The Conversion Funnel

When creating a content plan, I like to use the conversion funnel. It’s a simplified customer journey and it breaks down into three easy to manage sections:

AWARENESS: The awareness stage is how a new lead discovers your brand either through search or through a piece of content you’ve produced. PR, #tags or Google searches are all common ways that a new lead enters into the content funnel and becomes aware that your brand exists. Awareness content is usually thought leadership content and stays away from pitching your brand within that content. So far more value-add than sales.

CONSIDERATION: The consideration phase happens after a lead becomes aware of your brand. Usually during this stage, they are taking a deeper dive to learn about your brand and often compare it to your competitors. When a lead is in the consideration phase, they digest more active forms of content like product or service reviews, social media content, blog posts or webinars. Consideration content has the potential to filter out leads who aren’t a good fit for the brand making the leads that progress to the next stage qualified. Now this phase is where brand and marketing KPIs can conflict…and I’ll explain why in a little while.

CONVERSION: Now we come to the conversion phase, which wouldn’t exist were it not for the previous two phases, however, is arguably the most important phase. The conversion phase is when the lead decides whether or not they’re going to become a customer. While this is a crucial stage for leads, a lot of content marketing strategies fall short here. What I will say is unless you’ve never produced any content whatsoever, we should all have the answer as to what content converts for us. When you tap into your marketing automation software OR your UTM parameters to see what types of content your leads are digesting before they convert into a sale, are you noticing any trends? Is there a particular piece of content that seems to convert? Therein lies your answer. Be specific though, don’t look at the content which has the highest engagement or views…look at the content that’s converting into a sale.