Build Your Sales Funnel With These Pivotal Content Marketing Strategies

Written by Susan J. Owens@plumbline1tweet9 years ago

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The key to capturing the interests of prospects, while sustaining the mindshare of your current customers, is highly dependent upon your ability to supply information that meets them with information and answers.

Through a steady supply of searchable online content, you’ll need to prove, over and over again, that you are a worthy business partner, precisely because of your unique understanding of their specific business challenges. Here are three vital questions to help you refine and sharpen the focus of the content you produce.

What Are The Hot Topics?

You may assume you know what your customer wants to know, but the data may reveal something far different. By looking into topic streams on social media, Google trends, or your own page stats, you can discover the very words your prospects are searching, the conversations they’re having and what they are reading.

Look at your own published content to see which articles generate the most likes, and which ones seem to draw people to your site. Now you can look for gaps in the content you have published. What questions are still left unanswered that you could provide with future content? What can you add to the conversation to encourage prospects to go to you for more insight? Remember, the essential element of SEO lies in your ability to provide relevant solutions in the content you publish.

Is Your Current Content Hurting You?

Outdated content makes you look simply — outdated. The same analytical research tools used above can reveal topics that have minimal engagement and interest. Look at your own content analytics for pages that have no activity – this, too, is strategic information that can help you reinvest your efforts into more lucrative topics.

Continuously shape and modify your future content pipeline to create new stories that are treasured and valued. Specifically, how can you create content that will actively help your prospects solve the problems they have right now?

Have I Supported The Sales Cycle?

Do you have content that feeds the curiosity of a web surfer, to help convert them to a prospect, and ultimately through the sales cycle? As a customer moves from initial interest, to prospect, to customer, the types of information the customer searches for will change, as they move into deeper questions and issues. Have you provided the answers to those questions at each stage of the sales cycle? Ideally, you should be providing a balanced mix of content that includes informational gateways, case histories, strategic advantages, problem-solving and innovative uses of your product.

Looking for gaps in your content marketing arsenal will help you identify where to invest in creating future content. Look at your current sales pipeline and ask these questions:

• Do we have an abundance of content marketing pieces that attract new prospects?

• Are we lacking content that would help current customers re-invest?

• Are we doing a good job of explaining how our solution solves problems?

• Is it time to invest in developing more customer success stories based on our growing list of satisfied customers? Never underestimate the power of case histories at each stage of the sales cycle.

When viewed as a system, this information can help you build a balanced content marketing supply that meets all the critical stages of your sales cycle, and ensures your prospect and customers have a reason to align their business with yours.

What Does This Mean for My Business?

You have much to gain from using online content marketing to help you build customers, create engagement with your market and retain current customers. Using the questions above, combined with research and analytics, you can create a targeted content marketing pipeline that will keep your sales funnel full.

Susan J. Owens is an personal and product branding specialist. You can find here: Plumbline1.com