If you’re trying to grow your business through content but are struggling to set up a funnel, especially a clear content marketing funnel, here’s what you absolutely shouldn’t do…
What is the content marketing funnel?
The content marketing funnel visualizes the journey prospects take when considering a purchase and is part of an overall content marketing strategy. A successful content marketing funnel leads from your product to a satisfied customer of your company.
It’s a simple multi-step process:
- Awareness ;
- Evaluation;
- The purchase or conversion;
- Pleasure.
Each step corresponds to a specific goal in the customer journey. But a comprehensive content marketing strategy answers these questions:
- What type of content should I create?
- How do I measure the success of my content?
- Where can I improve my content strategy?
awareness
In this first stage of the content marketing funnel, you want to attract and educate your audience about your topic, raise their awareness, and show them how to solve their problems and eliminate their pain points. You can use different types of content, e.g.
- posting on social networks;
- The blog post;
- The E-Book;
- The podcast.
- infographics;
- The video.
With any content you create, ask yourself:
- Are prospects viewing, interacting with, and sharing the content?
- Is there a follow-up after the interaction?
Evaluation
In this phase you build a relationship, create trust and arouse the interest of your target group in your products. Now is not the time to sell “aggressively,” but once your audience knows your brand, you want them to consider a purchase. Still, you don’t want your content to read like an advertisement. This boils down to creating:
- blog entries.
- A white paper;
- case studies;
- A webinar.
At this stage, ask yourself if your content is fit for purpose:
- Are people converting from this content?
- Am I generating new sales or leads from this content?
- Does this content help or hinder my ultimate goal?
procurement
This is the stage where you try to convert contacts who have shown interest in your product. Your goal is to create content that will lead to closing the deal. The most effective formats in this phase are:
- Comments ;
- questionnaires;
- self-assessments;
- product sheets.
In this phase, ask yourself the right questions:
- Does my content have a clear call to action?
- Am I making the buying process as easy as possible?
pleasure
This is the crucial step to retain your customers in the long term. Here you will continue to cultivate customer relationships in order not only to retain customers, but also to increase their lifetime value for your company. The different types of content that work in this stage include:
- The leaders;
- Content reserved for members only;
- the forums;
- Gifts and special offers.
Finally, in this final step, ask yourself these questions:
- Does the content give readers reasons to recommend their friends?
- Does this content encourage customers to leave reviews?
What not to do in your content marketing funnel
An effective content marketing funnel gets a potential customer to learn about your brand early and make a purchase decision from you accordingly. When using a content marketing funnel, the primary goal is not to promote the product or service, but to Give your goal the value that the product would bring to it. You need to understand your audience’s pain points and work on those pain points in your posts.
Without further ado, here are the 5 mistakes that are often made in a content strategy
- You don’t understand your audience well enough. They don’t really know their expectations or their motivations. So they have no idea if your product is what they really need and if it can actually help them;
- You don’t know your competitorss and do not know how they differ from you;
- you are not flexible You think of the content funnel as a plan that you follow to the letter without changing it. Because of this, you don’t adapt it to different real-time events, audience needs, and context.
- They only create content for new subscribers, new prospects, forget about your current customers. This is a common mistake, but one that should be avoided. In marketing, retaining an old customer is far more expensive and complicated than acquiring a new one. So never forget to engage with your old audience;
- They post the same content all the time. Of course, your content should be related to your product or something that you can connect your product to. Still, try to make your content different even if they touch on the same thing.
Now is the time to invest in a content marketing funnel because today, more than ever, it is the most effective way to reach potential customers and make valuable sales!
Source: Lucidchart