Have you ever been in love with somebody, who didn’t love you back? This pain isn’t restricted to our personal lives, it can happen almost anywhere! Every time you create and publish a piece of content, you are engaging in a relationship with your audience. You are talking, and they are listening, and if you’re lucky, they’ll talk back. This relationship is fragile, short-lived and rarely goes any further. Let’s try to change that.
Movement, your aim
Producing amazing content followed by more amazing content will gain you a loyal and hopefully engaged audience, but it won’t do a lot else. If this is you, don’t panic! You aren’t alone.
Loads of businesses set out to implement the increasingly crucial strategy of content marketing. They create amazing content that’s pretty, shiny and ticks a whole bunch of boxes, but they don’t think about anything else! We want to move our audience through different stages of content until our relationship is at the perfect stage to take things further.
If you truly want to stop being friend-zoned by your audience, you’re going to need to implement a plan, a funnel-shaped plan:
- Top of the funnel: raise awareness and reach new audiences;
- Middle of the funnel: build trust, expertise, and positioning;
- Bottom of the funnel: convert.
Awareness and reach
This is your first meeting with your audience, and guess what, impressions count. Content must position you as an expert, engage your audience, attract visitors and make people aware of your brand and the problem your product solves.
That’s a lot to cram into one piece of content, right? That’s why you create more than one and don’t stop creating! If you thought you could record one video, or write one blog, and be done with it, you’re wrong!
This means a variety of:
- Formats: To attract the most amount of people into the top of our funnel, we should produce content in a variety of formats: video, audio, written and visual;
- Topics: Your product/service will have multiple strong points. Use your content to make your audience aware of the problems these strengths solve;
- Targets: Can you produce content that will attract certain niches of your target audience? Draw them into your funnel with super-specific content.
Build trust
The hardest part of the work is done in top of the funnel, but there’s no time to take your foot off the gas. We need movement and this is where we’re going to get it.
In comes an irresistible piece of content that gives huge value to your audience in exchange for their contact information.
In simpler terms, this is your hottest tip, your secret hack, a highly desirable chunk of knowledge that every prospect in your industry wants to know. There are many different ways to use this type of content, but the most successful techniques are:
- Around relevant content: If you’ve attracted an audience because they’re interested in a particular topic, they’re likely to want to learn more and give you their email address to get it.
- Retargeting: Categorize your audience by the content they visited and make relevant offers to relevant people, it will massively spike your conversion and lead generation stats.
Get them to convert
Your content has successfully grabbed your prospects contact details, so now you’re able to make specific offers to specific leads.
If you really want to increase conversion rates create an irresistible offer for an irresistible price to ease the transition of leads to customers. It builds trust, reduces risk and improves your relationship even more.
Using this tactic will greatly improve the likelihood of customers buying again and helps you maximize their value.