A content marketing funnel is essential for any business that wants to improve their sales funnel. If you are wondering what is a sales funnel, you will probably understand it once you get to know how a content marketing funnel works because they have a similar logic at their core.
Here are the ten tips on how to create your first content marketing funnel.
Parts of the Funnel
A funnel primarily consists of three main parts: top of the funnel (TOFU), middle of the funnel (MOFU), and bottom of the funnel (BOFU). These three parts work together to form a journey your prospects follow to become your customers:
- TOFU: This is the first stage of your funnel when you grab your audience’s attention and use brand awareness to keep their thoughts on you.
- MOFU: This is the next stage of your funnel when you convert your website visitors into leads.
- BOFU: This is the last stage of your funnel when you finally convince your leads to make a purchase and buy your product or service.
1. Consider Your Audience
Always start by determining the target audience. There is no way you will be able to do something successfully and create a comprehensive content marketing funnel if you don’t know who you are supposed to be targeting and engaging with.
To determine your audience, you need to do some research first. If you are already making sales, analyze who your buyers are. If you aren’t, look at what your competitors are doing and see who their customers are because yours will probably be pretty similar to that.
2. Create Brand Awareness
Create brand awareness in your audience. Once you have determined who your potential customers are, you will need to create brand awareness. This is an important stage in your content marketing funnel because it is the first step you make to turn random people into potential customers.
Brand awareness can be created in multiple ways, but what you should remember is that it will only be worth it if you maintain this brand awareness for a long time. If you let your audience forget about you, then what was the point of creating brand awareness in the first place?
3. Create Awareness for Problems
Present the problems your audience has to create awareness (in your audience) of these problems. This is different simply creating brand awareness because this time you are promoting the issues your audience has by telling your potential customers about them.
Keep in mind that phrasing matters here a lot, so you need to make sure that you use the right words. You can definitely be safe if you hire a professional writer from a writing review site like Best Writers Online where you can compare freelance writers to see who suits your needs the best.
4. Create Awareness for Solutions
Present the solutions you have for these problems. After your audience becomes aware of the problems they have, it’s your turn to tell them that you have the solutions to these problems, and you are willing to help them solve their issues.
Once again, phrasing matters here a lot, so you must make sure that you use the right language to communicate the message you want to be sending to your audience and your potential customers.
5. Verify the Problems
Check that your audience really does have these problems. It can be surprising how many times brands had mistakenly assumed that their customers had problems that they didn’t really have or didn’t actually give that much attention to.
This is why it is so crucial that you verify that your customers really do have the problems you were talking about. Conduct a survey or hire an expert in your field who will conduct it instead. Read some recent studies that perhaps covered these topics already.
6. Test the Solutions
Test your solutions to be certain that they work. Once you have verified the problems, you now need to test your solutions. If you aren’t sure that your solutions work, you can significantly undermine your own reputation when your customers start using your “solutions” and they don’t work.
Conduct as many tests as possible to be absolutely certain that your solutions work. And even once you start selling your products, consider whether you can improve them even further. If you can, then you probably need to do it at some point.
7. Find Alternative Solutions
Find possible alternative solutions (often offered by your competitors). Though everything you are currently offering could be great, there will almost always be another way to solve the problems you are trying to solve with your products or services.
This is why you need to consider alternative solutions. You can hire a writer from a writing services review site like Online Writers Rating to analyze what your competitors are doing and compare that to the solutions you are offering to see which one is more effective and appealing to your shared audience.
8. Put a Plan Together
Create a plan for your content marketing and your funnel. Now, you can be sure that you can start your content marketing campaign because you have all the necessary information. However, you still need to create a plan that you will be following.
This content marketing strategy will help you remember about the goals you have set yourself, stick to a certain standard of quality when creating your content, analyze where you are in your plan, and get a better idea of what you are trying to achieve with your actions.
9. Start Creating Content
Start creating and publishing content according to your plan. Finally, you can start following your content marketing strategy and guiding your audience through your content marketing funnel. Basically, this is the point when you are putting everything you have put on paper in action.
A good idea would be to create a posting schedule to use along with your plan. This way, you will be publishing content regularly which is the foundation of any successful content marketing campaign. If you don’t post to social media regularly, send a weekly or monthly email newsletter, and add the necessary pieces of content to your site, then you might not be able to achieve the effect you want.
10. Analyze the Results
Analyze the results you get and adjust your funnel if needed. This is probably the most overlooked stage of creating a content marketing funnel. Once it is created, many business owners and marketers tend to forget that it can still have errors and needs to be improved after some time.
Analyze your metrics and decide what should be changed, altered, or replaced to get the results you want to get. This can be something as simple as posting during a different time of the day to changing your content quality requirements completely. But, of course, it all depends on your own circumstances and the reasoning you use for the changes you make.
Final Thoughts
To sum up, once you have read this article till the end, you will be able to create a comprehensive funnel for your content marketing and use it effectively to improve your sales funnel as well. Try to focus on such crucial aspects as problem identification, solutions testing, and content quality.