You’ve identified your potential target customers, are consistent with your content creation, and use different content types to promote your product or service. So your content strategy seems solid enough, right?
The truth is, your content marketing efforts can and should constantly evolve.
As marketing strategy best practices change and adapt to current consumer behavior trends, so should content marketing.
Your sales team has likely already designed a sales funnel to better understand what your target audience is thinking and doing at each stage of the buying journey.
You too can create a content marketing funnel to take your ideal customers from the awareness stage to the conversion stage, where they become actual customers.
In this post, we’ll explore what exactly a content marketing funnel is, how to create a successful content marketing funnel that converts, and the types of content to include in each stage of the funnel.
What is a content marketing funnel?
A content marketing funnel allows content marketers to visualize how they can leverage existing content to attract prospects and guide them through their journey until they reach the end goal.
This end goal can include a sale, demo, download, or some other type of conversion.
Each stage of the funnel serves a purpose, such as: B. Attract attention, generate quality leads, and close conversions.
A marketing funnel can give brands a better view of where they may have content gaps along the customer journey.
For example, if a brand has a significant amount of content aimed at buyers in the awareness stage but not enough content in the decision stage, they might want to shift their efforts to creating more bottom-funnel content.
Here’s how to start mapping your content funnel
You should first assess your current content inventory, including all types of content you produce, whether it’s blog content, lengthy content (like ebooks or whitepapers), and more.
As you review each piece of content, you should then map which stage of the buyer journey the content is targeting. These phases include:
- Top of Funnel (TOFU): phase of consciousness. In this phase, potential customers are looking for information.
- Center of Funnel (MOFU): phase of interest and reflection. In these phases, potential customers look at your product or service and read customer reviews. You can also present this information to key stakeholders.
- Bottom of Funnel (BOFU): Intent, Scoring, and Conversion Stage. Buyers are ready to drive their purchasing decision.
As you can see if you examine each stage individually, your audience needs different content depending on where they are located.
Your funnel content can’t take a consistent approach, or you won’t effectively reach potential buyers. Relevant content must be presented in each funnel phase.
Let’s explore the most effective types of content for each funnel stage.
Image created by the author, January 2023Top funnel content
At the top of the funnel, customers gather information that guides them through the buyer journey.
At this stage, a customer is likely just getting to know your company and what you offer.
This is where you want to build a positive customer experience to show the shopper that you’re worth continuing to engage with.
You want to answer their questions, educate them about their questions, and turn those prospects into warm leads.
A study conducted by Semrush found that the following types of TOFU content perform best when attracting traffic.
- “How-to” guide (72%).
- Landing page (35%).
- Infographic (28%).
- Checklist (27%).
- E-book/white paper (26%).
- Video tutorial (23%).
As you can see, most of these types of content are educational materials designed to provide more information at the awareness stage.
The primary goal of your content at this stage is to offer help, and it shouldn’t be overly salesy.
Contents of the middle funnel
Once your ideal customers reach the middle of the funnel, they stop looking for superficial, introductory content.
Instead, you should focus on creating content that drives prospects further down the funnel. You might be looking for customer stories, product reviews, or an how-to video.
Looking at the results of the same Semrush study, the following types of MOFU content perform best when attracting traffic.
- “How-to” guide (44%).
- Product overview (40%).
- Case study (34%).
- Landing page (31%).
- Webinar (31%).
- Success story (30%)
Keep in mind that these prospects likely already got to know your brand during the discovery phase and therefore no discovery phase content should be presented. An effective content strategy involves personalizing content for your audience.
In fact, research shows that 71% of consumers expect companies to offer personalized interactions – and 76% are frustrated when they don’t.
If you don’t tailor your content plan and content marketing formats to customers at every stage, you risk creating a poor customer experience with your business.
Contents of the lower funnel
Once a potential customer reaches the bottom of the funnel, they look for content that will help finalize their purchase decision.
You want to know how your product or service is profitable and why you are a better choice than your competitor.
Because these customers are well past the awareness stage and potentially looking to convert, the type of content you present to them is critical to building trust and ultimately closing the purchase.
The content you present during the consideration phase can mean the difference between a conversion and a lost sale. The top performing content types in the BOFU stage include:
- Product overview.
- customer rating.
- success story.
Consider sharing success stories from current customers that are similar to your prospect at this stage of the funnel.
Other examples of content that should be included at this stage are email campaigns with positive customer testimonials and product assurances. Also add special offers, free trials or live demos.
What to do after rating your content
Once you have a high-level view of the content already in place for each stage of the journey, it’s time to identify gaps.
You should also determine the types of content objects you need to create. For example, you may have noticed that you don’t have guidance for buyers in the awareness phase. Or maybe you don’t have enough customer success stories.
After you’ve identified content gaps, it’s time to put together an editorial calendar to prioritize what to tackle first and when.
Your editorial calendar should be monitored daily to keep track of what you have in the queue, what’s upcoming, the intended content audience for the article, and where the article falls in the content marketing funnel.
It may also be worth conducting a competitive analysis of your competitor’s content marketing strategy to identify opportunities for new additional content and how you can improve your content.
You want content that is both relevant and helpful to meet Google’s Helpful Content System standards and create an optimal user experience.
Conclusion
A comprehensive and coherent content strategy is critical to creating a rewarding buying experience. With any content you create, think about your audience.
You also want to have a thorough understanding of your target customer, how they think, what they are looking for and how you can solve their problem.
An effective content marketing funnel takes time, testing, and patience to perfect, but it’s absolutely necessary to outshine your competitors and prevail.
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Featured image: Vitalii Vodolazskyi/Shutterstock
