you can see, this is type of content is geared toward managers working on a construction site. Many of them are probably already using Caterpillar machinery, or are considering doing so,. The content is designed to be helpful and provide guidance for these construction site managers, but it also wants to help them understand how using Caterpillar machinery can make their projects go smoother.

 

So that gives you a good idea of the difference between the type of content you should create to reach Unaware customers (The Cleanest Line blog) and Slightly Aware customers (On the Level Construction blog) along the Buyer’s Journey.

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Ten Elements Every Company Blog Should Have

Understanding the Ten Elements Every Company Blog Should Have

Social media sites come and go (Remember Google Plus and Friendfeed?), but a company blog remains one of the best tools available to drive organic traffic to your website. A company blog lets you promote your business, introduce yourself and your employees to the world, and gives you a place to provide valuable information to your customers.

Thinking about launching a company blog? Great, now if you want to avoid being “that guy,” then here’s the essential elements that you should incorporate into your blog.

1 – A strategy. Why are you blogging? What are you attempting to do with your blog? Establish your company as an industry leader? Boost your brand awareness? Provide customer service? Know what you want to accomplish with your blog, and make sure that your goals are consistent with your overall business strategy.  This post goes in-depth into creating a solid content strategy for your blog.  Once you’ve created your blogging strategy, make sure every member of your content team understands what that strategy is. Every content creator you work with will need to intimately understand your blogging strategy. It will make their jobs much easier, and they will create better content as a result.

2 – A dedicated group of bloggers. If you only have one blogger, or if you have five, every blogger needs to know what is expected of them, and what their role is. If each blogger needs to write 2 posts a week, they have to be willing to give you 2 posts a week.  Keep in mind when setting your team and expected goals, that it’s better to start with less and then grow as the skills and familiarity of the team improves. For example, it makes more sense to start with asking 3 new posts a month from each writer, then after a couple of months you may want to increase the rate for each writer up to 5 new posts a month. Starting small and growing makes more sense than taking on too much right out of the gate.

3 – A posting schedule. This ties in with #2. Ideally, a company blog should have at least 1 new post a week. Make sure each blogger knows how many posts a week/month they are responsible for, and have the posts up on a set pattern. Don’t have the bloggers put them up whenever inspiration strikes, that’s how you end up with 2 posts a week; one on Thursday night at 10:46pm, the other on Sunday at noon. Set up your posts to run in the middle of the week, and then move outward. Tues, Weds, and Thursday are usually the best days for traffic, so schedule posts to run these days, usually around 10am-noon.

Remember, it’s more important to keep to a set schedule, than it is to post more often. Creating and keeping a regular schedule trains readers to know when to expect new content from your blog. This helps drive engagement and traffic.

4 – A comment policy. Do you moderate? If so, how long does it take to approve comments. When Shelia leaves a comment at 3am Saturday morning, will it be noon on Monday till it’s approved? You need to know this. For extra credit, list it on the blog itself.  Keep in mind that you are under NO obligation to let stand ANY comment that personally attacks any of your writers or any of your writers. Challenging ideas presented is fine, but if any comment attacks or attempts to bully either a writer or reader, feel free to delete the comment without prejudice. Your house, your rules.  In fact, if you want to turn off comments entirely, that’s totally fine.

5 – An ‘About Us’ section. Tell me who you are, what you do, and how I can get in touch with you. It’s best to include an email address AND a phone number.  Yes, people still like to reach you via a phone call. For extra credit, add a section explaining what your blog is about.

6 – Pictures and bios for EVERY blogger. Again, this is non-negotiable. I need to be able to SEE who every blogger is, and I need to know their background. Simply seeing the face of the bloggers writing for your blog makes it much easier to trust and relate to the writers. Really.

7 – A clear Call to Action. You want to direct your readers to engage in some type of action.  Maybe you want them to download your new white paper, or signup for a product trial. Perhaps it’s simply asking them to call you, but you should have some type of Call to Action. Notice at the top right of this blog I have Calls to Action asking you to hire me to speak, or check out my LinkedIn profile, or read my recent posts. You need to give your readers an action to take.

8 – Ask for subscribers. Give your readers a way to subscribe to your blog, via a feed reader, or email. Feedburner can help you set up both, go to Feedburner.com and set yourself up a free account, if you haven’t already.

A small section explaining what RSS is and the advantages of subscribing would be a nice touch as well.  Also, if your company has a newsletter, you can promote it to subscribers as well.

9 – A section for Recent Comments. This isn’t a ‘must have’, but it’s a really nice way to put the focus on your readers, and it also gives them an idea of which posts are getting the most attention. If you aren’t really interested in getting comments on your posts then you could focus on something else like your most popular posts or promote your company website.

10 – A personal touch. Be human. Refer to commenters by name. Say ‘thank you’ early and often. Ask for feedback, and opinions. Remember that ultimately, people don’t want to connect with companies, we want to connect with people.

What did I miss? If your company blogs, what are some other elements that you believe are vital to your blogging efforts? Which of these are most important?