What Is The Content Marketing Funnel? – Search Engine Journal
You’ve identified your target prospective customers, are consistent with your content creation, and leverage different content types to promote your product or service. Your content strategy seems solid enough then, right?
The truth is, your content marketing efforts can, and should, always be evolving.
Just as marketing strategy best practices shift and adapt to current consumer behavior trends, so too should content marketing.
Your sales team has likely already mapped out a sales funnel to better understand what your target audience is thinking and doing at each stage of the purchasing journey.
You, too, can create a content marketing funnel to guide your ideal customers from the awareness stage to the conversion stage where they become actual customers.
In this post, we’ll explore what exactly a content marketing funnel is, how to create a successful content marketing funnel that converts, and the types of content pieces to include in each stage of the funnel.
What Is A Content Marketing Funnel?
A content marketing funnel enables content marketers to visualize how to leverage existing content to attract potential customers and guide them through their journey until they reach the end goal.
This end goal may include a sale, a demo, a download, or another type of conversion.
Each stage of the funnel provides a purpose, such as attracting attention, generating high-quality leads, and closing conversions.
A marketing funnel can provide brands with greater visibility into where they may have content gaps along the customer journey.
For example, if a brand has a considerable amount of content aimed at buyers in the awareness stage but not enough content in the decision stage, they may want to shift their efforts to creating more bottom-funnel content.
How To Start Mapping Your Content Funnel
You’ll first want to assess your current content inventory, including every type of content you produce, whether that be blog content, long-form content (such as ebooks or white papers), and more.
When reviewing each piece of content, you’ll then want to assign what stage of the buyer journey the content aligns with. These stages will include:
- Top of the funnel (TOFU): Awareness stage. In this stage, potential customers are searching for information.
- Middle of the funnel (MOFU): Interest and consideration stage. In these stages, potential customers are looking at your products or services and reading customer reviews. They may also present this information to key stakeholders.
- Bottom of the funnel (BOFU): Intent, evaluation, and conversion stage. Buyers are ready to move forward with their purchasing decision.
As you can see by examining each stage individually, your target audience needs diverse pieces of content depending on where they are at.
Your funnel content can’t adopt a one-size-fits-all approach, or you …….
