John Wiley & Sons
The Academic Researcher’s Customer Journey
Categorize Content, not Customers
Why is old content performing well? Why do the CTAs on those pages perform poorly?
Why do your landing pages cost so much? Why don’t they rank?
Do you NEED to keyword stuff your clean and clear action-oriented landing pages or is there a more effective way to keep the noise off those pages with high value KPIs (and conversion capacity) to increase the impact of the signals you’re promoting?
By basing our site and blog Information Architecture on our moment maps, we were able to audit existing content stock to support our flagging organic traffic. This enabled us to boost the viability of older content through optimization efforts while simultaneously increasing the visibility of new, higher-value landing pages through internal linking efforts. This approach increases the value of existing content stock, increases the Quality Score (and organic rank) of new pages and PDPs, and gave us deep insights into what content was working and why.
Most importantly - it allowed users to self-regulate and drop in to the funnel where they were, increasing traffic to bottom funnel pages through both organic and paid channels, as well as increasing CTA submissions further upstream.
The Researcher’s Story
I design customer journeys by answering questions. By aligning search and audience data, site metrics, user demographics, and a deep audit of existing content collateral I can help you discover the real needs of your users. A good customer journey and content strategy is simply a reduction of friction from first touch to conversion. Answer the right questions at the various stages of your audience’s need with the story of your brand and product. Simple, right?
At Wiley, we dug for questions researchers asked their colleagues, their mid-moment search queries, the details of the work that only other researchers would know. We discovered niche needs that drove engagement through the roof. We took on the role of a clear-eyed resource helping years of arduous research cut through the process of research, formatting, writing, submission and on to publication and the world. As users discovered our content on their journeys, our social accounts grew. Researchers found truly helpful resources, received reminders and personalized retargeting ads. We aligned our values to our products and told the story well. We engaged rejected submissions, helping researchers find the right journal for their work. We aided recently published authors with the tools they needed for success.
By being a resource, and not just a sales pitch, we created a brand identity for Wiley that resonated with our audience, drove increased traffic, audience quality, and site engagement - and most importantly - answered the right questions.
Keywords are Questions Products are Answers
You don’t want someone looking for a product to find a blog post. Your PDPs shouldn’t answer top of funnel enquiries. Your campaign content isn’t evergreen and your evergreen content is pushed down on Search Engine Result Pages by social content.
So how do you relate your content to user need?
How do you make that clean landing page appear for a BoFu query with high competition and an exorbitant PPC cost if you don’t have long-form copy on the page? The strategic significance of that kind of question can make or break a brand and it’s the driving force behind my approach to keyword research.
At Wiley, we recommended creating a clear and concise path for users to follow by building out our user journey using keyword categorizations to determine the most impactful content we had for that moment and optimizing it (while mapping our gaps).
Top of funnel would be long-form, informative, and engaging. Middle funnel introduced product and brand solutions. Bottom funnel was our product proposition.
What ended up making its way through to production was impactful. Our pilot and subsequent updates netted increased traffic volume, audience quality, CTA submission/completions, while creating an internal linking program to benefit our paid search efforts for publications and products.