The First Product is Just the Beginning Building Out Your Funnel
A sales funnel is a way for you to organize the information that you will share with your audience and when. It considers the buyer’s intent based on where they are in their buyer’s journey before delivering the messages that bring your ideal target audience member through the process and funnel toward the purchase, and hopefully, delight and lifetime customer status.
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The basic funnel looks like this:
- Awareness
- Consideration
- Decision
Using a funnel process enables you to imagine where your customers are in their journey based on what you have to offer them and deliver just the right information at the right time. For example, someone who is in the awareness stage, which is at the widest part of the funnel, is just now learning they even have a problem.
The messages you deliver to them now need to be educational in nature to produce the awareness they need to move forward in their journey. Some of the content you might deliver to them now includes blog posts about the problem from every angle because the idea is to attract the community to your website so that they can see the knowledge you have.
Since the awareness stage is at the top of the funnel, you need more of this type of content than you need at the bottom or smallest part of the funnel. You’ll also want to include content about your company values and information that shows why the customer should care about the issue with informative and educational content. Plus, you’ll want to include information that describes what happens if nothing is done about it and include examples of when the problem has been overcome.
This is a good place for your epic, cornerstone, or pillar content depending on what you want to call it. This content is fully available and free to everyone when they come to your website without requiring anything – even an email address and it is not salesy at all.
When you are sure that your customers are in the consideration stage, you’ll want to deliver different content to them. It might still be in the same format as blog posts, but you’ll want to work on getting them on your list now. This is when your prospects are comparing potential solutions after they’ve discovered you in the awareness stage.
The best content for the consideration stage will include testimonials, case studies, podcasts, videos, and email-only content after you get them to join your email list by offering them more in-depth content for download such as a whitepaper that compares and contrasts various solutions to the problem.
Finally, in the decision stage of the buyer’s journey, you’ll want to put even more forceful content in front of them that explains why you. At this stage, the buyer knows that they have a problem, they can define it perfectly due to your research, and now they know they have solutions to choose from.
Now is the time they will finally choose. It’s an excellent time to offer free trials, entry-level products, and so forth. The idea now is to get way more brand-specific in the content you show and deliver to them, which is now mostly via email, social media groups, blog posts, and downloadables that offer comparisons of the solutions. You’ll also have to work on overcoming objections to the content you publish, especially on the sales page.
You don’t have to do this all at once. You can start with the awareness stage information and work your way up, adding content for each stage of your buyer’s journey for each and every single product that you want to promote.
