As a marketer, you know the value of creating content that resonates with your target audience. You need to think ahead and create content for each stage of the marketing funnel to ensure maximum impact and success in reaching your business goals. To achieve this goal it’s important to understand how buyers move through the stages of their buying journey while they consume and evaluate different types of content. In this blog post, we will look at how you can identify where prospects are in the marketing funnel so that you can tailor appropriate content for generating leads or driving conversions. Let’s dive deeper into understanding which pieces of content best cater to each stage in the marketing funnel!
As of 2021, 97% of marketers from all over the world said that content marketing was a part of their overall marketing strategies. There are various funnels used to devise this content marketing strategy. A successful content marketing funnel does not focus on a single purchase. The best funnels use your most valuable clients to fill the funnel’s top. It is more of a cyclical strategy that builds trust and goodwill over time rather than a linear progression. We will guide you through the different content marketing funnels, different stages of the content marketing funnel and the kinds of content you’ll need for each stage to reach your audience as they progress through the buyer’s journey when developing a content strategy.
What is Content Marketing?
Planning, creating, distributing, sharing, and publishing content through channels like social media, blogs, websites, podcasts, apps, press releases, and print publications are all examples of content marketing. Reaching your target audience and increasing brand recognition, sales, engagement, and customer loyalty are the objectives. Based on the creation of relevant and valuable content, content marketing is a strategy for engaging your audience and increasing your client base. Most reputable marketing agencies offer a full time content writer that can take care of all your content marketing needs.
A brand’s audience can be attracted, involved, and provided with value through this strategy. This strategy boosts your company’s sales and creates a favorable impression of your brand. It is now a strategic investment to increase business success rather than a market trend. With Content Marketing, a brand can acquire visibility on the web and find new clients. It can also avoid being swallowed up by the competition and stand out in people’s minds.
What is a Content Marketing Funnel?
Using targeted educational content, the content marketing funnel is a customer-centered campaign that aims to attract your ideal potential customers at every stage of the buyer’s journey and propel them toward making a purchase. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if all of your clients came to us prepared to purchase? That rarely holds true in the real world. Your customers require direction and information. Your target audience needs to be confident that the products or services they are purchasing will provide them with value and solve their problems. Your company just needs the content marketing funnel to show that value.
The content marketing funnel is a client focused program that utilizes designated instructive material at all places of the purchaser’s journey to draw in your optimal prospective clients, and move them towards the path of making a purchase. It’s called a “funnel” because, if you imagine a “V,” your customers enter at the top and move down a narrower path, where only customers who are the right fit make it to the purchase stage.
Utilizing the content marketing funnel as part of your overall inbound marketing strategy can assist your team in attracting more leads, increasing conversion rates, and increasing sales for businesses looking to establish a stronger online presence. By defining objectives along the customer journey, a marketing funnel can also assist you in developing a cohesive content strategy. Your content marketing efforts will not only have a smaller scope, but they will also be more successful if you use this funnel in an audience-focused manner. As a result, your team’s ability to identify the most crucial pieces of content they should produce and the reasons behind them will improve.
Different Stages of Content Marketing Funnel
The content marketing funnel serves as a guide for organizing your plan for content marketing and developing a comprehensive content strategy. You can develop a content strategy that is more effective by comprehending the kind of content that your customers want and require at each stage of the sales funnel. This is because, depending on where your prospects are in the buyer’s journey, you can create specific types of content that will better educate them.
Your team will be able to create content that the buyer actually wants to consume if they know what your customers look for at each stage. Keep in mind that the names of the stages may change depending on who is presenting the information, but they all have the same concepts in mind as you continue your own educational journey into the content marketing funnel. The three phases of the content marketing funnel are as follows:
Discovery Phase (Content at the top of the funnel): Aimed at attracting leads who are first looking for information on how to alleviate their problems.
Consideration Phase (Content in the middle of the funnel): Assists prospects in evaluating their choices and determining which option is most effective in solving their problem.
Purchase Phase (Content at the bottom of the funnel): Helps potential customers decide whether or not to make a purchase and from which company. This phase is also known as the Conversion phase.
Discovery Phase (Content at the top of the funnel)
When a lead has just begun looking for a solution to the problem they want to solve, this is the first stage of the content marketing funnel. This is where they will discover your brand and begin to learn how your products or services might help solve their problem if you create content around their questions and interests but remember that buyers can find you at any point in the content marketing funnel.
There are consumers who begin their online search by asking questions like, “How do I repair my UPS battery?” or “Where can I buy car spare parts?” These prospects haven’t yet realized that you repair UPS batteries or sell car spare parts separately but, assuming that you’ve made sufficient content to respond to every one of their doubts, they’re bound to track you down.
Because there are more prospects to sort through and you can reach a wider audience, this initial phase is typically the one in which you should produce the most content. Just make sure it’s aimed at your ideal client in the right way. If you go too wide here, you might get a lot of bad fits. Not only will you increase your organic search visibility by answering questions about your offerings with content of this kind, but you will also attract new prospects who may not have heard of your brand before.
Also, Read: How Exploding Topics Can Help You Identify Topics for Your Blog Content & Future Search Movement
Consideration Phase (Content in the middle of the funnel)
A prospect is aware of your products and services when they are in the middle of the funnel, and they have an idea of how they might be of use to them. They are considering their options. When people compare and weigh their options, they ask more purchase focused questions. For instance, now that your prospect is aware that eye strain may be the cause of their headaches and that you can assist them in finding a cute pair of reading glasses, it is likely that they will conduct additional research to determine how your products compare to those of other brands before making a purchase from you.
In a nutshell, your customers conduct extensive comparison research in the middle of the funnel. Do they prefer your frames or are there other options? What distinguishes plastic from wireframes? Is one more breakable or cheaper than the other? Your prospects should gain a better understanding of their options and the factors that make them a good or bad fit by reading content of this kind.
Purchase Phase (Content at the bottom of the funnel)
Last but not least, when potential customers reach the end of the sales funnel, they are making a decision. They are gathering all of the necessary final data to complete their purchase. They have more confidence in their ability to select the most suitable solutions. They are now looking for information about how to buy and what it means to become a customer. This includes trial periods, demonstrations, consultations, and any offers, coupons, or other incentives, to purchase or join a membership.
Their objective presently is to incorporate a list of accessible merchants, make a short rundown, and eventually settle on a last buy choice. They are ready to spend money now, and as long as the provider can satisfy their requirements, they will probably select a provider they like, know, and trust.
Retention Phase
Even though most of the marketers consider the above three stages as the primary phases in a content marketing funnel, there is a fourth stage which is considered important by many. It is known as the Retention phase and is said to be beyond the funnel. When you have cheerful clients, your objective isn’t just to keep them fulfilled. It’s to make them brand advocates and keep them for the long haul. Your brand is currently focusing on converting one-time buyers into repeat customers (or, in the case of businesses that operate on a subscription model, ensuring that customers maintain their subscriptions rather than canceling them), in addition to continuing to serve them at such a high level that they cannot help but promote our brand.
New prospects frequently enter the sales funnel as a result of your customers’ good word of mouth. You stand to gain increased traffic and links to your website without much effort because satisfied customers frequently promote your brand and products. The kind of content you ought to create and distribute just for these clients include detailed product or service advice, personalized how-to content, and insider tips.
Why Creating Content for Each Stage of the Content Marketing Funnel is Necessary?
Understanding your audience is essential, as it is in all marketing disciplines: how they think, what they want to know, and how they usually go about finding a solution. You can begin developing a documented content strategy based on that research that links your content to the various stages of the buyer’s journey. A gap exists between your company and potential clients when you do not fully comprehend your target audience. This typically indicates that you are publishing content that your readers can’t really relate to for content marketers, which may result in their departure.
You’ll need to think about where they are in their journey, how to meet them there, and the best ways to get the content in front of them in order to avoid this. The internet has made it easier for marketers to use content marketing to engage customers at various points along their journey. Sixty percent of marketers rate content as “very important” or “extremely important” to their overall strategy for this reason. But it can be hard to make the right content at the right time for the right people.
Content Marketing Funnel Stages in Inbound Marketing
The inbound methodology is a way to grow your business by forming meaningful, long-term relationships with customers, prospects, and other business partners. It’s about giving these people the confidence and support they need to achieve their objectives at any point along their journey with you. There are three ways to use the inbound strategy.
Attract: Attracting the right people with useful content and conversations that position you as an expert they want to work with.
Engage: Presenting insights and solutions that are in line with their goals in order to increase their likelihood of purchasing from you.
Delight: Supplying assistance and support to enable your customers to make a successful purchase.
Attract
Content creation and development are tied to inbound marketing strategies that attract your target audience. Start by creating and publishing valuable content, such as blog posts, content offers, and social media posts, to reach your audience. Guides on how to use your products, details about how your solution can solve their problems, testimonials from customers, and information about discounts or promotions are all examples.
To draw in your crowd on a more profound level through inbound promoting, improve all of this substance with a search engine optimization procedure. You will need to focus on specific keywords and phrases that are related to your products or services, the problems you solve for customers, and the ways you help your target audience as part of an SEO strategy. This will permit your content to naturally show up on the search engines for individuals who are looking for this data, otherwise called your interest group or the right clients for your business.
Engage
Make sure you are communicating with leads and customers in a way that encourages them to form long-term relationships with you when you use inbound strategies to engage your audience. Include information about the benefits of your company when implementing these engagement strategies. How you handle and manage inbound sales calls may be part of specific engagement strategies. Concentrate on how representatives of customer service respond to inquiries and potential customers. In addition, ensure that you always sell solutions rather than products. This will guarantee that every transaction will result in agreements that are beneficial to both your company and your clients, which means that you will provide value to your ideal clients.
Delight
After a customer has made a purchase, delightful inbound strategies ensure that they will be supported and happy for a long time. With these strategies, members of your team become experts and advisors who can assist customers any time. A great way to make customers happy is to use thoughtful, timed chatbots and surveys to help, support, and get their feedback. To ensure that surveys and bots make sense and are useful, they should be shared at specific points along the customer journey.
Chatbots, for instance, may be able to assist current customers in implementing a brand-new method or strategy that you have recently introduced and that they would like to take advantage of. In addition, after customers have purchased your product or service, a satisfaction survey can be sent out six months later to get their feedback and review suggestions for improvement.
Another important strategy for satisfying customers is listening to social media. Followers in social media might utilize one of your profiles to give input, clarify some pressing issues, or offer their involvement in your items or administrations. Show your followers that you hear them and care by responding to these interactions with information that helps, encourages, and supports them. Keep in mind that a satisfied customer becomes a brand advocate and promoter, so be careful in all interactions, big and small.
How to Find if Your Content Marketing Strategy works?
Analyze Conversion Rate
The percentage of visitors who complete the desired action is shown here. Computing the content funnel conversion rate might be difficult because of various purchaser excursions and funnel ways. By setting goals and keeping track of how well they are met, Google Analytics makes it simple to calculate your conversion rate. Note that figures between 3-5% are for the most part thought to be a decent change rate.
Measure Engagement Rate
This shows how your audience is sharing, liking, and commenting on your content on social media. This metric is taken into account by Google Analytics as the percentage of engaged sessions in your site. An engaged session is one in which a visitor has viewed more than one page of your website, completed a conversion, or stayed on a page for more than ten seconds.
Calculate Cost per Lead
Your lead generation’s cost-effectiveness is shown by this metric. It varies by industry and is calculated by dividing the total cost of your lead generation campaign by the number of new leads. Your lead-generation strategy will need to be rethought if the figure is too high in relation to the cost of your product or service.
Review Time spent on Site
This is the amount of time a visitor spends on a single page or website before moving on to another, as the name suggests. Google Analytics makes it simple to monitor this by dividing the total duration of all sessions by the number of sessions. In general, a good average time spent on a page is 52 seconds. Your content is engaging and performing well if people spend time on your page.
- Assess Bounce Rate
When a visitor leaves your website after viewing only one page, the percentage of single-page visits can be used to gauge its success. A high bounce rate means that your content doesn’t meet the expectations of your customers, so you should change your content marketing strategy.
AIDA model in Content Marketing Funnel
The AIDA model portrays the four phases a shopper goes through prior to pursuing a buying choice. Attention, Interest, Desire, and Action are the four stages which constitute the AIDA model. Your content should draw attention to your brand, create people’s interest in your product or service, pique their desire for it, and compel them to try or buy it.
The AIDA model is used by brands to figure out how to write and send marketing messages to their target audience at every stage of the buyer’s journey. The AIDA model is viewed as a pecking order of impact model, and that implies shoppers should travel through each phase of the model to finish the ideal activity. Each stage has fewer customers than the previous one, similar to a typical marketing funnel.
You can gain greater control over your prospects’ paths to a purchase decision by using the AIDA model when designing campaigns and your website. Theoretically, consumers who learn about your brand will develop certain feelings or emotions about your product or service as they progress through each stage of the model, which ultimately compels them to take action. Let us look in detail at the four stages of the AIDA model.
Attention
Your target audience will begin to become curious about your business if your content is able to captivate them and deeply engage them. You must first get your content in front of them before you can proceed to this stage. This is accompanied by improved messaging and brand recognition. One strategy for bringing in new visitors to your website is through effective content marketing. You will be able to entice them and provide them with a solution if you produce content that addresses their passions and addresses their problems. Your target audience should be able to find your content through Google, social media, and other channels if it is done well.
Interest
After your target audience has shown an interest in your product or service, they will want to know more about your brand, the advantages of your solution, and whether or not your product is useful for them and also available at a reasonable rate. Your content must be persuasive and engaging to reach this stage. This stage of AIDA is about keeping their attention, whereas the first stage of AIDA is about getting it.
Let’s say your content marketing brought them to your website to learn about a problem, need, or pain they are experiencing. You could then “hook” them with a compelling narrative that explains why your solution is the best choice. Humans respond to stories because they are an easy way to convey information in a way that inspires empathy and curiosity. To create sufficient energy in your possibilities to urge them to act, you really want to ensure their partiality for your image hits a specific edge. You are more likely to succeed if you are more in tune with their requirements and values.
Desire
The knowledge and similarity are established in the first two stages of the AIDA model. The change from “I like it” to “I want it” is the objective of this stage. By creating trust this final act is done. Keep giving them content to do this. Make sure they download your offers, follow you on social media, and subscribe to your blog. Prospects will trust you more as they interact with your brand, increasing their likelihood of purchasing your product or service.
Customers who already enjoy consuming your content and believe that your product or service will be even better are the most likely prospects you will close. Because of this, you need to create a gap between where they are now and where they might be with your solution. Case studies and testimonials must also be used to build social proof simultaneously.
Action
Give your potential customers the chance to take action once you’ve created enough demand for your product or service. After all, if there isn’t a clear next step, what’s the point of creating content and developing deep relationships with prospects? With low-friction but high-incentive calls to action, you should compel them to respond regardless of the next step. The next step you present should be high-value, regardless of whether they are far off or close to making a purchase decision. To put it another way, it needs to aid them in some way.
Since they aren’t just committing to a sales call or sales content, they will be more likely to act if they are aware of the outcome of your offer and find it valuable. Consider precisely how you can motivate them to engage with you while simultaneously providing that value. The call to action (CTA) for this “next step” or offer ought to be prominent, simple, and clear. It could be a banner or button that clearly explains what they need to do and what will happen if they do. You can increase your chances of success by reducing the amount of friction in the process.
Types of Content that “Attract Leads”
Ads
Ads are a simple means of reaching your intended audience. You can customize your audience, messaging, and images in social media ads. On the other hand, you can target keywords that your audience searches with paid search ads. Last but not least, retargeting ads are a great way to reach people who have previously visited your website. Paid advertising has many advantages, for instance, they have a higher cost of customer acquisition than organic search. Additionally, the data used for audience segmentation is suspect. The availability of tracking data will become even more constrained as the end of third-party cookies draws near. In the below image, you can see the ads on Google from various vendors when you try to buy chocolate online.
Infographics
Infographics are a content marketing format that provides a quick and simple way to assist prospects in digesting more information in a shorter amount of time because our attention spans are declining. You can combine other longer pieces of content, similar to checklists, to either summarize what you’ve written or present new concepts. Try to make them fun and interesting by including a lot of useful statistics and facts.
Audiences who prefer images to text can be reached by visual content. Additionally, it performs admirably on social media platforms like Instagram and Pinterest. The best infographics focus on a single topic and are designed in a clean, straightforward manner. On the off chance that you pack a lot into your infographic it will overpower your crowd. Keep it simple and avoid jargon and technical language.
Podcasts
Podcasts can be a good way to connect with prospects who are at the top of your content marketing funnel but haven’t yet identified their core problem. Make sure you get the right equipment before you start a podcast. It may not be studio quality, yet it ought to sound proficient. Also, take some time to learn about the best podcasts in your niche. Who are the intended recipients? How long do they last? What topics are covered by them? You need to be able to offer value that other podcasts don’t in order to get listeners. Subject matter, length, presentation style, and many other factors could set you apart.
Landing Pages
You can create a landing page that uses persuasive elements like testimonials, benefit-oriented copy, and engaging media to get people to take action on an offer. The offer could include purchasing a product, signing up for a newsletter, downloading a white paper, or creating an account. But landing pages aren’t just good for making good first impressions. These pages can be used throughout the buyer’s journey and every stage of your marketing funnel to increase engagement and make a good first impression.
Your landing page is responsible for providing visitors with all the information they require about the offer and persuading them to make a purchase, while an optimized advertisement informs them about your product or offer. Optimizing your landing pages differently for each stage of the marketing funnel is essential for increasing the number of advertising conversions and, ultimately, achieving a higher return on advertising investment because your prospects’ motivations and desires differ at each stage.
Checklists
Because checklists can be so helpful for visual learners it is a good idea to use them as a piece of content in the awareness phase. They force you to be concise while still being clear and direct with your message, which is a great way to quickly convey a lot of information. Repurposing blog posts or other longer pieces of content into a concise resource that your customers can print out and take with them as they continue their educational search can be done with the help of checklists. By providing your prospects with a checklist, you can assist them in completing tasks and reminding them of your brand at the same time.
Videos
As more and more people use video streaming services like YouTube to learn about a variety of topics, video is unquestionably an effective means of communicating with prospects. The business starts by teaching potential customers something valuable by offering educational videos in exchange for their name and email address. Later on in the funnel, the goal is to further engage them with additional information.
Types of Content that “Engage Prospects”
E-books
Ebooks are a great way to give your potential customers a lot of value. Their content can be similar to that of blog posts, but they should be longer and more in-depth. Consider “gating” this content by requiring your prospects to provide an email address or other piece of information before they can access it. This will mark the individual as a lead in your database, allowing you to follow up with them later.
Ebooks can be made up of blog posts, other content you’ve repurposed or written specifically for your audience. In the discovery phase, shorter e-books are excellent lead generation tools. By requesting an email address in exchange for the e-book, a single landing page can generate a significant number of leads. But most importantly, make sure it enhances the experience of your potential customers.
Case Studies
It can be extremely helpful for prospects to see how your company is assisting others in achieving goals that are similar to their own when they are comparing their options. By using case studies, you can show how your company intervened to alleviate or eliminate a difficult issue. Your authority and credibility in your sector could be strengthened by these pieces of content. To produce a successful case study, keep in mind the following steps.
- Select a completed project with quantifiable outcomes. Ensure that the client agrees with your success metrics
- First-hand accounts, testimonials, and background information are all essential sources of information
- Focus your case study on the main problem you solved for your client
- Include a PDF that can be downloaded in your case study, and design it in accordance with the best practices of web design
Webinars
Keeping in accordance with the educational content, online courses are an extraordinary way for your informed authorities to get out there and offer significant knowledge about your items and administrations. This is due to the fact that it is a location where significant discussions regarding your offerings and industry can be held.
Hosting cross-branded content on webinars can help your audience better understand your brand and make better purchasing decisions. You could even invite a relevant member of the industry from another company to join you. Even though these events are technically “live”, you can get a better lifetime value by recording them and posting them on your website or YouTube channel. After you upload them, make sure they are optimized for search so that you can keep getting leads and organic traffic long after your event has ended.
How-to Guides
How-tos are a great way to connect with customers, establish authority, and earn their trust. Because they provide solutions to common issues, how-to videos in particular have the potential to be extremely beneficial during the consideration phase. For instance, if you sell plant seeds, and flowers, you could make a step by step how-to guide on planting, watering, manuring plants and how to protect them during monsoon.
Blog Posts
During the discovery phase, blog posts are a great way to connect with prospects. Long-form content of this kind should answer questions like “what” and “why” and target keywords that are related to problems. To comprehend how your target audience approaches the issues they face, it is essential to conduct keyword research. As they discover the root causes of their problem and decide whether or not to act, they may employ a variety of phrases and long-tail keywords. Think about how you will guide users through the content marketing funnel as you develop your blogging strategy.
White Papers
White papers can be useful for distributing to potential customers during the consideration phase of the marketing funnel. They are comparable to e-books and blog posts. White papers are shorter and more digestible than e-books, but they provide comprehensive information on a particular subject. In addition, they typically contain a greater number of pertinent statistics, data points, and research, making them more technical than other forms of content marketing. They enable you to demonstrate to potential customers your expertise, knowledge, and authority. Additionally, they assist you in in-depth prospect education regarding the nature of your brand’s solution to their issue.
Reviews
Digital word-of-mouth works wonders for brands, especially in the age of social media, where social proof influences our purchasing decisions. Customers are also speaking up more and voicing their opinions about their choices now. Therefore, it is essential to shed some light on the ways in which brands today can enhance their content strategy by utilizing customer reviews.
Reviews and feedback not only assist customers in making a decision, but they also assist brands in becoming better. Having a lot of reviews from customers has numerous benefits. This feedback gives you the chance to interact with your customers, builds trust, and promotes the authenticity of your brand. It can also be used to generate content ideas, guest blog posts, case studies, and many other things.
E-mails
Even though it has been around for decades, email marketing is still a good way to reach prospects at every stage of the sales funnel. Emails help you build relationships and connect with prospects at the consideration stage of the funnel on a one-to-many level. Emails can be sent in a variety of formats, including, inviting prospects to a live event such as a webinar, quick check-ins, links to valuable resources, providing solutions to simple audience problems and answering their questions. As you create an email list for this stage of the funnel, try to determine what prospects need most. Your email newsletter’s topics and follow-up should be influenced by your prospects’ requirements.
Types of Content that “Delight Customers”
Special Offers
Consider the types of content that demonstrate to potential customers how to schedule a complimentary consultation with a member of your sales team. When a person is ready to buy, having access to someone who can guide them through the process, whether online or in person, is helpful. Offer to meet with them and talk about their choices for free. Your prospects should feel at ease discussing their issues and discussing potential solutions with you if you aim to assist rather than sell. They should have everything they need to make a final decision at the bottom of the funnel, but you are there to help them understand the steps involved.
Prospects can be given a financial incentive to buy products through coupons. Coupons can come as a straightforward money rebate or as additional features free of charge. They might be able to convince potential customers to take action. You should only give coupons to potential customers who are unsure about making a purchase. This might be their first purchase from you, or they might be thinking about buying from one of your rivals.
Free Trials
Bottom Of The Funnel content that your potential customers are interested in includes trial offers so that they can test the products before making a purchase if your company provides a membership or subscription service where customers make a long-term commitment. Demos can also be helpful at the bottom of the sales funnel because they teach customers how to use your products and services effectively. Ensure that your trial effectively emphasizes the value of your product to potential customers and, more importantly, that they will see an increase in value when they pay for your services.
If your product has a relatively high price tag, free trials are especially helpful. Before making a financial commitment, they give prospects the opportunity to experience the advantages of your product. The same principle applies to free samples. Prospects don’t have to pay up front for a small taste of the benefits your product will provide.
Social Media
Social media is used by billions of people every day, so it is a great way to connect with a large number of people during the discovery phase. However, when it comes to using social media, there are two distinct obstacles. In the first place, you really want to know which platform your ideal interest group utilizes, whether it is Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram or TikTok. Find out where your target audience spends their time online by conducting audience research.
Then, you need to spend money if you want your social media content to get a lot of attention. Social media platforms have fundamentally diminished natural brand visibility to drive organizations into their paid promoting programs. You will need to know which kinds of posts get the most engagement on each platform in order to get traction organically.
Surveys
Marketing agencies can use surveys of customers and prospects to their advantage. When utilized to their full potential, surveys provide you with reliable insights into the needs and desires of your leads. Surveys can also reveal weaknesses in your strategy or point you in new directions you hadn’t considered. Designing your surveys in such a way that your current and potential customers are motivated to not only click on the link to the survey but to actually complete it is the key to getting the most useful information from them. Use promotions to push possible clients toward a transformation, like planning a free demo. You might also get useful information about the other choices they’re thinking about and what sets you apart.
Giveaways
Giveaways are a great way to attract new customers and raise brand awareness. A giveaway is the most effective strategy for getting more people to visit your website. The more people who are familiar with your brand, the greater the likelihood that they will purchase from you in the future. They encourage website visitors to sign up for your email list, share your content, and do so. Giving away freebies on social media can also help you gain new followers. Giveaways can also be used as a reward system for devoted customers or as an incentive for potential buyers who have a pressing need for something so that they don’t want to deal with the hassle of buying something online without any guarantees.
Benefits of Content Marketing Funnel
- Content marketing funnels help boost conversions, improve customer retention, fill content gaps, strengthen customer relationships, and increase customer value. You can better meet the needs of your audience by creating content for each stage of the customer journey.
- A content funnel can show you where your audience needs more help. For instance, you might have a lot of testimonials and case studies, but you might not have enough informational content that is supported by investments in search engine optimization (SEO).
- Using a content marketing funnel, you can measure key metrics for each stage of the buying process separately. You can improve the efficiency of your conversion funnel by analyzing how well each stage’s groups of content and individual pieces of content performed.
- You can boost important business metrics like customer lifetime value and customer acquisition cost by using retention-focused content marketing. As a result, your marketing ROI will increase overall.
Wrapping Up
You can start thinking about all the ways your business can use content to reach its customers now that you are aware of all the parts of a content marketing funnel and how they work. Each customer journey will look different as you bring everything together. A person might find your website through a blog post, sign up for your newsletter, and test your products for free before making a purchase. Another could find you by means of video, survey one of your contextual investigations, and choose to purchase from you in view of a client’s tribute. There is no end to the possibilities.
Make sure that these various components of your content marketing strategy link or sync in some way so that your prospect’s path to making a purchase is clear and simple to follow. Also, keep in mind that you can use any of these pieces of content at any point in the funnel as long as they are relevant to your target audience.
FAQs
Is content marketing necessary for small businesses?
Content marketing is essential irrespective of the size or turnover of your company. It does not matter if you have been in the business for long or just started out, if you want to grow your business, an online presence is necessary and content marketing helps you have a strong online presence and help grow your business.
Which phase is important in a content marketing funnel?
All the three phases of Attract, Engage and Delight are important in a content marketing funnel with each phase having its own merits. Having said that, the Engage phase is quite important since you need to make your customer to consider you as one of the potential products or services out there in the market.
How to find if my content marketing strategy is delivering the results?
You can analyze conversion rate, engagement rate of your potential customers. Another important metric to note is the amount of time spent by a user who visits your website. It can be found by finding the bounce rate of your site. It is also advisable to review the cost spent to get a lead, to know the overall success of your content marketing campaign.
