Content Matrix: What It Is and Why It Matters in Content Marketing

Last week, I shared why “Thinking About B2B Content Marketing Through the Lens of the Buyer” can drastically increase the return on investment of content creation activities and help better manage the content side of the marketing budget. This week, I will share what a content matrix is and explain its purpose in a content marketing program.

What is a content matrix?

A content matrix is a tool to help your company prioritize content production to ensure that your team is focusing on the content production activities that matter. Additionally, it helps keep your team properly targeted on the few factors that matter to a given buyer at a given stage in their buyer journey, thus maximizing the return on your company’s content creation investment.

What is a content matrix’s purpose in content marketing?

To understand why having a content matrix is important you first need to understand that content marketing serves 3 primary purposes in a company’s go-to-market strategy:

• Filling the top of your funnel with inbound leads. This is done by building awareness of a problem and aligning this problem with business issues, while at the same time making a buyer aware of your company and how it can help resolve each of these issues.
• Speed up the buying process and increase the conversion rates between each stage of it. This is done by crafting targeted content that is intended to help each buyer through each stage of his or her journey, which will hopefully keep the buyer moving through the journey and ensure that they have learned the key factors about your product that resolves their issues.
• Arm you marketing and sales team with a tool that tells them which pieces of content should be shared with specific buyers at a given point in the journey. This will help increase the effectiveness of marketing and sales efforts and create an audit trail to determine if different pieces of content are not very effective in the process.

Next week, I will share how to develop a content matrix to support a buyer persona focused B2B content marketing strategy and use it as a tool to ensure that the content creators are focused on writing content that will impact the buying process.