🕵🏻‍♂️Full-funnel content strategy

Apr 13, 2022 1:38 pm

In recent years, marketers have made great strides with content marketing and, as a result, they’re able to better communicate with their audiences and generate more revenue.

Here's some data points from Content Marketing Institute:

87% of marketers create content for different customer journey stages;
86% of B2B marketers say their companies are using content marketing, and 70% are creating more content than they did a year ago;
88% of B2B marketers are dedicated to creating "more engaging and higher quality content" - or at least have plans to do so in the coming months.

But despite high adoption rates and a willingness to leverage content marketing, not all marketers feel their content efforts are as effective as they could be.

One of the main challenges they face is the lack of an appropriate and effective strategy.

In this newsletter, we'll share some tips for crafting a content strategy that delivers results.

Here’s what you’ll learn:

⚡️How to identify what content you should publish to generate demand for your products;

⚡️Gated content Vs. Ungated content;

⚡️How to attract the attention of your target market to your content

Before we dive into it, here are some listings from our job board that might interest you or someone around you.

TRENCHES JOB BOARD

COMPLIANCE POINT IS HIRING A CONTENT MARKETING MANAGER

Job responsibilities:

Facilitate ongoing content planning and manage day-to-day content creation;
Coordinate with subject matter experts, freelance writers, graphic designers, and internal team members to create, edit, and review all content to ensure consistent messaging and branding;
Build and execute an effective editorial calendar by staying up to date with customer challenges and the latest industry news and trends

Learn more about this offer and apply here.

TYK IS HIRING A HEAD OF BRAND EXPERIENCE

This role should make Tyk famous. How?

By creating creative and compelling brand messaging, campaigns, events, and activities all year round;
By ensuring Tyk is seen as a thought leader in core spaces
Develop supportive and strategic relationships with tech influencers, national/international broadsheet media titles, relevant industry bodies (CNCF, OAS, GraphQL Foundation, etc), analysts (Gartner, Forrester, etc)

Learn more about this role and apply here.

Now, let's get to the meat of the matter.

How to identify what content you should publish to generate demand for your products?

The first step is to clearly define what you want that piece of content to achieve. In other words, understand why you should create it and why people would want to engage with it.

Marketing experts define 3 main stages of the funnel:

TOFU (top of the funnel) attracts attention;
MOFU (middle of the funnel) generates leads; and
BOFU (bottom of the funnel) drives payments.

At each stage, the user intent is different and your content should also pursue different goals. So, in order to help your audience convert to buyers, you need to create and implement content for each stage of the buyer's journey (from brand awareness to purchase decision).

The critical question you need to answer as a marketer is what content will meet the informational needs of your potential customers at a specific stage.

Your content strategy should align with your go-to-market strategy, the buyer’s journey, and your company's specific goals. Figure out where your prospects are in their buying process, what questions they are searching for, what answers they want to get, and what kind of education they are looking for.

GATED VS UNGATED CONTENT

There are still a lot of B2B audiences who want to download white papers. So, gate whatever you're able to.

In some industries like B2B e-commerce, logistics, or human resources and benefits, gated content still works pretty well.

But what should you gate?

Gate information that are completely novel (data for example).

Let’s say you did a study of 10,000 customers and learned X or Y. You can stitch that together into an e-book that you gate.

Also, you can gate free templates or formulas that save the reader from having to do something from scratch. In other words, pieces of content that pretty objectively save the reader time, energy, and brainpower.

But overall, the problem is not in gating the content per se. The problem is what you are doing with the contacts that download the gated content.

Usually, there is no correlation between the intent of downloading the template and the buying intent. And that’s where marketers get it wrong.

The fact that a contact downloaded one of your ebooks does not imply that they are necessarily interested in buying your products or services. So, do your homework before you start pestering them with sales emails.

How to attract the attention of your target market to your content?

Let's pretend that we are operating in a non-marketing or non-sales space. Let's take the example of some conservative industries like finance, engineering, or real estate.

Generally, what companies do is they just share their recent articles on their social media page and occasionally their marketers will share the link on their personal accounts, and that’s the end of it.

Unfortunately, that approach usually results in little to no engagement.

That said, the first thing you want to do is to look at where most of your target audience already frequents. Literally, that's where SparkToro can be really helpful.

You can run searches based on what your target audience frequently talks about, the words they use in their profile, the social accounts they follow, the websites they visit, the podcasts they listen to, etc.

Once you have an overall picture of where your audience is and what they are already doing, it becomes easier to optimize your message for that platform and cut grab their attention.

NOTE: This podcast has been condensed and edited for clarity. You can watch the full interview here with Amanda Natividad.

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Check the agenda of the event here.

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Adechina D. Odjo,

Content Editor @Trenches

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