A big thanks to our Pubcon 2014 sponsor, LinkResearchTools, your off-page SEO toolkit. Link Detox: Recover – Protect – Build.
At Pubcon 2014 in Las Vegas I had the opportunity to talk to talk to Steve Floyd of AXZM. There is not enough talk about how a customer’s path to purchase has changed, which is an area that Steve is very familiar with.
I used this time with Steve to ask him how to go about mapping the path to purchase process that a customer goes on after landing on your site, or being exposed to one of his ads.
Hear Steve discuss this in the video below:
Here are some key takeaways from the video:
- Steve pulls a lot of data from the user experience communities and content strategy communities versus the search communities. What you’re seeing more often now is the SEO and SEM community starting to adopt the best practices and disciplines of the UX community.
- A lot of people in the content marketing community are just now realizing that it’s an actual practice with established strategies used to plan content marketing processes.
- Steve believes content marketers are too quick to chase short-term tactics rather than looking at the bigger picture of the buyer journey and serving relevant content that is designed to move a customer from one end of the purchase process to the other.
- In order to map this process, Steve starts out with a traditional journey map and then looks at which channels his company gets the best results from. From there he performs a gap analysis to try and understand which of those channels has the lowest hanging fruit that’s not currently being utilized to the fullest. Then what Steve does is map content to those under-utilized channels.
- Steve says to think about the channel, not just the overall sales funnel. For example, if one of your landing pages is targeted for mobile traffic, serve up a native ad that leads to a whitepaper that could help to further guide that customer down the sales funnel.
Please visit SEJ’s YouTube page for more video interviews.