Content is a powerful tool for building your revenue. Great content can make all the difference in your marketing campaigns. It can save ugly designs and help you recover from badly targeted traffic.
But, what effect does it have on your marketing funnels and how can you really use it to bring in new prospects?
Why is content important?
In other posts, we spend a lot of time talking about how content can help you target your marketing campaigns to specific groups of people, generate traffic, build trust and timely nurture prospects into becoming full-blown clients with huge projects for your consultancy.
The marketing funnel
The marketing funnel is an extension of your sales funnel. We look at the stages of awareness someone has of your business and how we can move them through those stages in a systematic process. By putting the process in stages, we can think about how to successfully move someone through the process in a timely fashion, collecting their data all the time and using their movement through the funnel as a smart predictor of their growth as a prospective lead.
Content and The Funnel
The Right Content Attracts
Content gives people a reason to come to your site. They aren’t looking at your site because it is pretty or some other fancy reason. They are looking at your site because it either answers a question that they have or they think you would be a good fit to solve a problem they have. Content is the reason people come to your site. It moves people from the first step of the funnel to the second.
Great content gets shared and build your presence online. Social media will send you a frenzy of traffic in the short term and long term search engine optimisation will continue to expose you to a new audience that expands with every fresh piece of content that is targeted towards them.
The Right Content Positions You Well
Content tells people what you know. You know what you write about and you help the type of people your content appeals to. Your content helps you appeal to the right group of people and positions you in the market as an expert in a particular problem, a problem that your content helps visitors solve. Quality, value-producing, content sets you up as the expert and the go-to resource on solving the problem in your visitor’s mind so when they run out of resources or time – you’re the one they come to because you positioned yourself as the expert in a topic and a problem for a specific group of people. Who else are they going to go to for help?
Your headlines, copywriting, article items, case studies and blog posts make it all very clear who you work with and the value you can provide to your prospects. By focusing on, refining and targeting effectively with the right content, you can make it very clear the types of audience that you do and do not work with.
The Right Content Converts
As content attracts people to your site and positions you as an expert in your chosen field, it also helps you get that final push and converts a prospect into a lead. Who can resist working with an expert that is guaranteed to solve the problem users have? One that is so good at what they do that they actively teach others how to do and go about their work. Content reduces risk in the eyes of your prospects so they know their investment in your services is a safe bet. They will see a return in their investment specially when they compare you to other competitors that haven’t established a true position in the market.
The quality of the content you produce and the value it provides can drive sign-ups to your email list, and when they sign up, they give you permission to market to them directly. You can use their data to build profiles of potential customers that are interested in you, and give you leads to reach out to. These are people you can contact again in your marketing funnel, and stay at the top of their minds with each successive contact you make. If you do the marketing funnel right, you build a growing rapport with these potential customers.
The Right Content Builds Trust
Content provides a multiple touch sales situation without any extra effort from you. Every encounter that a prospect has with your brand that provides them value and is professional will build their level of trust in you in that you know what you are talking about and can do the job they are looking for. That you are a low risk, safe and able to really help them hit their goals and solve their problems.
Email and other permission-based marketing forms are a great opportunity to get in contact with your customers again and again to help them solve more problems and further build your brand’s equity with them.
The Right Content Closes
In the end, content is what will finally get you over the line with your prospect – they’ve been through your funnel, maybe they need a final push to get there. But your content has helped you build a relationship, they know what to expect when they work with you and how you are going to solve their problem. Now your sales process is easy, you’ll never had a more pre-warmed prospect.
Conclusion
Content is the albatross of the web, it is by far the hardest thing to design, the hardest thing to asses and the hardest thing to execute. Focusing on content can revolutionise your online marketing and dramatically reduce your sales time.
Content is complicated – let us know how you are approaching content at your company. Reply in the comments with your hardest content questions and problems, we’ll try and answer them for you.
