At the heart of marketing is the sales funnel, which represents the vessel prospects go through until they make a purchase and become customers. The marketer’s job is to facilitate this process by purposefully moving potential buyers through the funnel until they make a positive buying decision. The key to doing this effectively involves distributing the right marketing content to the right audience at the right time.
The buyer’s journey
While there are multiple behaviors that take place in the sales funnel, it boils down to three basic stages:
- Awareness: Prospects know that they have a problem and are looking to get answers to meet their needs. At this stage, the prospect becomes aware that your organization may provide products or services that could offer a solution.
- Evaluation: During this stage, the prospect evaluates potential courses of action including consideration of the competition. For marketers, this stage focuses on developing relationships, creating a corporate distinction and building trust.
- Conversion: In this final stage, prospects take action and become customers. The marketer’s goal is facilitate the sale, convey the wisdom of the buying decision and assure new customers that the company will deliver on its promises.
Content for each stage
To move prospects through the sales funnel, marketers need to deliver appropriate and carefully designed content to satisfy their needs at each of the three stages.
- Awareness: Content at this top-level stage should capture the prospect’s attention, increase awareness of your brand and introduce the prospect to your company. Content may come from your website, blogs, email campaigns, social media updates and e-books.
- Now that you have the prospect’s attention, it’s time to qualify the prospect, demonstrate why your solutions are the best fit, and nurture the relationship. This is the time to showcase your expertise and highlight your competitive advantage with white papers, bylined articles, webinars, product and service descriptions and demonstration videos.
- Conversion: At this point, prospects are ready to buy, and content should be designed to make sure they buy from you. The right content and call to action can have a dramatic effect on boosting conversions. The most effective content includes case studies, customer success stories, testimonials, special offers, product/service guarantees, consultations and live presentations.
Every industry and every company has a unique sales funnel, designed around the buyer’s distinctive sales journey. To understand and create the journey, marketers need to understand their audiences, appreciate their needs and challenges, and develop a strategy that delivers relevant content specific to each phase. To learn more about how to develop high-converting content, contact Trade Press Services today.