THE SALES FUNN
In order to really understand and appreciate the modern blogging sales funnel, you must first understand what the modern sales funnel looks like in which will be explained below.
Traditionally speaking, a sales funnel is pretty simple if you follow the AIDA model of: Attention, Interest, Decision, and Action.
The goal of marketing was to drive people in through this funnel until they finally made a sale. At every stage, you, the marketer, would have to be providing prospects and leads with a reason to continue going down the funnel.
While there are many variations of this funnel, and you can certainly add in more steps along the way if you require more time to nurture a lead, it all basically ends in a single sale. Once someone has made a purchase, they are out of the funnel.
However, today, a sales funnel now looks more like this: Potential customers, first purchase, repeat customers.
As you can see, the sales funnel itself has expanded; there is now a distinct front-end and back-end.
Jokes involving Sir Mix-a-Lot aside, businesses and marketers alike have all come to the realization that a customer’s journey doesn’t end once they’ve made a purchase.
In actuality, if nurtured properly a customer can become a repeat or lifelong customer and can be encouraged to continue purchasing more products for the foreseeable future. The initial offering now being viewed as a primer to encourage customers to purchase more.
What used to be the endpoint with a single sale and offering is now the middle of a funnel, which continues to push customers down to the back-end where more profits can be made.
For example, the majority of profits made from selling a Barbie doll isn’t from the sale of the doll itself, but of it’s accompanying accessories which can be purchased separately.
With that in mind, here’s how the sales funnel relates to content marketing.
A brief history of content marketing
Content Marketing 1.0
Once upon a time, content marketing was very simple. You would spend a few days working on a killer article that would be so well-researched and in-depth that everyone would be referencing it; to the point where achieving the number 1 spot on Google would almost be a given.
Back then, the primary focus of content marketing at the time was all about exposure.
Content marketing was just another way to get people aware of your brand and your business by establishing yourself as an authority in the niche.
SEO-wise, it was much easier in 2011 and 2012 to rank on Google than it is now. The rules were simple: as long as you could consistently put out content that people enjoyed, as well as get that content in front of the right people, then your audience would naturally gravitate towards visiting your website.
The goal was simply to have as many people visit your site as possible, and hope that they would stay on the site long enough to purchase something on offer. Or, if you didn’t happen to have your own business, to continue establishing your level of influence and authority in order to make money off of affiliate sales or ad revenue.
Content Marketing 2.0
Until, of course, the arrival of what I like to call “Content Marketing 2.0”.
At some point, brands like Digital Marketer began creating and utilizing content for more than just exposure. They began creating specific pieces of content in order to sell products.
The most basic form of this was to create a popular piece of content and to add a strong CTA either throughout or at the end of that piece. The distance between awareness and purchasing shortened as more content marketers began to understand that their content could be used to generate awareness and nurture leads at the same time.
Soon, different types of content began gaining traction, as well as the different channels where you could market that content. Storytelling soon became an integral part of content marketing, and brands began sharing all types of content across all forms of social media.
Infographics briefly supplanted blogs as the go-to form of content, and content marketers around the world began exploring different ways to make their content more strategic and niche in order to stand out from the increasingly crowded market.
Which brings us to today.
Content Marketing 3.0
No longer is content marketing relegated to specific stages of the sales funnel. In order to effectively take advantage of the modern sales funnel, you need to be able to be able to create pieces of content for each stage of the funnel.
That means making sure that for every stage of the funnel you have something to present a customer or lead- at any given time. This is done in order to continuously provide value to the customer, further establish your authority, and prime them for the next purchase.
With the basic blogging sales funnel looking like this:
Content marketing these days has shifted from having to aim for wide appeal in order to generate as much awareness as possible, to becoming as personalized as possible. Content marketing no longer ends with one piece of content, with many marketers using a multi-channel approach.
It’s now commonplace to find content marketers leveraging everything from articles, to eBooks, to emails in order to continue pushing people down the sales funnel.
Content marketing 3.0 is all about being hyper-focused on the customer and leveraging all the technology available to achieve that goal.
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Part 2 stay tuned
BRYAN G.
