Content is present in every area of digital marketing; Only the way and form of its presentation is different. Content marketing is one of the main, cheapest and most productive digital marketing methods in the field of digital marketing. Every business needs content with the power to attract more users to attract more audiences and better present its products or services, but producing quality content does not mean complete success in content marketing.
As a digital marketer, you must know which stage of the customer journey your audience is in and what content they need in order to produce content accordingly. Content marketing is a long-term process that requires planning and continuity and is not only specific to creating content on the site, but also has many uses in social networks.
Sometimes the production of a content takes a lot of money and time from the team, but in the end, due to the lack of fit with the campaign, the desired result is not received from it. But what is the solution?
A road map, such as the Content Marketing Matrix, will definitely help you create a suitable strategy.
The content marketing matrix is not a new concept, but it is a tried and tested strategy for improving your content marketing so that you can make the most of your resources.
A content marketing matrix is not like a content calendar, but rather a compass that keeps us on track and focuses on delivering effective content.
In this article from the collection of content marketing training articles, we are going to talk about the content marketing matrix and how to implement it, so stay with us until the end of this article.
Table of Contents
Definition of content marketing matrix
The content marketing matrix, designed by SmartInsights, is actually a road map that shows what kind of content your customer needs at each stage of the customer journey. In fact, this matrix helps your team focus on producing and publishing content that impacts the customer journey.
Content marketing should lead to user engagement with you. The content marketing matrix is a reliable tool to help you direct and define your content marketing goals and actions and shows whether the content is leading the audience correctly towards the purchase or the actions you want or not. Thus, in addition to increasing the efficiency and feedback received of campaigns and marketing techniques, your team members will not be confused among the types of content, from text to video. Basically, the task of the content matrix is to be able to provide the customer’s needs at any time and to do this continuously.
When you have made your content light and heavy, you can start completing the content matrix or content marketing matrix.
The structure of the content marketing matrix
The content matrix is made of two vertical and horizontal axes. A successful content marketing matrix requires you to map out your customer journey in the desired segment, identify the key events where the purchase journey takes place, and the details necessary to progress the buyer to the next stage of their journey. Display the in the following, we introduce the two axes of the matrix:
Horizontal axis: The left side of this axis shows the stage of awareness and branding in the customer journey. The more we move to the right, the closer we get to the buying stage.
Vertical axis: This axis shows how much the content engages people’s emotions and logic. In the highest part of this axis, there are contents that affect 100% emotions, and as we move towards the bottom of the axis, we reach contents that are more logical.
Based on these two axes, the content marketing matrix can be divided into the following four parts:
1. Fun content
People who start the customer journey are not necessarily looking to buy your product or service. Creating entertaining content is one of the ways to create awareness and also maintain the interest of the audience. So try to create viral content and create buzz by spreading awareness. Great content formats to achieve this include creating contests, contests, quizzes, questions and answers, games, and videos. With the help of this type of content, entertain your audience and involve them emotionally.
2. Inspirational content
Basically, when you reach this part, you know that the audience or persona has some knowledge about you and your services. In this section, you need content that simply reassures them of your product, brand, and services, and thus motivates them to take the final action and enter the next stage of their journey. This content is located in the upper right quadrant of the content matrix and like entertaining content, it affects people’s emotions.
Celebrity advertisements in the form of influencer marketing are one of the most important contents that are included in this stage. For example, when someone sees a contest on your Instagram page, they hear your brand name and become interested in it. Sometime later, he sees that a famous influencer has also published content about your products and praised them. This is where this person can complete the customer journey by trusting you and making a purchase.
Examples of inspirational content: sharing opinions and ratings given by other contacts and customers of the collection, using influencers, emphasizing product or service information and their competitive advantage.
3. Educational content
Educational content is an opportunity to share scientific information or educate an audience, and its place is in the lower left quadrant of the content marketing matrix. Your persona may seek to develop and learn new concepts and information, or seek an answer to a personal question and concern. Educational content should include answers to users’ questions and training them, and encourage more customers to use your products and services so that their needs and questions are answered.
Educational content is suitable for those audiences who want to measure your mastery of your product domain knowledge. Some suitable content models for this section are: infographics, blog posts, and product guides, news published in news agencies, e-books, and podcasts.
4. Compelling content
The last part of the content marketing matrix deals with the lower right quadrant of this matrix. Persuasive content sits at the bottom of the customer journey and logically convinces people to buy from you. This type of content is suitable for some potential customers who need to consider all aspects before buying anything. Also, if your products have a relatively high cost, it is better to use these contents and prove that your product or service works.
Some suitable models of compelling content are; Webinars, checklists, calculations, pricing guides and data sets and product specifications, educational webinars, case studies, interactive product demos, testimonials, answers to frequently asked questions (FAQ), statistics and figures are among the suggested formats of this type of content.
You should note that in order to buy many products, especially products that have a high price, it is not enough to attract the audience’s attention and make them excited; Rather, you have to logically convince him that your brand is worth pursuing and spending money on.
An important point:
As we can see, each content is not only limited to one section. In the graph, we see some content such as e-books that are placed on the border of the axes; because each of these contents can create a different effect in terms of content. For example, an e-book can have an entertaining style and content or contain only educational content. A newsletter can also be educational, inspirational, entertaining or persuasive. What scenario you take to prepare and build it completely depends on your goal and persona that you determined at the beginning.
What is the process of designing and using content marketing matrix?
1. Find out how the content production process is now.
In the first step, you need to know how your content production process is. How many percentages have you performed strongly and what percentages have performed poorly in your content marketing program? How many contents have you published and how many unpublished contents you have and finally how successful you’re published contents have been. You must have a detailed list of your content creation process.
2. be careful about your content goals.
Every piece of content you share should have a purpose. Be thorough and remove any irrelevant content that seems appealing in your content plan; But it doesn’t match any of your marketing goals, delete it. The purpose of the content matrix is to know which areas you focus on the most and which areas you have performed poorly.
3. Check your competitors’ content creation trends.
One of the important points that you should pay attention to in this direction is to check your competitors and have an analysis of their content production process. Attention to points such as; The number of content production per month, the number of words used, keywords and topics of the day can help you produce effective content.
4. Develop a content strategy with a focus on target audiences.
Each of your personas takes a specific path in the customer journey, so you need to keep in mind who you are writing for. Write for different groups of users and determine which of the parts of the content matrix each persona needs most along the way. In fact, look at your products and services from different angles and understand how your products meet the needs of users.
5. Make sure you cover all customer journey challenges.
Every customer goes through several stages in their journey: awareness stage, consideration stage and decision stage. The first step involves tapping into the emotional side of your customer, the next step is about providing enough information to your users and educating them, and the last step is only for personalized and high-quality content.
Basically, the customer journey is not a linear process, and people constantly move from one state to another from the time they are introduced to your brand to the time they make a purchase. Think about what influences your customers’ purchasing decisions and make sure your content covers all of your users’ challenges. Visual, viral, and interactive content will appeal to your audience’s emotions, while logical content accelerates the decision-making process.
6. Produce engaging and viral content.
After reviewing all these steps, it’s time to create interesting and different content for users. Check the types of content that should be included in your content matrix. This stage is exactly the time of your success to surpass your competitors. Try to have your own innovations in content production and fill in the weaknesses of your competitors to be the first choice of users.
7. Plan your future content.
After completing all the 6 mentioned steps, plan to publish the contents of the matrix. Be careful that the composition and ratio of content in specific time periods and no changes occur in them. If you want to add new customers to your existing customers, you need to increase the amount of informative content, or if you want to add some leads, you need to focus more on persuasive content.
The importance of publishing content and choosing its type
The influence of the place of publication of the content in its final format is undeniable. The content matrix deals with the type of content and does not mention the format of the content. Your team can present their reports in the form of an infographic image, publish it in PDF and e-book format, or explain the results of their reports in the form of a video. Its final format depends on where you publish your content. Therefore, when using the content marketing matrix, be sure to keep this point in mind. Because each of the websites, messengers or social networks require a specific type of content format. Focus your content marketing matrix on the channels that are accessible to your buyers at each stage of the buying journey and determine what type of content will make the best use of your team’s human resources and capital while ensuring Make sure the content uses the unique features of each platform.
Is it necessary to have a content matrix in a content marketing plan?
The answer to this question is yes, and if you still have doubts about using the content marketing matrix, read these important points:
By using the right content, you can raise the problems and needs of users and relate it to one of the aspects of your business and offer your audience a way to solve these problems and needs. By doing this, you have created informative content and you can bring new users into your sales cycle.
The content matrix helps you have the right content for each stage of the customer journey, which in turn speeds up the sales cycle and increases conversion rates. With these interpretations, your potential customers will go through the buying process faster and the profitability of your business will increase. Also, by knowing the content needs of users, you can increase site traffic and attract more audiences by producing entertaining and educational content.
And finally, if you want to have a successful content marketing and digital marketing program, you need a road map that guides the audience along the way. The matrix helps you design this path and have a regular and accurate content calendar.
The difference between the marketing funnel and the content marketing matrix
Unfortunately, the marketing funnel is incompatible with many modern marketing strategies, especially using the content marketing matrix.
In an interview at B2B Marketing Lab’s Grow with Inbound 2019 event, Brian Halligan, CEO and founder of Hub Spot, talked about replacing the old marketing funnel with a carousel model. Halligan discussed how startups dominate as “disruptors of past experiences in the market” (like Amazon) by creating “new experiences” for their customers.
The Content Matrix is a tool that helps businesses do this by applying the marketing carousel concept to your content. In this way, unlike the classic funnel model, which seeks to limit the flow, to create results; they create continuous power in the growth engine. Note that in this way, a growth engine is applied to your brand.
Power, motion, force, friction, stored energy; these are words associated with a Ferris wheel, and just like an engine needs a flywheel to store energy, brands need a marketing flywheel to gain power and loyal customers.
A carousel is similar to a funnel in that it represents a customer journey in multiple stages, except that customers may log in continuously rather than just at the top of the funnel.