You know how to create a customer journey map. And you know what types of content buyers tend to seek at each stage of the journey. But how do you pull that all together to create a content campaign that drives the outcomes you want? The answer is content journey mapping—an overlooked step in many (dare I say, most?) content strategies.
What is content journey mapping?
Content journey mapping is the practice of curating or planning content for a specific audience across their journey. It’s more than slotting assets into journey stages. Effective content journey mapping ensures your content:
- Answers the questions your buyers have
- Helps them move forward in their journey
It helps you align content with the B2B buyer’s journey and create content that prompts a desired action—two of the top challenges highlighted in the Content Marketing Institute’s 2025 B2B Content Marketing Trends report.
How is a content journey map different from a customer journey map?
A B2B customer journey map shows the process a typical buyer goes through as they discover, learn about, evaluate and decide on your solution. It maps out the interactions the buyer has with your company’s brand—as well as their pain points, questions and emotions—at each stage of the journey. The goal of journey mapping is to understand the buyer’s experience to better affect, and thus accelerate, that experience.
A content journey map documents what content you will use to help buyers move along that journey. The goal of content mapping is to identify the best content for each touchpoint in your journey map. It answers the question, “Which content should I put in front of my buyers, when?”
Effective content journey mapping helps B2B marketers:
- Ensure they are using the best content for a specific audience and the goals of the campaign or program.
- Identify information gaps that can stall the customer journey—and plan effective assets to fill them.
- Optimize existing assets to better suit a campaign or vertical.
- Determine how to combine upcoming content with existing assets to most efficiently and effectively support a new initiative or product launch.
- Interpret intent based on which content a buyer has consumed.
Answering the questions your buyers have.
The most common way to plot content across a campaign is to assign assets to each stage of the journey based on the asset type, topic and depth. For example, thought leadership blogs in awareness; how-to guides in consideration; case studies in decision.
This practice falls short of making sure your content does the work it needs to at each stage of that journey. You end up with content along the journey, rather than content that progresses the journey.
Effective content doesn’t just connect the dots between your solution and their challenges. It must answer the questions they have, or they won’t move on. (It doesn’t hurt for it to be entertaining too.) We use a 6-part framework to identify and plan effective content for B2B marketing campaigns. The steps below come from that framework—you can find the full framework and a set of templates to help you use it in our B2B Marketer’s Content Strategy Toolkit.
A 3-step process for mapping content to the customer journey.
One of the reasons I love this process is that it really forces you to think about the person on the other side of your marketing. Before taking these steps, make sure you fully understand the goals and audience for your campaign.
1. Define the conversation arc for your campaign.
Traditional campaign planning focuses on the buyer’s needs. At Iron Horse, we go a step further, to include planning how your messaging (and content) will address those needs as they evolve along the journey, so buyers can keep moving forward. We call this blueprint for the back and forth the conversation arc.
To create the conversation arc, I consider these elements for each journey stage:
- Buyer’s state of mind. This helps you identify the hook that will pull the buyer into the conversation.
- Questions that need to be answered. These will be the focus of your content.
- Blockers. In addition to answering key questions, your content and messaging will also need to implicitly or explicitly address these things.
- Desired next action. This helps you ensure your content and messaging is driving toward this action.
- Stage-specific messaging. The part of your story to focus on as you answer their questions.
Tip: Think about the buyer’s state of mind at the beginning and end of each stage of the journey. What should they believe about their problem and how to solve it by the end of that stage? This helps you zero in on the questions that need to be answered at that stage for them to move on. It also helps you identify what action your content should be preparing them for and point them toward it.
2. Evaluate available content against that conversation.
If you were starting from scratch, this would be the time to plan content for that journey. But most of us have a lot of content already—so the next step is to look at what you have in the context of this audience and campaign. This means going beyond typical measures of performance and asking, what does this content do? And: does it do it well?
Gather content from across your organization that might fit into the conversation you’re trying to have with your buyers. This might include blogs, videos, podcast episodes, infographics, ebooks, case studies, webinars, interactive tools (such as assessments and calculators), original or analyst research reports, and web pages, microsites or landing pages focused on the target solution, vertical or persona.
Standard content audits focus on asset function, format and performance. A content efficacy audit goes beyond this to determine whether the asset can do its job in the campaign.
For each asset, in addition to looking at the messaging, branding, freshness and previous performance, ask:
- What questions does it answer?
- Are these the questions that your buyers have?
- Does it include a clear CTA?
Don’t overlook the importance of that second question. It’s extremely common to have polished, well-executed content that nonetheless doesn’t address the goals or audience for your campaign.
Tip: Every piece of content you create should include a clear way for buyers to take the next step. Look back at your conversation arc. What new questions will the buyer have after consuming this piece of content? Direct them to the content that addresses those questions. Is there other information they need first, that they may not have found? Make sure to point them to that as well.
3. Map that content to the journey you’ve identified.
Now that you know what questions your audience has and what questions your content answers, you can pull the two together to see where the gaps are. We developed an easy-to-use spreadsheet for this, with questions as column headers, and one content asset per row. This allows us to see at a glance where the gaps are.
If your organization is new to taking an audience-centric approach to content and messaging, it’s likely you’ll find many of these questions unanswered. That’s okay! Now that you have clarity about what your content needs to achieve, you can plan one or more assets to do so.
Tip: Filling gaps doesn’t always mean creating a whole new piece of content. Optimizing your content for your campaign may look like:
- Adapting an existing asset for a new audience.
- Adapting an existing asset to include new info that addresses specific conversation arc questions.
- Repackaging content in a new format to better address your target audience.
- Updating content to be more effective—for example, by adding CTAs pointing readers to the next step in the journey.
- Converting internal content, such as sales scripts or battle cards, into middle or bottom of the funnel marketing content.
Tips for success.
Limit your campaign to a few pieces of content per question.
It’s not uncommon to have a lot of great top of funnel content that essentially answers only one or two key questions. Most buyers will only need a couple of these before seeking answers to their other questions. If you keep feeding them content in the same vein, they can get stuck at that point of the journey.
Instead, select a few assets that you believe will be most successful for the channels you’re using, and keep the others in reserves if you’re not seeing the results you expect.
Resist the temptation to shoehorn other content into the campaign.
If a buyer’s biggest issue is a compartmentalized content creation and review process, a webinar about your CMS’s AI-based content generator is unlikely to attract their attention (though later in the journey it may help convince them your product is forward-looking and can address more of their needs). The same goes for that case study featuring a healthcare provider. Buyers aren’t moved by irrelevant content.
How can you tell if you’re trying to shoehorn unlikely-to-be-effective content into a campaign? Try writing an ad headline connecting the content asset to one of the challenges or questions you identified for your audience. If you can’t do it, the asset probably doesn’t fit.
Stay focused on helping buyers move forward.
The goal of this process is to shorten buyers’ time to action by making it easy for them to find the information they need to move forward with your solution. Depending on your solution’s novelty and complexity, the size of the buying group and the length of the sales cycle, this may take 15 pieces of content or 5. (Okay, probably not 5.)
Sometimes answering those questions is more about making information findable rather than creating a new piece of content. For example, if one of the first questions buyers have is whether your solution will integrate with their existing stack, listing your integration partners on your website is likely enough to check that box.
The Iron Horse insight.
This systematic approach may seem daunting at first and it can take some time to set up. But once you have this framework established, it’s easy to adapt it to changing needs. Have a new piece of content? Plot it into your content journey map to determine if it should replace an existing asset or augment the journey. Looking to verticalize a more generalized campaign? Use your content journey map to determine which content in your campaign can stay and which assets could be adapted or replaced for the target audience.
