Stakeholder Content Journeys

An stakeholder content journey is the real path a stakeholder travels with your brand — non-linear, multidirectional, and lifelong. Where a funnel imagines one buyer moving down a pipe toward one purchase, an ecosystem journey recognizes that the same person encounters your brand across many contexts and identities: as a buyer, an employee, a community member, a citizen. Trust is earned (or spent) at every one of those encounters. In the Ecosystem Era, the journey isn’t something you push people through. It’s something you design for — so that wherever a stakeholder meets you, they meet the same worthy brand.

Our custom-crafted content journeys are the real fruit born of all this stakeholder and ecosystem thinking. They reflect the true nature of ongoing brand interactions, with dozens (sometimes thousands) of touchpoints via multiple sales and messaging channels.

To reiterate: being worthy of trust — whether for a purchase or simply as a thing that affects the world around you — does not come from a single one-and-done experience. Instead, modern consumers (and non-purchasing stakeholders) continually encounter the brand throughout their lifetime. In recognition of this fact, it’s critical for brands to develop messaging assets that can clearly communicate both their values and their value over time.

That’s where these stakeholder content journeys come in. Each one reflects the different levels of enagement required to show breadth and depth required for earning deep connections that can be achieved between you and your audience.

Relationship Journeys

• • Brand Content — define your brand: its values, its intention, and its story
  • Authority Content — Communicate your forward-thinking capabilities, AKA thought leadership content and innovative thinking capabilities
    

    Exchange Journeys

    • Stakeholder / Audience Content — Speak directly to your audiences to earn trust, such as by sharing knowledge on pain points or encouraging a certain use of time/energy/money
    • Product Content — Directly communicate product value props and USPs
    • Discovery / Search Content — Approach content from a search optimization and audience journey angle, earning attention and clicks strategically
      

      Artifact / Content Ecosystem

      • Owned Touch Points
      • Earned Touch Points
      • Paid Touch Points

To make an important distinction, Relationship Journeys assets earn value from your stakeholder groups by way of who you are and what you stand for, outside of any purely transactional considerations. Exchange Journeys assets encourage a purchase and facilitate purchase decision-making, in a more-traditional sales/marketing fashion.

Content Asset Types Real Examples

Website Content
Promote “owned” concepts and specific areas of expertise with brand pillar pages hosting information-rich resources and interactive assets.

• Brand pillar pages
• Resources library:

• Guides/playbooks
• Webinars
• Research reports
• Calculators/assessments
• Culture videos
• Press release

Blog Content
Provide expert advice and a differentiated perspective on news, trends, and forces shaping the industry.

• Deep-dive blog posts
• Expert think pieces
• News/trends posts
• Explainer Videos
• Executive interviews
• Data visualizations/infographic

Email Content
Develop an engaged community of subscribers; enhance luxury appeal with exclusive content.

• Exclusive customer/member newsletter
• Industry commentary/curated news roundup
• Executive newsletter/message from the CE

Social Content
Share thought leadership assets, promote internal thought leaders, and drive branded searches.

• Link and video posts
• Quote/stat cards
• Executive Linkedin posts
• Quote cards
• YouTube channel
• Slideshare presentations
• Livestreams

The things to note here is that this isn’t about building funnel logic, your want to build enough entry points so that people can on ramp and exit when they please, on their own time and always come back for more ways into your context.

Be Thoughtful and Complete in Your Marketing, Pave the Way for a Healthy Brand Ecosystem

As you can see, Consciously takes an exhaustive approach to ensuring that your visual and language assets acknowledge all the ways you function as a part of an ecosystem. The goal is to leave nothing unconsidered and to take nothing for granted. We ensure that your audiences clearly understand, by way of multiple forms of communication, what you are, what you care about, and what you can deliver in terms of their top priorities.

By thinking deeply through your brand’s values and value, we connect both in order to speak directly to the most-pressing concerns of your stakeholder groups, in other words. We’ve found that our approach can not only increase short-term conversions, sales, and customer acquisition, but that it also paves a solid pathway towards building long-term brand trust.

If you want to learn more about this new, deeply thoughtful way of marketing, visit Consciously Canon for more eye-opening articles. You can also reach out to us to request a brief for solutions to your unique marketing challenges.