Iliyana's Blog

Buyer Persona, Buyer's Journey and Content Plan Template

[fa icon="calendar"] 07-Mar-2017 09:30:00 / by Iliyana Stareva

Getting Started with buyer personas, buyer's journey and content plan for inbound marketing.jpg

As some of you know, I'm starting my own business together with my mum. 

It's an e-commerce startup for arts and crafts and we'll be launching the website next week. 

As part of the process, I've been developing the website (by the way, Shopify is amazing for e-commerce!) and planning all PESO (paid, earned, shared, owned) activities with a particular focus on social media. 

And because I work at HubSpot – the pioneers of inbound marketing – and consult my clients day in and day out on best practices for inbound, I'm truly preaching what I teach with my own business. 

While preparing my buyer personas, their buyer's journey and working through the content plan for them, I needed a template or a tool that would work for me. 

I couldn't find anything suitable so I ended up creating my own simple Google Sheet that with just one view visualises all the important parts of this planning and follows the correct way of doing content creation for inbound. It also helps with your keywords strategy

This template for buyer persona, buyer's journey and content campaign plan development is what I want to give to you today. 

You can click here to download the template but I'll still go over some of the details for it below. 

It starts with the buyer persona and covers the most important information you need about them as you can see in the screenshot below.

buyer persona template.jpg

Underneath comes the buyer's journey which I've extended a little bit. As an e-commerce, my goal is to have people returning to us again and again so their journey doesn't end just with decision. I need to make sure that I delight them with more content and online activities so I need to plan my Return stage as I call it as well. This is why the buyer's journey now has four rows instead of the usual three Awareness, Consideration and Decision.  

buyer's journey template.jpg

Once I have the buyer persona and their journey figured out, I'm ready to move onto the content campaign plan. I've put two campaigns in there but you can always copy this for more when you have run two already. 

content campaign planning.jpg

The content plan itself follows the best practices I've covered previously, namely starting with one key question for each stage and developing one content offer (so staying very focused) and then figuring out what the blog post topics and/or press releases and other content pieces are that will promote this particular content offer. 

When you download the template, you can just duplicate the first or second tab if you have more buyer personas. You can also customise it to make it yours, e.g. branding etc.

Having all of this in one place, allows you to make good connections between your personas and the content that you are creating. It also gives you a very clear picture of what you are doing and why you are doing it in terms of content creation. 

 

How do you do your buyer persona, buyer's journey and content planning? 

 

Still haven't got the template for your buyer personas, buyer's journey and content plan? Grab it here for free! 

Download buyer persona, journey, content plan template

 

Topics: Inbound Marketing

Iliyana Stareva

Written by Iliyana Stareva

Iliyana Stareva is the author of Inbound PR - the book that is transforming the PR industry. She's also a keynote speaker and a consultant in inbound and digital for fast-growing companies and agencies. Currently, Iliyana is Chief of Staff to the EMEA President at ServiceNow. Before that, she held global and EMEA-wide positions at Cisco and HubSpot. She is also certified by the PMI as a Project Management Professional (PMP)®. In her free time, you can find Iliyana writing for her blog, dancing salsa or travelling the world.

Subscribe here!

New call-to-action
Download buyer persona, journey, content plan template

Get Social

inbound-pr-winner-new-pr-books
Iliyanas_Blog_among_50_PR_Blogs Chosen_by_Graduates.jpg

Popular Posts

Public Relations Today

Want to talk?

iliyanastareva

I'm always happy to chat about how we can work together. Get in touch with me and start the conversation. I'd love to hear from you.

Contact Me