Last updated: 7-10-25
In this article:
content for every stage
The content you create will most likely serve different purposes for your audience depending on what stage of the buying cycle they are in.
stage 1
Early on this will be communicating first impressions, clearly establishing your offering, and setting expectations for the later stages.
stage 2
If they are still onboard once they have a sense of who you are and what you do, they will probably want to learn more about the details of your offering and if it’s right for them.
stage 3
Once they decide that it is, they will need to know in what way to move forward and take advantage of your offering.
stage 4
And finally, there is often a post-purchase stage which requires reassurance that the purchase was a good idea, or a way to go back to the learning stage and begin again as needed.
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Depending on what you offer, some of these stages will be taken care of by actual in-person communication, but in general there is usually room for content communication in each phase. In fact, in many cases it can speed up the buying process if that communication can happen on the buyer’s own time via content before they ever reach out or walk in your door.
Since the form and context of your content will probably look different at the different stages, we’ll take some time in the next few days to consider each one in more detail.
first impressions
The first stage of the buying cycle is where your content will most likely be doing a lot of heavy lifting to quickly give prospective customers an idea of whether or not they might want to do business with you. While it is still very important, this early content will probably provide more extrinsic than intrinsic value, pointing to value that can be found in the offering or content to be discovered later.
At this point you want to convey the basic sense of who you are and what you do (a.k.a. your positioning).
While those things may be easily stated in various ways, also consider what it is that your current customers value about working with or buying from you that goes beyond the actual offering itself. (Hopefully this is something more than just price…)
Is it how skilled and effective you are at what you do, or some other technical detail of your craft? Or maybe it’s a feeling of a friendly working relationship or a cozy retail environment.
Now consider how you can match the form of the content you present at this stage to match the desired effect of this first impression?
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P.S. Depending on what content you are providing for customers in the later stages of buying, it is entirely possible that some customers will completely skip this stage and jump in at a later stage. However it is still useful to have some content that addresses this stage for those who do come in cold, or for those who jump in later and need to back up and reinforce an incomplete first impression.
guided discovery
The second stage of the buying cycle, which comes between the first impression and commitment, is the longest stage. This is where the customer is learning more about what it is that you have to offer which might address a specific need they have.
While your first impression content should be easy to stumble upon and generally applicable, this second-stage learning content should be something of a guided discovery process into areas of particular interest for the customer. This can look a lot of different ways, but most likely this will involve some kind of repository of content to be explored by the customer.
If we return to our idea of ambience, i.e. controlling the amount of repetitive information desired for either clarity or resonance respectively, we can start to decide what shape that repository might take. It could be a gallery of photos of an event space being used in different ways (repetition to create an experiential desire), or a static list of specs about a specialized tool that is unique to your process (low repetition but high clarity of information).
Whatever it looks like, keep in mind that there are two goals of this phase that your content ought to help achieve:
- build confidence to advance to the buying stage
- turn away those who will never advance to the buying stage, which avoids wasting either their time or yours with an unnecessary introduction
The content which details your offering should make it clear who it is for, and just as importantly, who it is not for. If this is done well, it makes the critical commitment decision in the next stage that much easier.
tracing the gap
When it comes to making an actual investment decision, your content plays a very crucial, yet perhaps unexpected role: absence.
Whatever it is that you actually offer, it cannot be found in the content you provide. The ultimate goal of your content is to trace the outlines of this gap and indicate how it might be filled. (And yes, I think this is true even if content is your offering. Maybe we’ll work that out another time.)
However, the starker the contrast is between the description or depiction of the offering itself (via your content) and the understanding of the actual absence, the stronger the desire will be to take action or make an investment to fill the gap.
So, in what ways does your content point beyond itself to an unrealized need?
after the sale
The job of your content isn’t quite finished even once a sale has been completed.
There are at least three possible goals for content which may be consumed after a sale:
Most likely there will be quite a lot of overlap between the content you create for the guided discovery phase and the post-purchase phase, the only difference will be when the customer comes across the content.
That being said, keeping in mind the multiple roles and goals that any one piece of content may be serving will help us as we consider the most worthwhile way to approach the creating of that content in the first place.
We’ll look at each of these three post-purchase goals a little closer in the next few days.
balancing the scales
A sale is never exclusively an emotional or an intellectual decision, it is a messy combination of both at a particular time in a particular circumstance.
We might think of the emotion and intellect as two ends of a scale, constantly fluctuating. The buyer usually doesn’t think too much about this scale during the buying process, but oftentimes once a sale has been made he or she will suddenly remember it when they are trying to justify the purchase to themselves (or potentially to someone else).
If at this point they see that one or the other side has had an outsized influence, they will work to retroactively balance the scale by either trying to gather more logical facts on the one hand, or to reinforce the abundance of facts that they already have with an emotional gut-check on the other hand.
Even if your personal method of communication favors either the side of emotional hype or that of intellectual nerdiness, it can be useful to have a healthy dose of each in your media because, chances are, if the customer is second guessing the decision to buy from you, it’s your content—not you directly—that they’re going to turn to when looking for extra weight to add on either side of the reassurance scale.
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P.S. I don’t think the scales have to be perfectly balanced (and since everyone’s value judgements are subjective, it is probably an impossible goal anyway). Mainly you want the customer to have at least something on each side of the scale that they are able to point to so that ultimately they can say: “Yeah, this purchase feels good and it makes sense.”
P.P.S. To read more about the symbiotic relationship of emotion and reason in our lives, check out Jonathan Haidt’s book The Happiness Hypothesis where he lays out his now well-known metaphor of the elephant and the rider.
the double-life of support content
Support content may not be applicable to every business situation, but for those in which it is, it can play an interesting and multi-faceted role.
On a very basic level, providing content which gives support or training to supplement your offering after a purchase can be a very useful way to automate and standardize repetitive information transfer. This can reduce the in-person support toll on you or your team, as long as it is something which can actually be automated and doesn’t require personal nuance.
But the real magic of support content is that it leads a double life . . .
BY DAY . . .
If you make your support content public, it can be a key part of the guided discovery phase, giving potential customers an idea of what it will be like to take advantage of your offering. But, without being a customer, this kind of content will most likely only provide extrinsic value which points to the utility of your offering.
BUT, BY NIGHT . . .
Once they do become a customer however, that extrinsic value suddenly becomes intrinsic and compounds with the value that is inherent in your actual offering. If they are already familiar with this support content before a purchase it can also speed up the onboarding process.
MEANWHILE, ACROSS TOWN . . .
Finally, support content can also be a double-agent. Customers of competitors with similar offerings but less-robust support systems may find themselves turning to your content for assistance, which can be great for creating loyalty and driving new business.
level up
The last way that your content can continue to provide value to your customers after a sale, is to simply start the process over again.
This means going back to the guided discovery phase and discovering something new, or finding solutions to new challenges they are facing.
What I like about this idea is that it involves focusing on the meta-value of the content you create for the guided discovery phase. If you want past customers to be able to discover something new, you need to be one step ahead of them, and creating content is one way to explore new opportunities to provide value and demonstrate it to customers.
Put another way, past and present customers should get the sense through your latest content that you and your offerings are regularly evolving and leveling up. They should feel (rightly) that any new purchase will be more valuable than any past purchase, and ultimately they should be excited to participate.
(this article has been compiled from messages sent in my newsletter)
