Boost your business with content marketing

Quick tips on creating the marketing funnel

Content marketing answers the one question that every visitor to your website asks? ‘What’s in it for me’. Most businesses fail to understand this essential requirement, and talk about themselves instead. The ‘i, me, myself’ mode that you see on the websites of companies has exactly the opposite effect on the potential patrons. They move on to other websites that showcase ‘value’. Therefore, a content that converts is one that not only creates awareness about the problem that the customer is facing, but also offers various solutions that could endear them to you. 

Statistics will tell you that a person needs to interact with a brand at least five times before they decide to engage with the firm. Therefore, showing ads as many times will not work. However, what will work are a series of well-focussed content marketing articles that not only lead the customer into the sales funnel but also get the person to buy the product or service. 

The Content Marketing Funnel

There are three stages to a content marketing funnel. At every stage, the content is beneficial to the end user. 

Awareness

This is a stage where you need to play the role of Yoda, the guide. The website visitor is looking at someone who can guide them on how to overcome the problem they are facing. For example: You could create a free lead magnet, such as a ‘1-page marketing plan’ for startups preparing for a launch, or businesses who want to scale up. Once the visitors trade their email IDs for the freebie, you send out welcome emails every three days to help them with their pain points. Out of every four emails you send, only one should be a direct sales mailer. Everything else should be value-driven content that helps the customer overcome the many issues faced by the subscriber. 

Consideration

After the welcome mailer, you have the leeway to send links, extracts, or complete sections of your blog posts that offer actionable insight. These make your customer value you more. After many such emails loaded with value, the subscriber begins to consider your service or product. Just remember that all your emails should be about 125 words or less as the attention span of people is seven seconds.

Conversion

After three emails that only offered value and zero sales push, you can now send them a direct sales mailer that positions you as the guide who can help them with their pain points. For example: If all your previous mails were about how the visitor can use a range of content ideas, tools, and strategies to promote their business, you can now tell them that you could help them with all of this, so the subscriber can focus on their product or service. You also emphasise that by relying on your company, they can save time, money, and resources. 

Content writing hacks

Long-form content scores over everything else. Anything between 2000 and 4000 words per post is highly recommended for blog posts. Again, this varies with the industry. The best way to find is to key in the topic keyword in the search engine, and look at the average length of the top 10 pieces. That’s the word count you should aim for in your industry segment. The next approach to writing is to ensure that your article is more updated, insightful and comprehensive than the articles on the first page of Google. You want to rank higher or closer to these pieces, and thereby drive more traffic to your blog. 

Formatting rules

Make sure you offer bite-sized information in every blog post by splitting the content into several subheadings using the H2, H3 and H4 formatting tags. Choose the most relevant and captivating image to go with your story and ensure that the visual has the appropriate ALT attribute that works for your firm’s SEO. Make sure you internally link to other blog posts and pages to optimise the site for the search engines. Don’t forget to link to external websites of authoritative sources to justify the claims in the article. This will not only make your piece of content more trustworthy, but also great for SEO. Just make sure you don’t link to pages that are also competing for the same keyword. For example, if you are a content marketer, don’t link to another content marketer. Instead, link to the Pew survey that the content marketer was referring to. 

Best of luck!

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