- 1. What is a Content Marketing Funnel?
- 2. What Is The Importance Of Content Marketing Funnel?
- 3. What Are The Stages of a Content Marketing Funnel?
- 4. How to Start Using Your Content Marketing Funnel?
- 5. What Are The Things To Consider About Content Marketing Funnel?
- 6. What Are The Effects of Content Marketing Funnel On SEO?
- 7. What are Examples of a Content Marketing Funnel?
What is a Content Marketing Funnel?
Marketing has become about more than just promoting a business, product or service and as the world and markets have become so much more competitive, it is incredibly important that marketers and businesses use every available resource to better understand their clients. Understanding how a potential customer experiences the buying process can make or break whether a business is successful. A content marketing funnel is a system or process that guides potential customers through a specific buying journey, from the very first interaction to when a product or service is bought. Understanding and knowing how your own content marketing funnel operates can help you to better provide for potential customers, creating a system whereby you are aware of what they want and need through the buying process.
Interacting with and understanding your consumer market is a large part of any marketing plan, and buyer intent can signify and explain what potential customers and consumers want to see and hear when they are considering making a purchase. A content marketing funnel helps a business to better understand what the user experiences as well as provide insight into what works and what does not.
Awareness
When a customer first comes into contact with your content, it is important to assume that this is the first time they are hearing and learning about the products or services that you offer. Educating and informing your audience creates awareness of who you are and what you do, which is a key part of creating a content funnel. TOFU (top of funnel) content focuses on ensuring that your target audience is fully aware of your brand or business, educating through different streams. Many businesses use social media as a tactic to inform their consumer market and provide this information, though there are many other ways to do this. This stage is an important part of the purchasing process, and it is important that you are precise and offer all the information that a potential customer would need to decide whether or not your product would be beneficial to them! This follows on to our next stage of the process.
Evaluation
The evaluation stage is where consumers figure out whether or not they actually require the product or service that you are offering. The evaluation part of this process falls within the MOFU (middle of funnel) stage and this is the part of the buying process where you make a connection with your audience and start to build a level of trust between you and your customers. This stage is implementing different things that tell your audience why they should buy your products and many businesses use case studies and references to build a connection and a level of trust. This is the stage where you can begin to analyse whether or not your tactics are working, and analysing the various techniques you are using and coming up with strategies to monitor the metrics can help determine if you are converting leads into actual sales. If you are not, having this data will help you to restructure your content and figure out what could be leading to issues within the buying process.
Purchase
Now is the time when you need to convince your potential customers to make a purchase. BOFU ( Bottom of funnel) content is structured around comparing how your own product is better compared to others. It is important that you perfectly rely on how your product or service is set apart from the competition, What makes it unique? Why should a customer choose you instead of another brand? Ensuring that this information sits alongside a very clear call to action, you can work to increase the number of conversions your content sees, helping you to create a more clear vision.
Delight
Keeping the customer happy is one of the most important things when it comes to business and development within any industry. While this step is not part of traditional marketing strategies, brands and businesses are looking at ways to engage with consumers better and understand what they need and how your product or service meets their needs and measures up to the competition. Asking your customers for information on your product or service and marketing strategy can ensure you keep informed about how users and potential customers feel about your content and also supplies the best ways to better how you interact with a consumer.
What Is The Importance Of Content Marketing Funnel?
A content marketing funnel is vital to not only promoting the product or service that you offer but also to understand how the consumer interacts with your brand. Understanding the movements, desires, needs and channels that your consumers are hoping for can help a business better promote itself and its products. A content marketing funnel helps a brand to better streamline and structure the consumer experience, ensuring that they are aware of any issues within the process that may be impacting the consumer experience.
What Are The Stages of a Content Marketing Funnel?
Top of the Funnel (TOFU)
The top of the funnel is where you have the most general and largest audience, and this stage is specifically centred around highlighting who you are and making consumers aware of your business. Brand awareness is an incredibly important part of content marketing and ensuring that you are presenting your company in a way that attracts customers is vital. Buyers at this stage do not yet know who you are or what you do, so you have a chance to present yourself in the best way possible! At this stage, potential customers may be aware that they have some sort of problem or that they are missing something, either a product or a service, that would help them. Your job within the content marketing funnel at this stage is to highlight that you have a product or service that could help bridge this gap.
Middle of the Funnel (MOFU)
The middle of the funnel targets an audience’s needs, and now that they have figured out that they may have something that is missing from their lives, they will want to figure out a solution to solve the problem. You have already introduced who you are and what you do, so your audience will now need to be attracted to what you are selling. The middle of the funnel is all about making a connection and building up a sense of trust between your business and the consumers who are hoping to make a purchase. You need to be portraying why your product would be beneficial to those who are looking to make a purchase and explain why and how it can better their lives. Many marketers use references and different case studies to show this information, displaying how the very same product or service has bettered the lives of different consumers! These middle of the funnel content examples help to ensure that those to who you are promoting your product have a good idea of what your service or product could offer them and how it can help to better their own lives.
It is important to consider that as you make your way through the funnel, it is designed so that a certain amount of people will leave. You start out with a wide audience and then slowly whittle your way down to a smaller one. This is all part of the process and is nothing to be concerned about! You nee4d to be using metrics to measure that the amount of consumers who remain in the funnel at this stage is what you expected, with those few exciting but others still remaining and moving through the funnel to the bottom stage.
Bottom of the funnel (BOFU)
The bottom of the funnel is where a consumer will evaluate whether or not they want to make a purchase. At this stage, you need to be identifying why and how the product or service you offer is better than another. You need to be identifying how and why your offering is the best, convincing potential customers that they should invest in you as opposed to another brand or business. Bottom of the funnel content relies on showcasing yourself and your offerings in the best and most effective ways, it is here where the actual conversion between potential consumer and the actual customer takes place, so it is a very important part of the process. The content and information displayed here needs to be clear, with a concise and informative call to action (CTA) included.
How to Start Using Your Content Marketing Funnel?
Know Your Audience
Having a good idea of who you are making your content for and the types of consumers you are hoping to attract with your content can help you to better understand the content you need to create. Different types of audiences will interact with content differently and use different channels to access it. A b2b content marketing funnel, for example, will more than likely lead you to promote across business centred channels, like LinkedIn, or use paid versions of advertising across other social media channels. Knowing who your audience is and ensuring that you are planning your content according to who they are and what channels they are predominantly using will ensure that your content marketing funnel and content marketing efforts are seen by the right kinds of people!
Plan Content
Planning your content out and structuring the different elements that should be included within each of the content marketing funnel stages will help ensure that your content has a sense of structure to it. Remember that each stage of the process needs to be carefully thought out and considered, with specific elements being encompassed at each stage of the process. Planning your content will make it easier for you to compare metrics and also ensure that if there are any issues, you know exactly where they are and how to fix them!
Schedule It
Releasing content regularly is a big part of any content marketing funnel. Without releasing content to your wide audience at the top of the funnel, how can you expect potential customers to get the opportunity to move through it? By scheduling content for appropriate releases and ensuring that you are releasing content on a regular basis, you can ensure that your audience is actually getting the chance to move through the funnel you have created! You also need to release content regularly in order to track the performance of your funnel, and without having an audience who is actively interacting with your content, you will not be able to actively track metrics.
Promote It
Promoting your content across the right channels is a vital part of perfecting your content marketing funnel. In order to properly monitor and attract consumers, you need to ensure that the content you are producing is reaching the right people. This involves determining the best streams and places to put the content that you are creating. If you are not reaching the right people within the right spaces, you are not going to attract people into your funnel. You need to closely consider what it is you do and what you sell to ensure you are reaching the right people!
Track The Performance
Using different metrics to analyse and track how well your content marketing funnel is working is extremely important. As a brand or business, you would have implemented certain tactics that centre around the different stages of the funnel, some will involve attracting the attention of consumers while others may be aligned with converting attraction into sales. Knowing how well each of these different tactics is working and figuring out if there are any issues within a stage of the process can help you to better create content that is more goal-centred. Tracking metrics will ensure that you are well aware of any issues or changes that need to be made if a certain step or stage is not doing what it is meant to.
What Are The Things To Consider About Content Marketing Funnel?
How Do You Target Prospects at The Top of The Funnel?
When looking at the top of the funnel vs bottom of the funnel, it is important to look at how you attract prospective customers and target audiences. Understanding this difference will help one to better create content that is designed for specific things. The top of the funnel is used to attract customers by creating awareness. Potential consumers may not know that what you are offering is something that they are missing from their lives, so you need to inform them of what you can do for them. Creating brand awareness is the main goal of this stage, and many brands and businesses use social media to do this at this stage!
How Do You Target Prospects in The Middle of The Funnel?
The middle of the funnel is where you start making a connection with your consumers and informing them of the different ways that a product or service could better their lives. This is the stage where you need to promote yourself and your brand in ways that show how you are able to help them. One of the most used targeting techniques in this stage is references. If you can showcase to a consumer how someone similar to them has enjoyed and used the product or service so much, you can convince them that this is something that will benefit them too!
How Do You Target Prospects at The Bottom of The Funnel?
The bottom of the funnel is perhaps the most important, though it is seen by the least amount of people, this is the stage where you are looking to convert customers! The main targeting feature at this stage is a clear, easy to read and see call to action (CTA). A call to action informs those who are seeing the content of what to do next, or in other words, how to finalise their purchase.
What Are The Effects of Content Marketing Funnel On SEO?
When it comes to content strategy development, there is no better way to help improve the number of visits and number of people seeing your content than through SEO! Content marketing and SEO walk hand in hand and they are both two very important aspects to consider when developing your content strategy. One of the things that these two aspects have in common is that they are creating user-centred content that is aimed at specific things that users are looking for. The content for each of these concepts is therefore extremely similar. A funnel can help to clarify a few things about your SEO and help you to direct your marketing efforts in the right direction.
Understanding who your consumer is and what they are looking for can help you to better structure your website content. Keywords, for example, should be centred around what the consumer is looking for as well as keywords that bring in a good amount of traffic. Remember that while SEO efforts can help to increase traffic, the overall goal is to increase the number of customers that you have as well. With a content marketing funnel and SEO strategy helping to streamline your marketing efforts, you can be sure that you are creating content that is centred around both what the user is looking for as well as the user experience.
What are Examples of a Content Marketing Funnel?
There are different examples and things that you can do at each stage of the content marketing funnel. The things that you use to attract consumers is a vital part of any content marketing funnel or brand strategy. The following are just a few examples of the type of content that can be used through the different stages of the content marketing funnel:
- Awareness;
- Videos: Creating videos can help to attract a customer’s attention, and without them even realising it they could be learning about who you are and what you do! Videos make it easy for brands to interact with consumers and create brand awareness.
- Social media posts: Social media has become a great way for brands to promote themselves to large consumer markets. Creating posts that are informative, eye-catching and easily shared is a great way to create awareness about your brand.
- Evaluation;
- Case studies: Case studies help consumers to better understand how your product could benefit them!
- Referrals: referrals are one of the most used types of evaluation. Remember that if a consumer sees that someone else, a person similar to them, have found your product or service useful, it makes them far more likely to complete their purchase!
- Purchase;
- Clear CTA (Call to action): A call to action informs potential customers on how to complete their final purchase. It should be clear, concise and well-written. This is the final step before purchasing so it is important to remember that this is your last chance to convert a potential consumer into a customer.
- Delight;
- Review option: Ensuring that your customers are involved in the processes and are able to inform you how their product or service could be improved and the things that they enjoyed about them is a new and not often used part of this process. It can help you to better communicate with your customers and also offer you reviews for the second stage of the process!