What comes to mind when you hear “content marketing for business”? Do you think:
- SEO optimization
- Engaging content
- Building website traffic
Though it’s known to effectively grow your business in all of these ways, there’s so much more to content marketing. It can easily be broken down into a funnel:
Content Marketing Funnel: the Breakdown
When viewers come across one of your articles, hear you in someone else’s podcast or see your writing on another domain, they become aware of your brand. As a result of your engaging and informative content, the viewers interest sparks and they begin to follow you on social media, check out your website and read your articles.
Their desire to know what you can do for them sky-rockets once they have a need for your service. From there, they may read long forms/case studies, scan your ‘About Us’ page or search for testimonials. If they consider your business a good fit for them, they take action that might result in a sale.
If you want more information on the content marketing funnel, watch this video.
Still wondering how the funnel works? We have an example from our own experience. At Full Stadium Marketing, Basecamp and HubSpot are prevalent tools in our day-to-day operations. There are thousands of scheduling, sales and marketing tools out there, so how did we choose one? We bought into their brand. Years ago, our founder read Inbound Content, written by Justin Champion from HubSpot and It Doesn’t Have to be Crazy at Work written by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson from Basecamp.
When it was the right time for FSM to choose a project management tool and time to decide a marketing and sales engine for this business, it’s no coincidence that our founder referred back to the people he has learned from. The information these authors had already shared in their books built up a trustworthy relationship and provoked him to check out their tools before anyone else’s on the market. That’s the power of content marketing.
Let’s go back to the pipeline/funnel. This framework considers everyone in your target audience to ensure that prospective and current clients feel valued. It’s not just for people at the bottom who are considering making a deal. It’s also about the people at the very top who don’t even know your name, yet, and those in the middle who may have heard about you but won’t necessarily need your business until days, weeks, months or even years down the road.
If you’re interested in growing your accounting/financial firm or learning more about the content marketing funnel, you can visit www.fullstadium.co.
