The marketing funnel is one of the most important tools for a marketer. It’s how you assess a potential leads interest, and how you should be responding to them.
It’s well established how some channels, such as SEO or PR feed into the funnel, but how does the relatively new practice of content marketing fit into most department’s funnels?
The key to this question is to assign different pieces of content to the different areas. What’s outlined below is only a rough guide of course, each industry and company will have its own funnel.
Awareness
There are a number of factors that feed into this, social channels, email mailouts, and your website are the primary ones, though there are other areas to consider like guest blogs that you might have done, or pieces of content that you've put up on slideshare.
Your blogs will be your main content tool at this stage, use them to try and drive people to sign up to your email newsletter. This means that you can start gaining some control over what content that they’re consuming, as well as being able to start profiling your customers.
But remember that just because they’re reading blogs at this stage, it doesn't mean that you can’t mix in other forms of content. Mix it up by embedding videos into your blogs, include snippets from whitepapers, or put together a quick infographic.
Any information that you learn should be fed back into your buyer personas, so that you can produce content that matters to your audience. Once you've developed a relationship with the customer you’ll be able to start feeding them the information that they really want.
Consideration
This is where you bring out the big guns. The whitepapers, case studies, and videos, so that you can help your sales team to establish a business case. This is where you’ll really need to hone in on the issues that your customer faces and make them specific to your product.
The really key issues that you need to address are those that your sales team run into when they’re talking to customers on the phone. So make sure you take the time to find these out, whether that means setting up a field in Salesforce or simply sitting down with the sales team on a regular basis.
Preference
This is where your customer is coming to the end of the buying process, and they’re looking to make a decision. Utilise specific pieces of content that will help them get over the last hurdles, such as a webinar on how to use the product, a fact sheet about the product, or a pricing list.
Third party pieces of content are particularly useful here, as they add external validation to your product. So this is a good place for awards that you've won, as well as external analyst reports and press cuttings.
Transact
Where the customer buys your product or service. You need to make sure that they have all the necessary pieces of content around this to transact successfully. If they’re buying it digitally then make sure that the email confirmation and receipt is set up correctly and is tested across all the relevant browsers.
Loyalty and Advocacy
The role of content doesn't stop once the customer has bought your product. Once you've got them through the loop then you need to be working out how you can gain their loyalty and get them to become an advocate for your product.
For loyalty, make sure to include them in on pieces that will help them to get the most out of your product or service, such as webinars or tip sheets, or a Q and A session on Twitter with one of the team. Make them feel like they’re getting a special service and you’ll have their loyalty.
If they’re reluctant to become an advocate, see if a promotion can help them get over the line. This doesn't have to be a simple get money off for recommending a friend, think about asking them to list their favorite thing about your product or service on social with a relevant hashtag and choose the winner from that.
This is just a basic run through the funnel, and of course it doesn't deal with the issues of what constitutes a lead and at what point you should be handing them over to sales. However, what you should get from this is a feel for where you should be putting content in the funnel, and how, when you pass people over to sales, you can help their chances of conversion with relevant content.
By Will van Wyngaarden, Content Manager at blur Group.
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