Website owners have a wealth of benefits from great content. Brands, large and small, including Red Bull and your local coffee shop, strive to provide relevant and engaging content via various channels to better serve customers. But, it can be expensive and time-consuming to create content, especially if your budget is small and you don’t have access to a content marketing agency.
How do you decide whether to make a viral video of your cat or write a technical whitepaper about it? Should you spend your time updating the FAQ page on your website? Here are some ideas and tips to help you create a great website content strategy.
Kobe Digital is a top digital marketing agency in New York. To learn more about how Kobe Digital can help you grow your business with content, give us a call today.
Conversion Funnel
A good content strategy from a business perspective is one that:
- Represents the company well
- Potential customers in a non-intrusive manner
- Increase sales and meet specific business objectives
Before you begin to develop a content strategy and integrate it with your website production process, you need to understand how your customer moves from hearing about your company to purchasing. The conversion funnel is a general term that describes the journey a customer takes from becoming a customer to purchasing.
Four steps can make up a generalized conversion funnel (borrowed from marketing industries):
- Awareness: This is the stage where you first contact your customer. This is the first time a customer learns about you.
- Interest: If the customer becomes aware of your company she may be interested in you.
- Desire Once the customer’s interest is aroused, she could start to desire your products and/or services even though no purchase has been made.
- Action This stage of the conversion funnel is where the customer not only dreams about and longs for your product/service but also has the financial resources, time, and effort to purchase it.
These stages are easily remembered using the acronym AIDA, which is borrowed from marketing. There are many variations in customer behavior across these stages. For example, someone who is just learning about your product (awareness) will be different from someone who wants to purchase your product (action).
Content strategy is designed to help customers move quickly from awareness to curiosity to action by providing relevant content at each stage.
You should create the best content for each stage of your conversion funnel
Let’s consider a hypothetical scenario to help us understand the topic. Let’s suppose that we have developed a photo-editing program and are ready to sell it. Let’s call this hypothetical software Photoshop.
Photoshot’s target customers are photographers and Miami web designers. We have determined that online content is an effective marketing strategy to get our target customers to purchase our software.
Awareness
Photoshoot is not yet known by our potential customers. Our goal at this stage is to get him started on the conversion funnel. We will first inform him about our product. What are some common questions web designers and photographers (our target customers) have about photo-editing software
Some examples might be:
- “What are some photo-editing methods that I can use in my design/photography projects?”
- “Where can you see great design/photography work?”
- “Who are the top designers/photographers in the industry?”
- “Which websites are best for learning about photography and design?”
- “What are some of the most recent web design/photography tools?”
Our potential customers are not aware of Photoshot and ask the same questions to anyone who uses photo-editing software daily. Our potential buyers don’t ask about Photoshot at the pre-awareness stage because they aren’t aware of it. We could attract their attention if we created content that answers these questions. It would be because we have helped them to answer a question they are looking for.
We offer them something of value. We create content that is attractive to our customers. This will help us start the conversion funnel.
Interest
Photoshoot customers are more interested in our content and have different questions. These are some examples of questions they might be asking:
- “Is Photoshoot superior to my current photo-editing program?”
- “What is so special about Photoshoot?”
- “Am I missing anything by not using Photoshot?”
- “How does Photoshot work?”
Desire
Our customer may decide to buy our software if we can answer his questions. Sometimes, we can convince him to act quickly once he has started wanting our product. Sometimes he may add the product to his “wishlist” and not look to purchase it immediately.
These questions could be asked about our software in this stage:
- “How can I convince my boss to buy Photoshoot even though I have photo-editing software?”
- “Do you have a project in the future that could benefit from this software?”
- Are there ways I can get the software free of charge so that I can experience at least some of its benefits now?
- “Do I have to buy this right now?”
Take Action
These are some of the questions a customer might ask when purchasing Photoshoot:
- “What OS does it support?”
- “Can my computer handle Photoshot? What system requirements are required?
- “Can I easily pay for my purchase?” (PayPal, credit card, cash, etc. )?”
- “Is there any restriction on how this software can be used?”
- “Can I download it or do I have to visit a physical shop to purchase it?”
Each Stage: The Optimal Content Type
Each stage has its own needs. Each stage has its own needs.
Concentrate on the Most Important Stages in the Funnel
Now you know how customers go from awareness to interest to want to act, and what questions they might have during the conversion funnel process. It is difficult to create content for each stage. You need to prioritize. It is crucial to know which stage of the conversion funnel would be most helpful at any given moment.
If we have 10 visitors per day to our website, then awareness is the problem. Because no one is yet interested in our product, creating a FAQ about how to purchase and install it will not help. To increase awareness, we could instead start with blog posts about design trends and guest posting on a top design blog.
If we have a lot of traffic to our site but customers are constantly asking us questions about our product, such as how to get a free trial or how to purchase it, we should create content to answer these types of questions. This could be a webinar, video, or tutorial on the software. It might seem like you are wondering how to determine which stages of the funnel are most important at any one time. There is no one-size fits all answer.
It is often a good idea to identify the bottlenecks. These are some questions you might ask.
- “Do you see many visitors to your website?”
- “What do potential customers know about our company?”
We must raise awareness if we don’t.
- “Do customers click through to our site when we guest post on other sites?”
- “Does your company interest them?”
- “Do they wonder how it all works?”
If so, we must work on interest.
- “Would customers be interested in purchasing our product?”
- “Do they think it’s a great product?”
We must work to make customers want it and show them the benefits.
- “Do people know where and how to buy our product?”
- “Are my conversions comparable or better than others in the industry?”
We might have to take action if we don’t.
Distribution channels
It doesn’t matter how great your content is. Customers will not find it by itself. It is also important to determine how you will deliver the content to the customer. You need to know where customers are most likely to find the content at each stage of your conversion funnel.
Our customers in the action stage are looking for photo editing software. They will likely use Google to find different options. To find the best option, they might also check out industry forums, review sites, and blogs.
To capture this audience, we need to create content that answers the questions that they are asking. We must also consider how our content will be distributed. We can use search engines, blogs, or forums to get the content in front of the right people.
Customers in the pre-awareness stage probably aren’t looking for us. We could attract their attention with an interesting topic. Let’s take for example, creating a collection of photo-editing inspiration, a tutorial using Photoshot, or a set of graphic design resources. Our blog or other industry blogs could be the distribution channel.
Depending on where you are at the moment in your funnel, you can now concentrate on creating content that will help you the most.
Content Strategy Matrix
I created a table to help us map out how we can use content marketing for Photoshot, our hypothetical program.
| STAGE | POSSIBLE QUESTIONS | DISTRIBUTION CHANNELS |
| Awareness | – “What are some popular photo-editing techniques I can try in my design/photography projects?” – “Where can I see good design/photography work?” – “Who are the top designers/photographers in the industry?” – “What websites can I go to if I want to learn about design and photography?” – “What are some new web design/photography tools in recent months?” | Mainstream media – Guest posts – Press releases – Webinars – Trade shows & Conferences – Social Media – Display Advertising |
| Interest | – “Is Photoshoot superior to my current photo-editing program?” – “What’s so special? About Photoshot?” | Our website – Press releases – webinars – social media – display advertising – review websites – forums |
| Desire | – How do I convince my boss to purchase Photoshot? I don’t have any photo-editing software. | Review websites – Our website – SEO forums – Google Adwords |
| Take Action | – “What OS does it support?” What system requirements does it require? – Can I easily pay for my purchase? (PayPal, credit card, cash, etc. “ | Our website – Google Adwords SEO – Forums |
You can create your table to help you with your content-based marketing efforts.
Continual Improvement of Content Strategy
You should not rest on your laurels or assume that what worked yesterday will be the same tomorrow. Your competition is constantly trying to create the most engaging content and attract the customer’s eye. You should experiment with different types of content and distribution channels.
You should focus your efforts on the ones that are working and minimize those that don’t. You must measure your actions. Find out which parts of the funnel need the most attention, which content is most effective, and which distribution channels work the best.
