How to Build an Effective Content Marketing Funnel

You also want more customers, either online or in person; Research made by Semrush Blog explains how you can gently and strategically guide customers towards your online products or your services. As you would expect, different types of content are required to meet different questions and queries at each stage of the buyers’ journey and it is crucial to structure your broader content planning to cover each element.

In the first stage, all you need to do is to grab attention and interest, which will require you more visual overviews and prompts, in the middle stage, you’ll need more informational content in order to feed into the initial interest. 

First, we will clarify what is Content Marketing Funnel and how it works. Basically, the content marketing funnel is a model that helps a brand visualize how to use content successfully in order to attract new clients and guide them through their journey from the very first interaction to conversion into a paying customer. For instance, when analyzing and building a content marketing funnel, we refer to the way we use various types of content to engage and convert users.

Below we will briefly describe the stages of the content marketing funnel:

• Top of the funnel (TOFU): attracts attention

We could describe the top of the funnel as the starting point of the buyer journey, and it’s one of the most populated stages. At this stage, people aren’t yet ready to buy and have probably never heard of your company. Your main goal here is to attract their attention, offer them the best answer to their queries, educate them, and then of course gently introduce them to your brand.

TOFU is usually measured by the following metrics:

• Organic traffic, referral traffic, and total traffic
• Social media engagement (shares, comments, likes)
• Mentions by influencers and media
• On-site engagement metrics (bounce rate, time spent on page)
• Newsletter and social media subscriptions

• Middle of the funnel (MOFU): generates leads

The middle-of-the-funnel stage is where it shows you the number of people interacting with your content shrinks slightly. However, they are more willing to interact with your content given the proper encouragement. Your goal here is to accompany the prospect from an initial idea to an in-depth understanding of how your solution helps. MOFU content is usually measured by the conversion rates and the number of leads. Typically, middle-of-the-funnel content still generates the most traffic from organic searches.

• Bottom of the funnel (BOFU): drives conversions

The finish line is the bottom-of-the-funnel, where content can help position your brand as superior to competitors and also build trust, and of course, accelerate the purchase. The content you create at this stage should answer very specific questions about your product or service (e.g., how it actually works or what skills are required to deal with it). What is most important at this stage, is that you need to do case studies, and create landing and product pages.

The top three content types for the BOFU stage are:

• Product overviews
• Customer reviews
• Success stories

The most important question that you have to answer as a marketer is, what content will satisfy the needs of your potential customers and how it will help them build a relationship with your brand at each stage. Each marketer needs to read carefully all the stages, in order to find out which content is most suitable for each stage. There are multiple ways available to make sure you’re creating the right content for your funnel and maintaining customer interest. It’s just about finding the method that works best for you and your customers.

Covering each aspect will help you drive more conversions, and this guide from the team at SEMRush, based on its own research, could provide some valuable pointers on where you should be looking.

You can read more about the most effective content approaches for each stage of the funnel on the SEMRush blog: https://www.semrush.com/blog/content-marketing-funnel/

Source: Social Media Today & SemRush Blog

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