How to Funnel Customers into your Business (part 2)
Utilizing a marketing funnel to deliver your stunning content to your customers can accelerate the buyer’s journey — especially when augmented with AI.
In my last blog, I talked about what the marketing funnel is and the types of content that work best in each stage of the funnel. In this blog, I’ll go more in-depth about how to build out your marketing funnel with stunning, relevant content to accelerate your buyer’s journey.
How to know what content to create for each phase of the marketing funnel
Understanding your target audience is the first step toward creating effective content for the marketing funnel. Your objective should be to address their information requirements and their needs. Start by asking yourself exactly what your product or service does for your customers.
What is your target audience looking for and what solutions does your business provide?
Depending on various demographic factors, the problems and needs of your target audience will vary. Your buyers’ unique needs will be critical to how you create your personal marketing funnel. For instance, depending on your target audience, you may want more entertaining or more informational content for the awareness stage of the funnel. Many buyers in the awareness stage are just there to “browse” in a sense. So, you don’t want to inundate the buyer with hard sells at this stage. A simple survey will help you determine your target audience and create ideal buyer personas for your products or services to carry them through the buyer’s journey.
You can ask many pertinent questions in the survey that will help you identify your customers’ preferred channels for seeking information, what types of content they prefer, what their reading habits are, what their current problems and so on. You can also promote the survey through social media, paid ads (depending on your marketing budget) and share it with your existing customers. There are many free to use survey tools available online. For a comprehensive data crunching method, you can look for paid, professional survey tools. You need quality data to determine all the details that can be used to create the buyer persona and eventually an empathy map.
The better the empathy map, the more you will connect with your target audience. Recent Adweek research found that 81% of buyers do their research online before closing down on a purchase. The buyers are already out there seeking answers and solutions for their problems. All you have to do is tap those touch points and provide them relevant information to use. The best way to tap into this is by providing customized, high-value content such as blog posts, infographics, white papers, reports, and even comprehensive eBooks with substantial information. You can also use informative videos and other educational content to grab their attention and build trust.
If you use content strategically and publish it to the right channel, you will certainly generate not just more leads, but quality leads. Many organizations fall in the trap of creating lots of leads but ignore the quality of the leads and eventually fail to nurture them through to the next stage of the funnel.
Inexperienced content marketers often don’t know how to effectively strategize for the content marketing funnel and end up only with peripheral issues such as deciding on a number of blog posts to publish, tweets to post, a budget for video content, when to post and so on.
How to create effective content for different stages of the funnel
There are many aspects to consider while creating successful content for the marketing funnel. Once you have a buyer persona, or multiple personas, you can get a clearer idea about what type of content your persona(s) would be interested in.
Content for the Awareness Stage
In this stage, content must reach a wider audience. Content at this stage strives to gain the attention of the prospective customer, educate them about the solutions and offerings and take them to the evaluation stage. Some of the most popular format of awareness content is social media posts, infographics, and educational videos. Your content should try to answer the most relevant questions for your prospective buyers. For example, if a prospective buyer is looking for car leasing options from your car business, the content should educate about car leasing as an alternative to buying a car, EMI options, tax benefits, buying and leasing market trends and so on. Once the content gains some traction, determine which posts or content to promote and optimize.
Content for the Evaluation Stage
In the evaluation stage, prospective buyers try to determine the value of your product or service and the legitimacy of your organization. Basically, people try to understand how well the product or service will serve them and whether it is a good fit for them. To provide these answers and insights, you will have to provide content such as research reports, case studies, white papers, critical reviews and so on to pitch the superior value of your offering. You can measure the success of such content by determining the number of leads generated and contacts made, and invest more in the successful content.
Content for the Purchase Stage
In the purchase stage, your content needs to be compelling enough to convince your prospective buyer to purchase your product or service. The only measure of success for such content is closing the deal. The best content for this purpose are reviews, questionnaires, testimonials, demos, trials, product sheets and so on. This type of content needs to be very personal and showcase the value in subscribing to your services and purchasing your products. Such content through can be sent through an email autoresponder sequences- or drip campaign- to prospective buyers who provided their email addresses at the evaluation stage in exchange of free content. You may also reuse some of the evaluation stage content after tweaking them with more interactive elements to customize the content further. To measure the success of such content, you have to determine whether the content is improving your revenue.
Content for the Delight Stage
The main objective of content in the delight stage is to garner loyalty from your customers and build long-term trust. You must engage with your customers often and determine how often your product is used, look for online interactions, check referrals and leverage user-generated content. This will help you develop the right content for delight stage in the form of exclusive product guides and educational content, special offers and giveaways. To return to our car leasing example, a customized annual letter from your organization to the car lessee to update them about new offerings, special benefits and loyalty rewards would be a great piece of content for this stage.
Many buyers won’t move to the next phase of the buyer’s journey without experiencing a “trigger”. For instance, someone may not buy back-up software until they have a system crash, or they may not buy an up-to-date household appliance until their outdated one breaks. Think about what the trigger is that may cause your buyers to make a purchase, and ask yourself if you can create that trigger. A great example mentioned by David Skok on The Sales Hacker Podcast, is Hubspot’s Website Grader. The Website Grader is a free tool any marketer can use to test their website for search optimization and get a report on everything that’s WRONG with it. See how this could trigger a sale for SEO services? How can you do something similar to accelerate your sales funnel?
A well-planned approach, as described here, will help you develop effective content for the marketing funnel, but do not compromise on understanding your audience first and customizing the content for the buyer persona. If everything is executed well, content marketing will leave a lasting impact on your customers and your businesses growth.
Partnering with you on your content marketing efforts
At Social27, we are experts at curating content specifically for your target audiences at each phase of the marketing funnel. And, using our AI services, you can further personalize your content and get valuable, actionable insights into what’s working and what’s just causing more friction. Please go to social27.com for more information. We want to be your partner in your digital transformation no matter where you are in your journey.
