How to Create Marketing Funnel Content to Target Your Audience Effectively

With an effective content marketing funnel, a business can see closing rates that are six times higher than the industry average.

That means higher ROI and retention rates all thanks to tailored content delivered at the right time.

Understanding each stage of the marketing funnel, how to align it and its content creation to the customer journey, and tailoring your strategies appropriately, are the keys to driving higher returns on your marketing efforts.

In this article, we’ll look at how to do just that so your business can improve its ROI.

Understanding the Marketing Funnel

What is funnel marketing?

A digital marketing funnel symbolises the customer journey from learning about a product to ultimately making a purchase. It is typically split into three stages:

Awareness (TOFU: Top of the funnel): This raises brand awareness. Content should be informative, engaging and broad. You’re casting a wide net and seeing how many fish can be brought into it, before picking out the most valuable.

Consideration (MOFU: Middle of the funnel): At this stage, a customer is already aware of your product. Now they’re actively seeking information to make an informed decision. Content should be educational and product-specific. You’ve reeled the fish in, now show it why it was right to bite.

Conversion (BOFU: Bottom of the funnel): The final stage, where a customer is ready to buy. At this point, you’re looking to nudge them into the right decision by highlighting your products’ unique selling points. The fish is reeled in, happy, and ready to jump straight into your bucket.

Using this structure, a business can tailor its content marketing strategy to each stage, guiding the customer through the funnel.

By meeting the customer where they’re at in their journey, with relevant information and help, businesses increase engagement and the overall likelihood of conversion.

(We’re also done with the fish metaphors now. Promise.)

How to plan marketing funnel content

The most important part of marketing funnel content is understanding how it relates to each stage. Aligning with this tightens up a business’s overall approach, meaning resources aren’t used inefficiently, at the wrong times.

Again, meet the customer where they’re at.

This is achieved by creating a solid content calendar and strategy that utilises SEO and industry knowledge to tackle the key pain points customers are looking to solve.

The Challenges of Funnel Marketing

A lot of businesses neglect funnel marketing, despite its effectiveness. This is often due to one or two simple reasons, like:

• Lack of resources: not enough in-house staff to produce the variety of valuable content needed, and continually update and manage it.
• Inability to maintain consistency in their efforts: This comes back to a lack of resources or ability to dedicate the relevant time to producing new content.
• Difficulty in content strategy development: Building a cohesive strategy that relates to each part of the funnel takes time and expertise. Businesses may struggle to align their funnel with the content available.

That’s why many businesses choose to outsource this major part of their business; usually to great effect. With this task taken off their hands and handled by experts in developing content strategies, they can focus on other ways to build their business.

Creating Content for the Awareness Stage

At the awareness stage, potential leads haven’t even necessarily heard of your product yet. They might not even be looking for a product at all right now.

This is particularly true of B2B sales, where the marketing funnel and journey to eventual conversion has a much longer life cycle that can take over a year to come to fruition.

TOFU Content Types for the Awareness Stage

The primary objective at this stage is to become their go-to place for industry knowledge and educational content. Then, when they’re thinking of products, the website that regularly provides invaluable content will be at the forefront of their minds.

Good content marketing types to achieve this include:

• Blog posts: Informative articles addressing the industry’s biggest questions, issues, and trends.
• Social media marketing: Short, snappy, engaging content that reaches a wide audience.
• Infographics: Breakdowns of big stats or information into easily digestible, and easily shareable, chunks.
• Videos: For visual learners, introduce your brand and its benefits, or quickly and simply break down complex industry topics.

Once you have the content, it needs to be used effectively to generate leads.

How to Write Awareness Content

Good content must be engaging, with eye-catching headlines encouraging readers to click through. One of the best practices is to ensure any content written follows the E-E-A-T framework. That means displaying experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness
through active, convincing language and providing real-world solutions to common pain points.

This has a two-fold purpose: it draws in readers looking for solutions, while appealing to Google’s Helpful Content Update, meaning your content is likely to rank higher. This is a must, especially at the awareness stage of the sales funnel.

The Importance of SEO in Attracting Leads

At the awareness stage, one of the most common ways leads will visit your site is via organic search. That means having a solid SEO strategy with in-depth keyword research that the content plan is built off the back of.

Good SEO is one of the most important things a B2B business can do and is responsible for generating 34% of qualified leads.

Make sure each piece has an SEO goal; a primary keyword and secondary keywords that inform H2s, meta descriptions, and alt text on images throughout the article.

This is exactly what B2B water tech company Veolia did, and they saw a 128% increase in organic traffic, year-on-year.

Creating Content for the Consideration Stage

At the consideration stage, content turns to highlighting your product and proving how it effectively addresses the customer’s needs.

That means showcasing its superiority over similar products with content that provides real-life examples of its use.

B2B buyers spend a significant portion of their decision-making process conducting independent research online, highlighting the importance of providing relevant content at this stage.

MOFU Content Types for the Consideration Stage

The primary objective at the consideration stage is to provide deeper insights into the product and industry with detailed information that helps a potential customer evaluate their options.

At this point, the content focus should be on establishing credibility and demonstrating the product or service’s value.

To achieve this, use a mixture of content types:

• Whitepapers: Reports that have detailed analysis and insights on industry trends, showcasing expertise and authoritativeness. Bonus: you can use this as gated content to collect more information on your leads.
• eBooks: Similar to whitepapers, but usually shorter, snappier and designed to be more accessible. This content type might cover multiple aspects of an industry topic, rather than deep diving into a particular issue.
• Case studies: The best example of “show, don’t tell” content. Use real-life examples of how your product or service has solved a problem for other customers.
• Comparison guides: Articles directly comparing competitor products to your own, showing where yours succeeds and where the others fail.
• Webinars: Live or recorded sessions that show visual explanations and step-by-step processes to effectively deal with an industry process. If live, this is also an invaluable opportunity to engage directly with leads, building that relationship.

How to Use Consideration Content to Nurture Leads

The consideration stage often opens up the dialogue between the business and the lead. It’s a good opportunity to offer resources and insights and get something in return – like an email address.

The most effective way to do this is by offering gated content. In return for access to whitepapers or eBooks, ask leads to enter their email address. That way they receive an instantly accessible download they can save in their inbox, while you can then put them into email funnels for future nurturing.

The Importance of Email Marketing in Nurturing Leads

Businesses that use email marketing have extra opportunities to engage directly with, and nurture, its leads.

The more tailored and relevant these are through segmentation and personalisation, the more effective they become.

If an email speaks directly to you, about a pain point you’ve experienced, you’re far more likely to open it and engage with its content. So, by personally addressing leads and tailoring content to their specific interests and behaviours, businesses are building trust.

Marketing automation and drip campaigns also facilitate this. By building out an email sequence, businesses ensure there are timely, appropriate gaps between content. Plus, they can adjust the deliverables based on a lead’s previous actions, like clicking a link or downloading a resource.

Creating Content for the Conversion Stage

At the consideration stage, leads are at a point where they are ready to make a decision. This is the last step in showing them why that choice should be yours. The most effective way to do this is through direct displays of the product or service.

BOFU Content Types for the Conversion Stage

• Landing pages: Pages that are designed with a single focus, and to appeal to a specific buyer persona. They offer clear call-to-actions, and targeted information to prompt a conversion.
• Product demonstrations: Highlight the unique offerings of your product and its ease of use through online demos.
• Free trials: Allow limited access to the product or service, so that the customer can play around themselves and get a feel for your tools.
• Interactive tools: Offer one of a product’s interactive tools for free. For example, if you were a B2B govtech company, you could offer access to a budget simulator tool for free as a sample of the tech the business uses.

How to Guide Customers During the Conversion Stage

The offerings available at the conversion stage of the content funnel need to be geared toward one purpose: making a sale.

Provide easy paths to purchase, with clear call-to-actions that encourage users to take the final step. A mixture of easily accessible content, alongside free tools and demonstrations, builds the relationship and nurtures the lead.

The closer attention paid to them, the more likely they are to convert – and convert in a much bigger way. Nurtured leads make 47% larger purchases than those who aren’t, so the work of the content and individuals in the sales team is paramount in this final push.

The Importance of Active Language for A Successful Conversion

Active language drives action and engagement, creating a sense of urgency and encouraging immediate response. This makes it more effective during the conversion stage in compelling the reader to feel like they have to act now or miss out.

Coupled with a limited-time offer, this technique effectively encourages a lead to take the final step.

Measuring and Optimising Your Marketing Content Funnel

At each stage of the content marketing funnel, businesses need to track and analyse its metrics to see what’s working and what isn’t.

By understanding which pieces of content resonate with your audience and drive them further down the funnel, you can make informed decisions that enhance your overall strategy. The key metrics to track for content marketing differ depending on the funnel stage:

Awareness Stage

• Traffic
• Engagement
• Clickthroughs

Consideration Stage

• Download rates
• Page views
• Bounce rates/Time on page

Conversion Stage

• Conversion rate
• Cost-per-acquisition
• ROI

Using a mixture of analytics tools and cumulative dashboards, these metrics should be tracked so content can be continually optimised.

Using A/B tests can determine what headlines and language best resonate with the target audience. This further refines and strengthens your content marketing funnel, putting your business a step above competitors who neglect this important marketing technique.

Maximising the Impact of Your Marketing Funnel Content

To sum up, tailoring content to each stage of the content funnel is a key way to improve ROI, and retention and increase upsell rates.
By meeting the customer where they’re at in their journey, you can provide the relevant information they need to guide them through the process, continually monitoring success rates.

Marketing funnels require constant care and nurturing. If you need support in building and maintaining your content strategy, Common Ground can do just that, and increase your results at the same time.