Mapping the clients’ buying journey is key to successfully aligning content to meet their needs.    Someone with extensive experience across multiple industries in doing just that is Vicky Cunningham, Marketing Director at Efficio Consulting. Vicky joins the CMO Series Podcast today to discuss her approach to aligning content strategy with the client buying journey to drive business growth.   Vicky and Will discuss:  The importance of mapping the client buying journey and aligning this with content strategy  How Vicky approaches this at Efficio Consulting  The barriers to success and how to overcome these  The key components of driving your content strategy and examples of success Advice for others looking to align their content with their client’s buying journey   Transcription:    Will: Welcome to the Passle CMO series podcast where we discuss all things marketing and business development. My name's Will Eke and today we are going to be talking about aligning content with the client journey. Mapping the client's buying journey is really key to successfully aligning content to meet client needs. Someone with extensive experience across multiple industries including law, consulting, and various other areas, is doing just that. And I'm really really happy to have Vicky Cunningham, who's the marketing director at Efficio Consulting, join us today. Vicky is going to discuss her approach and Efficio’s approach to aligning content strategy with the client buying journey to drive business growth. Welcome Vicky, how are we doing?   Vicky: Hi, Will. Thanks for having me. I'm doing very well, happy to be here.   Will: Good stuff. Some people will recognise you and your voice. We were just talking about that from your Freshfield days, but we'll come on to maybe how you got to where you got to on one of the questions today. To start off with- be good to set the scene in terms of your career. What- at what point did you realise the importance of mapping the client buying journey and, and aligning it with you know, a really robust content strategy?   Vicky: Well, I think the seeds of that come from the fact that I started out in a sales route and if you get closer to the coal face, it, you know, it focuses the mind. It's always- I've always had to stop and say, you know, what's a customer or client need first? What is it that, what is it that they want? How do you put yourself in their shoes? I also spent a number of years as a journalist, so you, you know, you get the understanding of storytelling, the importance of storytelling for different audiences and that, you know, takes you right into what do you- what stories do you need to be telling to your potential clients and your existing clients to, you know, to keep them focused, to sort of help them along their buying journey or to, you know, nurture them once they have bought. So it's sort of- it's kind of in my professional DNA, I think from the, you know, the background that I've come up through.   Will: Makes perfect sense, especially, yeah with the journalist background as well-   Vicky: -and part of, you know, part of that route from a marketing point of view, i've also spent time in consumer marketing, and that's very very different clearly to B2B and professional services. So, consumer marketing, you're getting much much closer to your potential customer and again, that teaches you to think customer first, maybe doing much more sort of persona based marketing and B2B tends to approach that differently.   Will: Yeah, and I suppose you- with that you're used to actually having this tangible outcome often with a consumer as well. You can actually link it back sometimes to a transaction type.   Vicky: Yeah, and you know, in professional services, I think people still- marketeers and I've been guilty of this too, still often think of their clients as job titles and the practitioners think of their clients sometimes as job titles and not as humans, which is cr