Transcripts
1. Introduction to Content Mapping : Hey, there. I'mFabGivaneti,
market author and founder of Marketing School. Over the past 15 years, I've helped hundreds
of professionals build smarter
content strategies. They don't just shrank,
they also convert, which is exactly why
we're here today. My work has been featured
in Forbes and Ex Web and even hard as awards for
making marketing more human. In this class, you
learn how to build a strategic content
map from scratch. Break down content planning
by customer journey stage, show you how to group ideas into So friendly clusters
and help you set goals that actually guide
your content decisions. So this class is really
perfect for marketers, content creators, and
even brand strategists. Whether you're just starting
out or looking to shop as strategy, this
class is for you. No special tools needed, just the workbook
provided in class. By the end, you have a
final first content map that aligns with your goals, speaks to your
audience, and sets your content up for
long term success. And your project?
Well, you fill in your own customer journey
map using the workbook. And if you're feeling extra, you can explore
the full toolkit, and refine and build even more of a stronger
plan for yourself. Ready to make content
that actually works. Let's get started and see
you in the first lesson.
2. What is Content Mapping?: Every customer journey
starts with the first step. And after that, hopefully, we have a second, third, and potential any steps you can, which means each journey
is following a direction. And that usually is what
a marketing funnel is. It is the journey that
our customers will take. And at some point
in that funnel, they might end up
on our website. So let's think about
your own law content. Which stage of the marketing
funnel should it be tied to? Is it topo, top of
the funnel awareness? Or maybe **** middle of
the funnel consideration. Or potentially Bf bottom of the funnel, the
decision part. I'll give you a moment
to think about it. You can even press
pause if you want to. Actually, here's
the sneaky part. The real answer is all three. To create affected content, you want to map it across these different stages
of the customer journey. In this video, we'll show
exactly how to do that. So what is content
mapping anyway? Content mapping isn't
just about creating content for brand awareness
or discoverability. But it is actually part of it. It's about using your
content to do much more. Content mapping is a
process through which your content is mapped across different
stages of your funnel, where you can guide
your audience, meet their needs, and
also drive your results. There's a misconception that content is only about
brand awareness, but it can do so much more. So when you are
mapping your content, every piece is
strategically positioned to guide your readers
along their journey. By mapping your content, each reader progresses through
the funnel with purpose, which means every
piece of content serves a real clear goal, which is by making it more targeted than typical
service level content, we are building trust. Think about it as
crafting a journey. We're helping your audience moving every single step
towards the conversion. The truth is, content
mapping can set you apart from other people that just focus on surface
level content. And it's a process that
usually handled by people overseeing any
type of content strategy. So content director, strategist, or sometimes just marketers. Your job is to make sure that your content isn't
just filling space, but it's designed to move
users through the funnel.
3. Define Goals & Audience: Now the first step into content mapping is
one of my favorites, defining your goals, which means we're going to
ask ourselves some question. How does your content strategy tie back to your bigger
goals in marketing? For example, if you're building a content strategy for an
online plan delivery service, your main goal might be to
create a culture around plan care and encourage customers to subscribe
to your service. While the short term
goal could be building awareness and educating
potential customers, the long term goal is to convert subscribers and readers
into actual bias. So you want to think about it as your content marketing
mission statement, which means we want
to understand how our content is
helping our readers. How do you plan on helping them? How are you going to
provide the value? I really like to write an
actual statement for this. So for our plant
delivery service, our mission might be to help plant enthusiasts
and beginners alike, cultivate a green thumb by
providing expert advice, tips and resources, ultimately encouraging them to keep adding plants to their collection
through our platform. The reason why I like
commission statement is because it's kind of
like a guiding light. So it will guide every
piece of content you create to make sure that aligns
with your audience's needs, and what are your
specific goals? Once you write that
mission statement that allows you to understand
how you're helping people, I want to go back to talking
about your audience. Because with everything you do, knowing who you're
talking to is everything. And you can go as far when
it comes to content Mappi to create a reader
versus a bio persona. These are the start plans of
your content map, obviously. They help you get
a clearer picture of who your content is speaking to and whether it is potential buyers or just
people looking for advice. So if we're going back to the example of a plant
delivery service, we might have a few
different personas. If we are targeting
these in professionals, we need low maintenance
plans for the home office. Or perhaps we're
reaching out to Caesar plant enthusiasts hunting
for exotic plants. And these are our
buyer personas. But here's a twist. Your
readers aren't always buyers. Imagine we create some
killer content about Plan C, which is something that I should definitely read, to be honest. Not only potential customers
might be reading it, but also you might
attract creators, bloggers, which means
you might even get a businesses who can recommend
you to their audiences. So you're building
trust with them, too. And let me be real here. We have to get into data to
understand what personas are. So, use your research and especially the one
that you've done to flesh out your personas in
the past to help you out understand what are your readers and who
are your buyers. You can look at your values and goals because that will
help you understand what drives your audience and create content to speak
through their motivations. So if we go back to our plan delivery service
for this example, you know, busy professionals, like most of us,
value simplicity. And so it's really
about creating content that talks
about the ease of care when it comes to
plans because you want to fit into a busy lifestyle. Honestly, I understand
their problems and their pains because this is what they're going
to be looking for. Answer for those specific ones. I'm one of the people
that struggles to keep plants alive,
I'm not going to lie. So if you develop some content around the best low maintenance
plans for beginners, I definitely would read that. But also, going back to some of the readers
that might not be bias, knowing where your oldest
gets information can help you position your content where they're
running hanging out. So any source of influence
from gardening bloggers to people on YouTube can be really important
for you to know. A as a way to research some of the content
they might be creating. Finally, though, we're talking about the buyers as well, right? So I want you to go back to their habits when it comes to shopping and purchasing as well. Understanding why they
make decisions and what stops them from doing so can also be really,
really helpful. They need to see some comparison guidance
before committing. So things like five
top indoor plans rated by experts could be a great piece of content that can give them an extra push. So if you're short on time
or you don't have a persona, just focus on these
key areas for now. But if you have a
full fledged persona, go back to that. I
always recommend them.
5. Mapping Topics: And now that we
talked about how to structure your content
based on the funnel, let's move into one
of the biggest steps, which is coming up with
the right content topics based on the different stages. For some, generating
content ideas can feel like a daunting task, but asking the right questions
can make it a lot easier. So here are three quick
questions that you can guide your Basoming for
each stage of the funnel. For awareness, we
already explore some handy tools through the
power of searching dent. So what are the questions that people who've never
heard of your company might potentially need your
product or service could be asking and how's it moving to the moful
consideration stage? What would you say about
your product to convince this particular person or
persona to give it a try? What can you showcase them? Here's about showing
how you can solve a specific problem
better than anyone else. It's an opportunity
to provide content that highlights to
products unique values and also give them
the confidence to move forward through
real life stories. Finally, for those on the edge of making a decision in BofO ask what content can help them make their final
purchase decision? And obviously, what
might be a deal breaker. You're addressing those
last minute doubts or questions that can make or break their final
decision to commit. Once again, use cases can be
really powerful lists and anything that can actually give the option of you as the
answer to the questions. Now, these questions
can help you finalize some topics and obviously align that with the
audience's journey, which is amazing,
because we want to make sure that answering these questions can help P start mapping your content
and breaking it down. However, it's easier said than done for us to
build this out, right? Because we want to ensure that the content topics
actually are relevant. So how are we going to do that? It's a very simple
three step approach that can help us
with this mapping. First, you need to come
up with the topics. They have to be relevant
for your brand, your business, or your strategy. Once again, you go back to
tools like Answer the public. Or if you have more So
knowledge under your belt, you can look at tools
like SMAS topic Research, which is a gold one
for finding out what your audience is searching for
and what's on their minds. One of the things that I love
is the SMR topic research, also tying topics to questions. Secondly, we want to
identify the intent of the different topics or different questions
we're finding. Find a search intent
from the topic. Go back and understand what is your audience looking for
while searching for the topic? Are they looking
for information? Are they comparing options or they're ready to buy and they just need one final
bit of direction. Third is the angle.
Don't forget about this. How can you come up
with our original angle that matches that search intent? It's not just about
answering questions, it's about providing
a unique perspective or solution that stands out. Now I want us to walk through an example to really
make this sink in. It's been a couple of
years since you've been running your plant
delivery business, and now you have a new venture as a plant whisperer, I know. And, of course, on how to communicate with your
Ask plans. Loving that. After Noakewor research, you
discovered that the phrase best plans for beginners is something that you
want to rank for, which means you want to
attract more plan lovers onto your site by showing up as
an answer to this question. So we're going to go
into search intent. And one simple
thing that you can do is just go to Google, type in Best plans for beginners and check out
the top ten results. Let's look at some
of the headlines that might show up
from our research. We got five here. The best
indoor plans for beginners, how to miss your indoor plans. How to choose your
first house plant. Top five low maintenanous
plans for beginners, how to choose the best plans for a first S flan BarentO
YouTube video. Notice that most
of these results are how to or Sun guides? This is clear that people are
searching for this phrase, are looking for guidance on
getting started with plans, and they love lists. They want easy
actionable advice. Also note said, the fifth
result is a YouTube video. This tells me that
Google is saying, Hey, people searching for this
specific topic might prefer a video along
so written content. So if I want to satisfy the search intent and rack
well, what are we going to do? You should really thinking
about creating a comprehensive How to guide on the best
plans for beginners. Maybe you can even include a video demonstrating the care
routines for those plans. So by focusing on search
intent and offering the type of content people
are already searching for, you can make sure that
your content meets the needs of your audience
and gets discovered.
6. Content Clusters: Now that we've covered
generating content ideas, let's talk about something that can seriously boost your
website visibility as well, because we're not just
done yet with our mapping. I want to introduce
content clusters. If that sounds a bit technical, don't worry. We're
going to break it down. First, let's brush up on ACO, which stands for search
engine automization. It's a big part of content
mapping, as you can tell, because at the end of the
day, what we're trying to do, just like we do in ACO
is helping our website. Show up on Google when people search for topics
that we're covering. Content classes are a
great way to improve a CO, and that's why we
talk about it a lot. What are content classes there? Think about your
website as a map. On this map, you
have destinations or helps the focus
on specific topics. These destinations
are people will go to learn more about something
they are an expert in. Let's go back to our
plant Whisper example, and let's say that it's
plant care for beginners. Now, within those destination, you have different paths leading to more specific subtopics. So it comes bit of a
spider web, right? So you might have a piece of content that's guide
to plant care, like a one on one plant guide. This is your pillar content. What you can do
after this is create smaller and more detailed
posts dive deeper into specific topics like
best low life plants or how to water your succulents. These are your content clusters. These are important because
they help you organize your content starting
hierarchically. So you can actually
make it easier for your readers and search engine to understand how
your website works. And when Google understands the website ba is more likely to show the content to people
searching for those topics. So Fab, you might be asking. Why going through all of this effort in
creating clusters for all the topic ideas
you just came up with is not just about making your
website look organized. There's actually
some value here. First up, huge for CO, right? Such es like Google, love contents well structured, and they want a topic that
covers different angles. So when you create classes or related content on
specific bigger topics, and then you connect
them all back to a main more generic, more beginner or
comprehensive piece, you're telling Google, Hey, I'm an expert on this topic,
and here's all the proof. So that can help you rank
higher in search results, meaning more people find your content. And
that's not all. Why? Because there's
another big win here, which is you can create content that has lots
of internal linking. When you've got a
bunch of articles that all live in
the same cluster, it becomes much easier to link them all together
by linking them back, so they will go from
one page to the next. So if you're writing a blog
post about best Lo plants, you can even link back to your
main filler content about plant care or another
cluster piece on how to water your supplement. So why does it
matter? Because it's not just about this being
great for your readers, you know, the jump from one
alpha pose to the next. But we're also showing strong internal link in
Shoptu which is something that search engines are
looking for and they identify as content that is
interconnected and valuable, which means you're going to rank higher in the
search results, which means when people have questions through search intent, you will be the first answer to come up on the different tools. How do we find content clusters? How do we build them? Okay,
we got two options here. Can go manual or we can use tools like a keyword
Strategy Builder. Let's look at both. Of all, I want us to explore
the manual method. With this one, you're going to bra some the big topic that
you want to be known for. Some of the stuff
that you already have done off in
the previous step. So these are the pillar topics. They're going to
be the main ideas that represent your expertise, the main question
the audience have. Once you have these, they came up from the previous steps. You want to start breaking them down into subtopics that
relate to each pillar. These will become
content clusters. How can we do that, though? If you're still struggling to figure out what
the topics are, just go do a quick search of the pillar topic that
you decided to focus on. Then look at the
related searches or similar questions
people are asking. Look at what others are covering and think about how you
can add your ink spin. This is also with things
like so the public can help. But if you want to
speed things up, I recommend tools like
Keyword Strategy Builder on SEMRush because it can do
that heavy lifting for you. You just put the
main keywords that you want to be ranked
the main topic, and it also just clusters or related keywords that you can
build your content around. And this is great because
you can go from indoor plan, and then you might
get recommendations like best plans for apartment, easy care plans, plans
that thrive in low light. Listen, what method work. But what we're trying
to do really is mixing creativity with also
some actual data and looking at what people
are actually looking. So once you identify these topics and hopefully
we're starting to build them into
bigger clusters, we can dig even deeper.
I know, I know, I know. I'm asking us to go in and
deep about why Because I want us to have as many ideas as possible when it
comes to our content. So we're going to
go again and look at more keywords
that we can use. What are keywords? Let
me refresh this for you. Keywords are the specific words or phrases that people type into the search engines themselves when they're looking
for information, obviously, they're looking
for specific sentences, but the good thing about it is that you can catch a couple of words that might be the ones
that they use more often. So when you are looking at this, recording these kind
of seed keywords, and you will find them
on Google once again. Where you can actually
find more keywords, though, is when you're looking
for something on Google. You scroll down to the
P Also ask session. And in this section,
you can find related searches at the
bottom of the page. This is where you can
find more keyword ideas that are tied directly to what people are
already searching for. Once again, you can tap into
other tools, and once again, I recommend Answer
the public or SEMRush keyword magic tool because
they will actually take the main keywords or questions
you're looking for and give you other related
keywords or questions as well. So once again, if
you're looking for indoor plans as something
like Set keyword, you might find
related keyword like best beginner house plans
could be another one as well. It's really important
that you take that time to get as
many ideas as possible. There are backed up by some data and real people looking
for real things.
7. Refine your Progress: All we put this into
practice. We got the idea. We're going to stack
them in clusters. We got all our
little topics right underneath with
keywords, and now. Now it's start to fill
your content calendar. And yes, you will
need a calendar. But in order to do that, I also recommend going back to what we talked about
at the beginning, which is, let's fill this calendar so that it covers different
stages of the funnel. If we're looking at the ratio of the different types of
content across the funnel, I'm going to suggest looking at our calendar quarterly
is a good rule of thumb. And I want you to focus
more heavily on the tofu, the top of the final content, which drive awareness and brings new visitors
to your website. Roughly, if you're in doubt, 70% of the content should
be top of the final, especially if you're just
starting with content planning. So if we're mapping our
content for the first time and and you are a
plant whisperer, well done, you
might want to build a blog post title
like how talking to your plants can help them
grow a beginner's guide. So this is a piece
that educates and attracts new audiences
interested in plant care. Then we're going to
move into the ****, the middle of the final content. And this is about moving people closer to a
decision, right? Think about 20% of your content should fall
into this category. An example for our plant to whisper might be a
case study titled how one Aunt lobo transform their apartment with plant
whispering techniques. So this shows
potential customers how your method has
worked for others, nudging them to
try for themselves and giving some real
tips along the way. Finally, that Bofu right? The bottom of the final content, where you're focusing
on closing the deal and converting those
leading to customers. This would be the remaining
10% of your content. This should be really boful. Were you could create a Shake
post title top three apps to help you keep plants alive. This could be a created
list of options, conveniently including your
very own plant whisperer. But we're not done.
Not just yet. Finally, I want to add write your calendar,
a special place, just a column or whatever it is to track the effectiveness
of your mapping, which yes, it means you got to start tracking some results
on what is happening. Can you think of a metric
for each of our stages? Presuppose to jot down one metric that
would work for tofu. Waffle and waffle. Before I give us the
result, why does it matter? Because every quarter, I wanted to look at
the performance, and I want you to
look at what content is giving us the best results. And maybe your ratio
is going to change or maybe you're going to
double down on some topics. But now, the answer
about the metrics. Let's start with toful
awareness stage. Track the number of visitors. This is your top
metric. And actually, 75% of marketers,
according to Sam Rush, rely on it to measure
success at this stage. More for deposit duration stage, you should focus
on conversion rate and depending on your business, the number of leads
you're generating, which could also be newsletter
subscribers, for example. For both for the decision stage, we're going to look at
conversion rate again, but also you can even go as
far as tracking the number of payments and any ROI
return on investment, which might be something that
your company is already. Remember, content mapping isn't just about filling
up your website. With mapping and
clusters and a strategy, we are actually
creating content depth, taps into all the different
stages and behaviors that our customers will go
through as they're deciding whether we are the right
solution for them. So keep pushing forward. Give this system a try and get the worksheet to get practices
because practice was what? Progress. Well done. Get
your worksheet done. Try it out for yourself,
see what comes up, and I cannot wait to
see some of your work. Until next time
class is dismissed.
Fab Giovanetti, Head teacher at Alt Marketing School
