What is a Content Marketing Funnel?
The marketing tool known as the "funnel" has evolved into the "content marketing funnel" with the unprecedented growth of this new segment of the marketing world. This new version enables content marketers to better support sales by targeting each stage of the funnel with specific content that helps to qualify, nurture, and convert leads into customers. The strategic use of content can open up a lot of doors for marketers and startups.
First, understand that content creation done correctly is not a race against the competition. It's more like a spectator sport where you watch your leads getting closer and closer. Each piece of content is an opportunity to bring a new lead closer to a sale or inspire an existing customer to take action.
Different stages in the funnel each get their own, appropriately targeted content. This content attracts new customers and helps move them through the funnel from awareness to purchase to retention. Each piece of content has a job to do. What works to bring someone to your website will not necessarily motivate them to make the purchase decision. At each stage in a customer’s movement through the content marketing funnel, you have to create stage-appropriate content.
Now you have understood what a content marketing funnel is. Now let's proceed towards:-
THE PERFECT CONTENT MARKETING IS A FULL-FUNNEL
Most often stylized as a funnel, the content marketing funnel is a graphic that shows a system of stages (Awareness, Consideration, Purchase, Retention), each with associated content. It starts with as many leads as possible and moves, or funnels, those leads through a step-by-step flow of content and converts them into actual customers.
At the top is a large number of people who have become aware of your products or services. These are the leads, the potential customers. As they move towards the narrower part of the funnel some number of them drop off. A smaller number stay in the funnel and become paying customers.
AWARENESS
This first stage of the content marketing funnel is where you want to attract and educate your audience on your topic, make them aware of you, and show them how you can solve their problems and eliminate their pain points.
At this stage, the content itself should not be about you. Here you'll deliver interesting articles, updates, and posts that make potential customers want to engage with you. That way, you can build a relationship, entertain, educate, and speak to their passions. No hard sell.
The outcome you want from awareness content is website traffic. Once someone is visiting your website, they have entered your sales funnel. You can continue to build brand awareness and begin moving them towards purchase by exposing them to your evaluation-stage content.
EVALUATION
At this stage, you are building a relationship, creating trust, and getting your audience interested in your products. It's still not time for the hard sell, but once people are aware of your brand, you do want them to consider making a purchase. Still, you don't want your content to read like an ad.
You want to get engaged readers to become customers by getting them thinking about your products. This stage is the point where potential buyers determine the legitimacy of your company, develop trust in you, and decide if they need your product.
Guides, templates, and white papers perform well in numbers of leads influenced and overall leads generated. You can look at leads generated and leads influenced to determine which type of content performs the best.
CONVERSION
This is the stage where you seek to convert contacts that have expressed interest in your product into active customers. They know your brand and products, and now it's time to make the sale.
At this stage of the content marketing funnel, you are showing your audience that a purchase is their smartest next step. Your goal is to create content that results in closing the deal.
A cold prospect cannot evaluate your solution until they are first aware of the problem and your solution. And conversion is impossible until the prospect has first evaluated the possible courses of action.
To move a prospect through a marketing funnel, you need to give them content specifically designed to satisfy their needs at each of the three stages.
In other words…
• They need content at the top of the funnel (TOFU) that facilitates awareness.
• They need content in the middle of the funnel (MOFU) that facilitates evaluation.
• They need content at the bottom of the funnel (BOFU) that facilitates conversion.
Blogs are fantastic facilitators of awareness, but they do a poor job of facilitating evaluation and conversion. And, at the risk of pointing out
the obvious, evaluation and conversion are super critical to your business.
To move prospects through the middle (MOFU) and bottom of the funnel (BOFU) you’ll need other content types.
It looks like this…
We call this The Content Lifecycle.
Let’s look at each stage of the funnel and the content needed at those stages…
TOP OF THE FUNNEL CONTENT MARKETING
The prospects entering the top of your funnel are completely unaware of your solution and, often, completely unaware of their problem.
As a result, you need content with a low barrier to entry—because, at this stage, they have little to no motivation to put skin in the game (such as giving your contact information or money).
You need freely available content at the top of the funnel (TOFU) that…
• Entertains
• Educates
• Inspires
… and you need to make it readily available using content types like:
• Blog posts
• Social Media Updates
• Photographs
• Digital Magazines/Books
