If you aren’t already familiar with the traditional model of the marketing funnel, it’s worth getting to know. Although in a perfect world, we’d have a cylinder—everyone who heard about you would end up buying something from you. Alas, that’s simply not the way of things. 🙂
The idea of the funnel is that your pool of potential customers grows smaller as it moves toward its first transaction with your business. At the top of the funnel, there are a great many people who will become aware of your brand (often seen as the first step in the conversion process). The middle of the funnel is smaller, as there are fewer people who’ll actually consider paying you for your products or services, and the bottom of the funnel is even smaller, as many of the folks who consider paying you will end up deciding not to. Your mission as a marketer is to make that funnel as solid (and cylindrical) as possible, guiding potential customers toward eventual conversion.
Here’s the cool thing about content marketing: Despite a misconception that it’s always a top-of-funnel tactic, content marketing can help reach people at any stage of the funnel, and as those people continue their interactions with your organization, it helps widen the neck of the funnel farther down. And because content is all the words and pictures on (and off of) your site, you have a lot of options to tailor your content marketing message to where your audience is in that funnel. There are four major stages of content marketing, which we thought we’d show in relation to something very familiar—coffee:
Discovery: The Top of the Funnel
Goals: Indirect customer acquisition; brand awareness
Tactic: Educational content, viral content
In this first phase of content marketing, you’re trying to generate awareness of your brand among potential customers (and even the market at large). In some cases, when the use case for your product isn’t immediately obvious, you’re also trying to educate the market that there’s even a problem to be solved.
You’re also trying to use content marketing to generate interest during this phase. Because it’s not enough for people to just hear your name, they also need to be curious enough about your brand to remember that name and start integrating it into their list of trusted brands (even if they only trust your content at this stage).
The top of the funnel is often where we see inbound marketing at its finest. Our goals might include nudging a few potential customers toward conversion, but the way we go about that is rarely by talking about ourselves. Instead, it’s about figuring out what the audience wants and needs to learn about and teaching them those things. If you’re doing that well, you’re associating feelings of gratitude and respect with your brand—not to mention authority. All the while, you’re raising the competence of your readers to a point where the products or services you have to offer are more useful to them. Double win.
Types of content that work well during the discovery phase include:
- Blog posts
- Webinars
- Big content (games, tools, long-form content, parallax scrollers)
- Comprehensive guides
- Videos
- Email newsletters
Real-world example: Theo Chocolate
There’s a really fun example of this type of content at a chocolate factory here in Seattle called Theo. They sell chocolate (in a great many varieties), but they’re perhaps better known for their factory tour, during which they teach people about where chocolate comes from, how it’s grown, and how the beans from the odd-shaped cocoa pod are converted into the chocolate bars we all know. Visitors leave feeling like they’ve become relative experts, and from that point forward, they think of the Theo brand as one that not only knows exactly what it’s doing, but is also quite generous with that information and is just as concerned with developing an appreciation for chocolate as it is with simply selling it (it doesn’t hurt that they’re also quite generous with samples). Those feelings go quite a long way toward creating the brand loyalty we’re all striving for.
To take the same concept and bring it a bit closer to home, most of what we publish on the Moz Blog is an example of the same kind of top-of-funnel marketing. We don’t publish blog posts to convince people they should buy our products. We publish them because we want people to level-up their skills and be better marketers. Our hope is that by participating in our community and reading our blog posts, if you ever find yourself in need of tools for your digital marketing efforts, that we’ll be top-of-mind as a reliable choice, just as Theo is top-of-mind for many Seattleites (and now you) when seeking chocolate.
Consideration: The Middle of the Funnel
Goal: Direct customer acquisition
Tactic: Solutions to use-case challenges
In the consideration phase, a consumer starts to associate you with the solution you offer. This is the time when you want to supply them with content that helps them evaluate you and your products. At this stage, we’re speaking directly to the people we think our business can help and making sure they know how we can help them. Remember that they may not yet trust you, so don’t put on your sales hat just yet. Instead, consideration content is a great opportunity to make sure it’s easy for your visitor to browse all the information that might help them differentiate you from your competitors.
At this stage people will be looking for:
- Case studies
- How-to content that showcases your products
- Demo videos
- Product descriptions and data sheets
One of the most effective ways to do this is by illustrating use cases that solve our customers’ problems. Here at Moz, we have a series of short video lessons we call Moz Academy, where we show folks how they can use a Moz Pro subscription to tackle specific tasks like improving their search engine rankings and competitive analysis.
Real-world example: Toll House Cookies
There are all sorts of other examples of this. When Nestlé made its famous cookie recipe publicly available, they made sure to specify the all-important bag of Toll House chocolate chips. The recipe wasn’t salesy, but it did encourage those who used it to buy that company’s product (even if only to get the recipe printed on the bag).
Keep in mind, though, that middle-of-the-funnel content usually doesn’t focus directly on what you’re selling. It uses what you’re selling as a means to some other end, whether that end be higher search engine rankings or a batch of delicious cookies.
Conversion: The Bottom of the Funnel
Goal: Transactions with customers
Tactic: Product descriptions and unique value propositions
Finally! All the courting is done and your visitors are ready to turn into customers. Depending on your brand’s style (if you’ve found that the hard sell works well for your audience), this is where you’d make that final direct pitch.
The narrowest part of the funnel is the point of transaction (or conversion). At this point, we know that folks remaining in the funnel are interested in what we have to offer; we’re just trying to convince them we’re worth them pulling the trigger.
Be ready to wow those people in the final moments before they finally decide to commit to your products with:
- Testimonials
- Reviews
- A streamlined, comprehensible, and trustworthy sales process
This type of content is more straightforward. It can involve things like clear descriptions of your products that outline the unique value they provide to customers. It could include charts that compare your various products to one another or to those of other companies. Bottom-of-the-funnel content is the sales material of content marketing.
Real-world example: Amazon.com
Take Amazon.com, for example. It used to feel revolutionary when we put our books and CDs in their “cart.” These days, if you’ve enabled 1-Click Ordering, you engage in one of the most seamless ordering processes out there. There’s not a lot of content in the course of ordering, but that’s the whole point—they’ve taken concision (of both words and process) to a whole new level, and we’d be shocked if their sales didn’t reflect that.
Retention: Beyond the Funnel
Goal: Retention of existing customers; advocacy
Tactic: Help, support, and onboarding
Once you’ve got those customers, your goal is to keep ’em. Content marketing is part of that process too. At this point, we’re focused on retention—turning one-time buyers into repeat customers (or, for companies with a subscription model, making sure customers continue their subscriptions instead of canceling).
Think about all the content that’s generated in the following forms and how your retention would tank without it:
- Customer support and help documentation
- Special offers
- Insider how-tos
- Email outreach and follow-up
- Effective product UX
Real-world examples: Tumblr and Boden
One example of brilliant onboarding materials as a retention tactic is Tumblr, the popular blogging platform. Known for its smooth signup and onboarding experience, we can all learn from their new user slide deck as seen at User Onboarding.
Another retention play using content is the way British clothier Boden uses even their shipping confirmation emails and packaging as chances to spread delight (and build customer loyalty):
As you can see, each stage requires a different approach. Just like you’re more likely to post different versions of your message on Twitter and Facebook (to relate to the native audience and conform to the culture of the medium), be sure to use the right form of content marketing at the right stage of your process.
Whatever stage of the funnel you’re creating content for, the key is to figure out who you’re talking to and what they might need to hear before you say anything
