Free Content Mapping Template

What is Content Mapping?

Content mapping is a process through which you map each content piece to a particular audience persona and funnel stage. In essence, it involves attributing all content you create to a particular goal.

This is necessary because your target audience has different intent at each stage of the sales funnel. A prospect would want to learn more about your brand in the decision stage, but they’d want to see results during the conversion stage.

Additionally, your content needs to be relevant for each segment of your audience. A piece that appeals to CMOs may not be fit for CFOs. Through content mapping, you can ensure that you’re creating content that’s laser-focused on the particular persona.

Why Should You Map Your Content?

Content creation is easy. All you’ve got to do is come up with topics and get your creative juices flowing.

But here’s the thing—simply creating content without any direction in mind isn’t going to bring in any results. You might just be wasting your marketing budget if that’s what you’re doing.

But that changes when you start mapping your content. Here’s why you must do content mapping well:

• Helps align your content with business goals for effective strategy execution and achieving objectives.
• Enables you to provide relevant content to your audience, enhancing your engagement to get a loyal audience.
• Makes it easy to unify brand messages to improve recognition and trust across channels.
• Helps you create content for the entire sales funnel to ensure it connects with customers at all stages of the funnel.
• Simplifies the tracking of your content performance as you’ll get greater visibility into performance at each stage.

With our free content mapping template, the content mapping process will get easily integrated into your workflow.

The Only Content Mapping Template You Need

Content mapping is an important process that must be done correctly to get the most out of your content creation efforts. And that’s why you’ve got to get it right.

Well, with our content mapping template (it’s free, by the way), you won’t have to experiment much. We’ve done all the heavy lifting to create a solid resource for you.

 
Your content strategy deserves better planning. And that can only come with superior visibility. Our content mapping template is the way ahead.

Why You Need Our Free Content Mapping Template

Once you start creating content, you must start mapping it in the right manner. Else, there wouldn’t be much you can accomplish through the content mapping process.

The right sort of content mapping will help you identify gaps in your strategy, assess performance issues, and make amends that can help elevate your results.

And that’s why cookie-cutter content maps won’t help you. Your business needs advanced tracking that can give you visibility across the funnel. And that’s where our free content mapping template excels.

Here’s what it has to offer so you can give your business the boost it deserves.

1. Audience Persona

The content you intend to create for your website needs to be highly tailored. In fact, the average consumer now expects brands to customize their experiences to the greatest extent possible.

So, if you’re creating generic content that’s made for your entire audience base, it’ll likely end up underperforming due to the lack of relevance.

That’s where buyer personas come into the picture.

Your audience base can be easily divided into numerous audience personas based on some common characteristics of particular segments of your audience. These personas will typically have the same issues and requirements. As a result, the content you create for each of them will be highly relevant.

Our free content mapping template is created such that you’ll be able to add each of your personas in. You can then track the content that you’ve created for each of your personas. It’ll give you detailed insight into whether you’re excelling at content creation for a particular segment or lagging behind. Accordingly, you’ll be able to tweak your content strategy for better results.

2. Funnel Stage

Creating content for each buyer persona is important, but what’s even more critical is to create funnel-wide content. You must have content that appeals to your audience base at each stage of the buyer’s journey, be it the awareness stage or the action (conversion) stage.

Now here’s the thing—each content piece you create will only serve one particular stage of your funnel. For instance, a how-to blog post might be best for the awareness stage. On the other hand, a case study would be the right option if you’re targeting your prospects at the conversion stage.

So, how do you track if you’ve created content correctly for each stage of your funnel? And more importantly, has the content been created for each segment of your audience?

Well, that’s where our free content mapping template comes in.

It’s got dedicated sections where you can enter the details of content you’ve created for each stage of your funnel. And these sections are available for each persona.

This way, you’ll know exactly what sort of content needs to be created for each persona to fulfill the entire funnel. It’s the best way to drive more prospects toward conversion.

3. Content Goal

Every piece of content you create must have a specific goal attached to it. Creating content without any set direction in mind won’t help your cause. Having a set goal gives direction to your content creation process as you’ll know exactly what the content needs to contain for reaching that goal.

That’s why it’s important to list the question that you intend to answer through your content. This question would typically be an issue or concern that a segment of your audience faces. And that’s why the questions would be different for each audience segment.

Additionally, it’s important to ensure that there is only one main question that you aim to resolve through your content. There can be several different secondary questions that your content can answer as well.

Our content mapping template has sections dedicated to mentioning the questions that your content will answer. This gives you greater context into what the content offers and also gives direction to other content so that you don’t have multiple content pieces dedicated to the same question.

4. Content Topic

When you want visibility into your content, you can’t get it without indicating the topic of your content piece. This is essentially the title of your blog post, image, or video that you’ve created for your audience.

Our content mapping template has got a dedicated space where you can add the topic of your content. It’ll help you keep track of the topics you’ve already covered and the ones you’re yet to create content on.

If you like, you could also mention the broader topic that you’re covering with the content in this section for greater context.

5. Content Idea

While the content topic deals with the title of the content, the idea is the thing that shapes your content. In the content idea field of our content mapping template, you can add the main idea behind creating it.

It enables you to see if you’ve covered the same idea for the related persona already. This can help you create content on diverse ideas for each persona for best results.

6. Content Type

Your content can come in different forms—images, infographics, videos, blog posts, and landing pages—the options are plenty.

One form of content may be better than another based on the stage of the sales funnel. Additionally, each content type could appeal to a different audience. That makes it important to track the content type you’re creating when developing your strategy.

That’s why our content mapping template offers a section dedicated to content type. It also plays an important role in content repurposing as you can track the content that has performed well in the past and repurpose it into another type.

Through the content mapping template, you’ll be able to see if a particular piece of content has been repurposed. And if so, which format has it been repurposed to.

It also gives you a detailed insight into which topics are yet to be repurposed for each audience persona. This can help drive your content strategy and eliminates the need to brainstorm new topics for publishing all the time.

7. Call to Action (CTA)

When you create content—be it videos or blog posts—you’d want your audience to take some action after interacting with it. This action could be something as simple as providing their email address to you or a slightly more complex one like purchasing your products.

Irrespective of the action you want your audience to take, it’s important to document the call to action you’ve added to your content.

It’ll help you determine if you’ve added the right CTA for the type of content and the stage of the funnel. That’s exactly what our content mapping template helps you with. You can see if the CTA matches up well with your funnel stage and accordingly modify it.

8. Author Details

If you’ve got multiple content creators in your organization, this section is of great help. Our content mapping template has a column dedicated to the author details to help you track who created a content piece.

It can help you greatly when you want to make any changes to your content or want to update it. You can easily reassign it to the person who created it as they’re already aware about it.

With our free content mapping template, you won’t have to shoot arrows in the dark. Instead, you can channelize your resources and elevate your strategy.

Steps to Do Content Mapping the Right Way

While our content mapping template will help you with most of the things you need, it’s best to know how to do content mapping correctly.

Here are the steps you can follow for the perfect content mapping strategy:

1. Define Your Goals

Define the purpose behind your content marketing efforts—its goal. It should include things like who you’re trying to help and how you plan on doing it. The idea behind the goal is to ensure that your content efforts are aligned to accomplishing them.

2. Understand Your Audience and Segment It

Research your audience well and create segments by grouping audiences with similar demographics, interests, and problems. Develop a persona for each so you can start customizing content for them.

3. Develop Your Sales Funnel

Identify the various stages of your sales funnel to determine what sort of content would be needed for each. Map out the path your customers will follow to create a solid funnel.

4. Plan Out Content for Each Funnel Stage

Design your content marketing plan’s funnel strategy to determine what sort of content would be used at each stage of the funnel. Each stage will require a different type of content with varying topics. For instance, blog posts are great for awareness.

5. Come Up With Topic Ideas

List the content ideas you’ll focus on and come up with content titles as well. You should also define the content type for each. You can, of course, repurpose your content later.

6. Define the Action for Each Stage

Decide on the call to action for each content idea based on the stage of the funnel. This CTA has to be directly linked to the intent of the prospect in that stage.

7. Develop an Editorial Calendar

Create an editorial calendar to start executing the content creation plan. Make sure you dedicate enough time to content ideation and creation.

These steps, paired with our content mapping template, can help you achieve superior ROI.

So, what are you waiting for?

Start Using Our Free Content Mapping Template in 5 Easy Steps

Our content mapping template is made for beginners and experienced users alike. In any case, we’ve made it so simple to use that it can be used in a plug-and-play mode.

Here’s a guide to help you get started with our free content mapping template:

1. Download our free content mapping template by clicking on any of the buttons on this page. You can always download the template from here as well.
2. Make a copy of the template so that you can start editing it.
3. Start adding information related to your content in the boxes provided. You can add more rows as needed.
4. Keep adding new content to the free template as you publish it.
5. Analyze the content you’ve mapped and make changes to your strategy.

Our content mapping template will give you unparalleled visibility into your content strategy and help you gain an edge over your competitors.

FAQs

Q1. How do you create a content map?

A. To create a content map for your business, here are the steps you can follow:

• Define the purpose behind your content marketing efforts.
• Research your audience well and create segments. Develop a persona for each.
• Identify the various stages of your sales funnel. Trace the path customers will take.
• Design your content marketing plan’s funnel strategy.
• List the topic ideas you’ll focus on and come up with content titles.
• Decide on the call to action for each content idea.
• Create an editorial calendar.

Q2. What is mapping content?

A. In simple terms, content mapping is the process of developing a content plan such that you create content for all stages of the funnel and personas.

It also gives you full visibility into the content you’ve created and various factors related to it such as call to action, author name, funnel stage, and more. With this visibility, you can take better content marketing decisions and level up your strategy.

Q3. What is content mapping in teaching?

A. When it comes to teaching, content mapping is a process through which teachers can plan out and understand the scope of their educational content. It also shows them a clear relationship between different concepts being taught and the sequencing for each. It can help you visualize how you’re getting on with teaching the curriculum and plan out future action. The result is better teaching and learning.

Q4. What is content mapping social media?

A. Content mapping is an important process on social media. It outlines the content that you’ll create for social media posts along with the audience persona and the stage of the sales funnel. This enables you to plan out your content better and also gives you visibility into the existing content you’ve already created. The visual map lets you see:

• What content you’ve created for each stage of the funnel
• Which audience segments is the content created for
• The CTAs that are related to the funnel stage
• The type of content you’ve created

Q5. What are the benefits of content mapping?

A. Here are some of the major advantages of doing content mapping the right way:

• Helps organize your content creation efforts better.
• Gives a consistent experience to your prospects and customers.
• Ensures you’ve got the right content for each audience segment.
• Makes it easy to create content for audience throughout the customer journey
• Enables you to easily repurpose content for each segment and funnel stage

Q6. Why is content mapping important?

A. There are several reasons why content mapping is an important part of the content marketing process:

• Helps you identify the purpose behind all your content
• Gives complete visibility into the content based on your funnel
• Makes it easy to identify content that needs to be created for each audience persona
• Aligns content with the intent for each funnel stage
• Simplifies the process of repurposing content

Gain Unparalleled Visibility Into Your Content Marketing Strategy

Our free content mapping template makes it easy for you to plan out your content such that you can create something for each persona’s journey across your funnel. It also gives you tremendous visibility into existing content you’ve created.

So, get our free content mapping template now and start reshaping your marketing strategy for the better. Soon, more focused and targeted content will become a reality for your business.