We use funnel while pouring oil to a can so that oil won’t spill outside the can. In the same manner sales funnel helps you to avoid spilling or losing a prospective customer. With the help of content marketing it is much easier to build an efficient sales funnel (revenue funnel or sales process).
Sales funnel is a tool that helps you understand when and where conversion of a browser to a buyer happens. As in the case of any kind of funnel, the width size decreases as it goes down. At the top you will find more leads, in the middle you will find only a handful of prospects and at the end you will get only a few customers, that too if you are lucky. To put it in perspective, in case you are targeting over 100 people into your sales funnel, not even 50% of them make into your middle or intermediate stage and only less than 5% of them will end up as customers. Of course, this is a generalization, but sales funnel helps companies to understand the sales process and to measure conversion success in each step of the funnel. Having a sales funnel and applying content marketing to it will help you increase that number and you would be able to translate more of your prospects into your customers.
Stages of Sales Funnel
There are three main stages in sales funnel, i.e. Top of the funnel (ToFu), middle of the funnel (MiFu) and bottom of the funnel (BoFu).
The top of funnel, usually consists of anyone who is your target audience or leads. The middle of the funnel are people who have expressed some interest in buying your products and basically are ready to become your customers. The bottom part of the funnel consists of people who have become your customers or are in the final part of becoming your customers.
How content marketing can be integrated into the Sales Funnel?
Content is king and sometimes the kingmaker too! By sharing appropriate content, you can not only bring leads but also convert them to your buyers. In fact, it can be said in no mean terms that content is the most important element in Sales Funnel. Content Marketing can help you reach prospects at all stages of the sales funnel. And also to the people who wish to continue their interactions with your business. Check out the kind of content you need to generate for each stage of sales funnel.
In the Top Stage
This is the ‘awareness’ phase of your sales funnel and so in this stage you need to generate awareness about your products/services among your potential customers. With content marketing
You can create content that will attract new prospects, generate interests, answer questions, dispel confusion and build trust. Since, it is the widest stage, the content doesn’t need to be too in-depth, it can just be entertaining and educational. Blogs posts, webinars, videos, articles, social media, infographics, how-to posts, e-books, etc., work well at this stage.
In the Intermediate Stage
This is the stage where a user starts to connect with you and starts evaluating his/her options. You are directly speaking with the people at this stage and you need to provide content which helps them to analysis your products/services. By providing them the content with all the information that might help them understand your brand, you may be able to sway the customer to buy from you. Good type of content for this stage of the funnel are: Case studies, Demo videos, product descriptions and data sheets.
In the Bottom Stage
Remember at this stage only refined visitors are left there and hopefully they are ready to buy your products/services or they have already bought from you. For those who are still not converted, convince them with testimonials, reviews, free trial emailers, comparison guide, offers, deep product demo, etc. If they have already become your customers, keep in touch with them with newsletter, offers, etc.
Interested to integrate content marketing to your ‘sales funnel’? Get in touch with us now to learn how we can help!
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