Content Marketing FunnelContent marketing is NOT blogging, podcasting, posting on social media or publishing videos.
This stuff is just content. People are increasingly reluctant to be sold to., in an online world. The single hardest thing you can do online is to convert a cold audience member into a customer – the content marketing funnel is designed to make this process as easy, streamlined and frictionless as possible. |
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Turning website traffic into leads is the link between awareness and lead capture content – and although it’s pretty straightforward to generate those leads, capturing them in high numbers with highly qualified results is a much more complex task.
Step 1: Awareness & Audience Building
Aim: To use content to make more of your target market aware of your brand and its solutions and collect data to learn more about your audience.
Examples of Content Used: Social media posts, social media stories, blogs, podcasts, videos, images.
Audience we need to know:
- Choose written, audio or video content and start relating stuff that will help your audience solve problems that are related to your brand’s industry.
- Break this content into small pieces and share these on social media.
- Provide value to your audience on social media as well as your own website (it’s crucial that you publish on your own website btw).
- And make sure that you have a tracking code or pixel installed from advertising platforms like Facebook, Twitter and Google. It will come in handy later on in your content marketing funnel.
Examples of Content Used: Social media posts, social media stories, blogs, podcasts, videos, images.
Audience we need to know:
- What you market want to learn
- Where your target market hang out
- What medium your market prefer (e.g. video, audio or written)
- A schedule for your content’s publication
- Where and how your industry leaders are marketing their content (at this stage)
- Choose written, audio or video content and start relating stuff that will help your audience solve problems that are related to your brand’s industry.
- Break this content into small pieces and share these on social media.
- Provide value to your audience on social media as well as your own website (it’s crucial that you publish on your own website btw).
- And make sure that you have a tracking code or pixel installed from advertising platforms like Facebook, Twitter and Google. It will come in handy later on in your content marketing funnel.
Step 2: Lead Capture
Aim: To use content to turn visitors who have become aware of your business into qualified leads.
Examples of Content Used: Lead Magnets e.g. eBooks, cheat-sheets and planners. Free trials, discount offers, newsletters
- Do this by offering super-high value content (or offers) to our visitors in exchange for their contact details. This process converts these visitors into leads.
- The better our offers to leads at this stage in our content marketing funnel, the more likely they are to convert into customers in the next stage of our funnel.
- Our aim is not to generate as many leads as possible, it’s to generate as many ‘qualified leads’ as possible.
- Depending on your industry, categorise, tag and personalise your lead capture efforts for every visitor.
Ensure that your lead magnet connects the dots between your products and your customer’s knowledge goals. There is no use offering a lead magnet that has nothing to do with your business’s product offerings, and there is no point offering a lead magnet that doesn’t provide value to your target market.
Offer your target market your lead magnets in a variety of placements, e.g. retargeted ads (by using the data from your tracking code), pop-ups, locked content, native ads, pinned posts – and optimise your focus on the most successful.
Examples of Content Used: Lead Magnets e.g. eBooks, cheat-sheets and planners. Free trials, discount offers, newsletters
- Do this by offering super-high value content (or offers) to our visitors in exchange for their contact details. This process converts these visitors into leads.
- The better our offers to leads at this stage in our content marketing funnel, the more likely they are to convert into customers in the next stage of our funnel.
- Our aim is not to generate as many leads as possible, it’s to generate as many ‘qualified leads’ as possible.
- Depending on your industry, categorise, tag and personalise your lead capture efforts for every visitor.
Ensure that your lead magnet connects the dots between your products and your customer’s knowledge goals. There is no use offering a lead magnet that has nothing to do with your business’s product offerings, and there is no point offering a lead magnet that doesn’t provide value to your target market.
Offer your target market your lead magnets in a variety of placements, e.g. retargeted ads (by using the data from your tracking code), pop-ups, locked content, native ads, pinned posts – and optimise your focus on the most successful.
Step 3: Conversion
Aim: To use content to convert our qualified leads into paying customers.
Examples of Content Used: Reviews, testimonials, spec sheets, product demos, brochures, sales copy, email drip campaigns.
Everything in the content marketing funnel up until this point has been aimed around giving stuff away to your target audience, at this point, we’re going to make that pay.
- We can keep our leads engaged by sending them content from our Awareness and Audience building stage, posting them a regular newsletter or actively having conversations with them as often as possible.
- These sorts of tactics keep leads opening your emails and make your brand first-to-mind when thinking about purchasing from your industry.
- Whilst constantly re-engaging your qualified leads with existing content, you can make them relevant offers.
- The best way for you to ensure that these offers are relevant, is by tagging them by interests, actions and behaviours in your CRM (aka email software).
- This means adding tags to different leads depending on what emails they opened and engaged with and what lead magnet they exchanged their contact details for.
The majority of your conversion content is going to come the way of writing emails.
That means engaging existing leads, re-engaging those who are losing interest (and have stopped opening emails) and driving leads to landing pages for relevant offers.
The rest of your content will be built out on landing pages.
Trust is fundamental when it comes to a prospect buying from a company for the first time – show that others have bought from you and enjoyed the experience.
You can use things like reviews, testimonials, social media posts/shares and other social proof signals to demonstrate this.
Examples of Content Used: Reviews, testimonials, spec sheets, product demos, brochures, sales copy, email drip campaigns.
Everything in the content marketing funnel up until this point has been aimed around giving stuff away to your target audience, at this point, we’re going to make that pay.
- We can keep our leads engaged by sending them content from our Awareness and Audience building stage, posting them a regular newsletter or actively having conversations with them as often as possible.
- These sorts of tactics keep leads opening your emails and make your brand first-to-mind when thinking about purchasing from your industry.
- Whilst constantly re-engaging your qualified leads with existing content, you can make them relevant offers.
- The best way for you to ensure that these offers are relevant, is by tagging them by interests, actions and behaviours in your CRM (aka email software).
- This means adding tags to different leads depending on what emails they opened and engaged with and what lead magnet they exchanged their contact details for.
The majority of your conversion content is going to come the way of writing emails.
That means engaging existing leads, re-engaging those who are losing interest (and have stopped opening emails) and driving leads to landing pages for relevant offers.
The rest of your content will be built out on landing pages.
Trust is fundamental when it comes to a prospect buying from a company for the first time – show that others have bought from you and enjoyed the experience.
You can use things like reviews, testimonials, social media posts/shares and other social proof signals to demonstrate this.
Finally, make the process of a lead converting to a customer as frictionless as possible – this might mean leading with your lowest priced products first to build that trust and maximise every customer’s value.
The very last thing you can do is to shortcut the entire system by using custom audiences (captured from your website’s pixel) to present relevant offers to lookalike audiences.
We suggest testing your lead magnet offers against your relevant product offers to these ‘lookalike audiences’ and optimising for your best performing.
Things like tags, retargeted ads, lookalike audiences, pop-ups, emails and drip campaigns can all be automated after they’ve been created.
The very last thing you can do is to shortcut the entire system by using custom audiences (captured from your website’s pixel) to present relevant offers to lookalike audiences.
We suggest testing your lead magnet offers against your relevant product offers to these ‘lookalike audiences’ and optimising for your best performing.
Things like tags, retargeted ads, lookalike audiences, pop-ups, emails and drip campaigns can all be automated after they’ve been created.
