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.
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.
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.
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!
