4 Compelling Content Types to Attract Customers to the Top of Your Sales Funnel

Your content marketing strategy will play a key role in attracting new customers into your business.  As you create and distribute quality content that resonates with your target audience, you will greatly enhance your brands presence online, boosting your follower engagement, generating traffic to your site and leads into your funnel.  However, to be effective in your content strategy, the key is ensuring that the types of content you use is conducive for this stage at the top of the sales funnel.

You see, at this level of the funnel (also known as the Awareness Stage), your prospects are aware that they have a problem yet are unsure of the solution…so they begin researching.  They are seeking information that will help them to better understand their issue and get an answer to resolve it.  The goal is for you to show up as the solution using the ideal content type that best serves this new audience.

Understanding Your Target Audience

Before unveiling the various content types to attract new customers into your sales funnel, is important to have a clear understanding of your audience and their pain points.  The primary objective is to create content that speaks to your market, engages them, solves their problems and moves them to action. Being clear on your market is the only way to make this happen!

Forming buyer personas is the optimal strategy because you’re essentially painting a picture of exactly what your ideal customer looks like based on the types of customers your business has and desires. Establishing these personas allows you to foster deeper relationships and connections with your audience because you’ll be able to speak directly to them, making your content impactful and engaging.

Here are four types of content to attract new customers to the top of your sales funnel along with specific techniques to implementing these strategies into your online marketing.

Attracting New Customers – 4 Types of Content to Attract at the Top of the Sales Funnel

#1 Blog Content

The best way to attract new clients into your sales funnel is through engaging content that speaks to the problems and issues of your audience using your blog.

Blogging is at the heart of any successful inbound marketing strategy and is a key tactic to increasing brand exposure, being found in the search engines, growing your leads list, and boosting revenue.  In fact, small businesses that blog get 126% more lead growth that those that don’t and are 13 times more likely to drive positive ROI than those who don’t.  Your blog is worth the time investment you put into it!

The beauty about blogging is that you can optimize your content for SEO to increase visibility in the search results.  Being that search engines is still the #1 source for content traffic generation, here are a few techniques you can implement in your blog content to increase SEO ranking:

1. Value-rich content always wins! Remain in tuned with your buyer personas to create content that best resonates with them…you’ll be amazed at new ideas generated just from audience feedback
2. Do proper keyword research on your audience, focusing on long-tail keywords
3. Publish long-form content with 2000+ words. Search engines are looking for quality content that engages the readers thus giving it preference in the SERP.  Plus, the longer visitors stay on your page, the better this helps with SEO ranking
4. Incorporate outbound links within your content. Studies shows that this has a positive effect on SEO and also builds your credibility as you link to other reputable sites

#2 Video Marketing

Video content is one of the most effective strategies for boosting engagement and increasing sales conversions.  Consumers are 85% more likely to buy after watching a product video (Source: Entrepreneur).  It allows your audience to connect deeper with your business when they see a face with your brand.

The goal with creating videos for the top of the sales funnel stage is to present your content as the solution.  You want to educate your new audience by either showing them how to solve their problems themselves or illustrating how your products and services can solve their problems with ease.  Even if you’re not offering your products in these videos, you’re still delivering value which positions your brand as the “go-to” source. 

Check out these video content ideas that appeals to this stage in the funnel:

1. FAQ videos: Think about those commonly asked questions you receive on a regular basis…post a video for each of these inquiries using keywords in your title, description, and tags
2. How-to videos: Demonstrations that solve their problems are highly effective with video

Be sure to keep your videos short and to the point.  You only have 8 seconds to grab their attention, so capture it quickly and offer the solution!

 

#3 Social Media Promotion

Social media networks are powerful channels for businesses to promote and deliver content that creates buzz around their brand.  Eighty-three percent of marketers indicate that social media is important for the business (Source: Hubspot).  More and more companies see the value in these platforms and are leveraging social to attract new customers into their sales funnel.

The following offers key strategies to attracting new customers from your social media platforms:

1. Use infographics: Infographics do extremely well on social media, being liked and shared 3 times more on these social platforms than any other type of content.  Take your long-form blog post and hire a graphic designer from Fiverr.com to convert your content into an infographic to be shared on your social media sites.
2. Visual content ROCKS on social media! Create visuals that complement your blog and use these images to promote your blog content on sites like Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, and Twitter. Blog articles with images get 94% more views so ramp up your visual strategy. Be sure to link your blog post to these images
3. Always include relevant and branded hashtags on all your social media post to increase reach and exposure
4. Use social media management tools like Buffer or Hootsuite that not only helps you manage and be more effective in your marketing, it also provides analytical data to help improve engagement and exposure of your posts

Quick tip with using infographics: Be sure to do a separate blog post strictly for your infographic.  Signal relevancy of this visual to the search engines by using keywords for your image file name, alt tag, title, description, and captions…bolstering its chances of being found in the image search results!

#4 Email Marketing

The ultimate goal to attracting new customers to your content is to generate a new lead onto your email list.  Email marketing is a key component in this stage because your fresh leads are still in the research phase of solving their problem, therefore, you can deliver content that continues to offer solutions and info that would interest them. 

Here are a several approaches on how you can utilize email marketing as a content type at the top of the sales funnel:

1. Use nurturing tactics that effectively inform prospects of what you have to offer. Share email content like infograhics, blog posts and whitepapers to cultivate your list and boost engagement
2. Practice email segmentation where you divide and zero in on your new your new leads to feed content relevant to where they are in your sales funnel
3. Remember to give the call-to-action in each of your email messages. It can be as simple as telling your subscribers to share the content or click on a link.  Either way, give clear instructions to promote engagement.  By the way, email subscribers are 3 times more likely to share your content via social media than visitors from other sources…so giving the CTA of sharing your email might not be a bad idea!

Conclusion

Implementing these key content types into your marketing along with the suggested tactics will enhance your inbound strategy, boost follower engagement and increase traffic to your site…all key ingredients to attracting and retaining customers into your business.  As always, if you have any questions please contact me. I wish you all the best.