Guide Customers Through the Sales Funnel
Categorized in: B2B Digital Marketing, Content
Understanding the sales funnel is an essential skill because it enables you to convert prospects into paying customers. You need to understand every nuance of the sales funnel and how it all relates to your audience in order to have a chance at increasing your business.
Once you understand the details, you can then determine how to guide prospects through the sales funnel. One of the best ways to do that is through your content. If you combine your understanding of the sales funnel with your content marketing strategy, this is a winning combination. Here’s a look at how you can use content to guide people through the sales funnel in order to increase the amount of new business coming in.
Connecting Content with the Sales Funnel
When setting out to create a content marketing strategy, the typical approach is to brainstorm on topics, especially for articles, that relate to the business or to your industry. However, one thing a lot of businesses don’t realize is that this shouldn’t be arbitrary. Content marketing should be about more than just topics. Extra care and attention should be taken to make sure the topics themselves are connecting with the audience.
What does this really mean? Prospects may not realize it, but if they are connecting with your content, it usually means that you’ve succeeded in moving them through the sales cycle via your pieces. This is something every business should strive to achieve.
Discover the Rhythm of Your Sales Cycle
There are a few basic phases of the sales cycle, and you need to discover your company’s unique rhythm before you can determine how to use content to guide people through it. Here’s a look at how typical sales cycles are comprised:
- Awareness. This phase attracts attention. It gets potential customers to first notice who you are. Activities in this phase include writing content establishing customer pain points, as well as positioning you as an authority.
- Interest. You attracted their attention, now you need to keep it. This is what the “interest” phase is all about. You offer deeper insights, exploring pain points in greater depth, and getting into more detail about your authority.
- Consideration. Prospects in this phase are seriously “considering” buying from you, and content should be positioned to help convince them to do so.
- Decision. Content connecting with the Decision phase of the sales cycle basically connects with prospects that are very close to buying. Often, content in this phase is the one piece of information they need that will help them give a final “yes” or “no”.
Putting the Pieces Together
It doesn’t matter if you have an existing content marketing strategy that you’ve been suing that seems to work pretty well. You can always add this to your strategy. Every content strategy should, at some level, connect with the sales cycle. After all, this is exactly why you’re in business. You want to turn prospects into paying customers.
If you approach content this way, using it to gently guide people through the sales cycle, you’ll be better poised to reach your organizational goals.
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