Digital Marketing For Dummies (For Dummies (Lifestyle))

by Ryan Deiss

The big goal at the top of the funnel is to make prospects “problem aware”

Unfortunately, the top of the funnel is where most organizations begin and end their content marketing efforts.

Middle of funnel (MOFU) content marketing

The big goal for content you use at the middle of the funnel is to convert “problem aware” and “solution aware” prospects into leads.

We call this type of content gated offers, which we discuss in Chapter 3.

Educational resources:

free reports, white papers, primary research, webinar training, and sales material. These types of content resources educate the consumer on a particular topic related to your brand while highlighting features of a solution, product, or service you provide.

Useful resources:

Handouts or cheat sheets Resource lists Templates Software Surveys Assessments Discount and coupon clubs Quizzes and surveys

Don’t pin all your lead-generation hopes to a passive gated offer on your home page or the sidebar of your blog, because the gated offer can get lost among the many elements of your site.

Bottom of funnel (BOFU) content marketing

Demos:

Customer stories:

Customer stories are customer testimonials and reviews.

Comparison/spec sheets:

Webinars/events:

Mini-classes:

A mini-class is a type of event that you set up to teach a relevant topic to your target audience.

Exploring the prospect’s intent

The key to perfect content marketing is to understand your prospects’ existing intent so that you can anticipate their future intent and predict which path or paths they will take.

If you’re having difficulty brainstorming ideas for content that will satisfy your prospects’ intent, gather a group of people in your organization who have contact with your customers and prospects. Salespeople, customer service representatives, trade-show workers, and others who hear the

voice of the customer and prospect should be present. These members of your team can help you discover holes in your content that would satisfy a prospect’s intent.

Brainstorm lists of intent at the top, middle, and bottom of the funnel. Then decide what content assets need to be built to satisfy that in...

Providing a path to the next step

As a marketer, you need to provide a path from one piece of content to the next.

Failing to provide an easy-to-follow path to the next step isn’t just bad marketing, it’s a bad user experience,

The goal of every piece of content is to get the prospect to ascend to the next logical step in the customer journey.

How well an ascension offer performs depends on the relevance of the offer.

Segmenting your marketing with content

You won’t truly understand your audience and what people really want until they have given you one of two things: their time or their money.

Your content falls into three main categories of recipes: vegan, vegetarian, and gluten free. What do you know about someone who visits a blog post about vegan recipes?

When people spend their valuable time consuming content, they are segmenting themselves.

And thanks to the magic of ad retargeting, you can follow up with these prospects by using a relevant ascension offer without having to acquire their contact information.

Retargeting is the process of advertising to people based on t...

Appearing everywhere your customer expects

Marketers who want to create perfect content need to publish where their customers are. That means publishing content that meets prospects’ intent in any channel, and at every

stage of the funnel where groups of prospects are searching for and sharing content. These channels include but are certa...

A website or blog Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Pinterest Instagram YouTube

You can publish a single content asset across numerous channels to maximize exposure.

Customizing your content

You produce perfect content marketing materials to satisfy the intent of your customer avatars (also known as target audience or customer persona).

But not all avatars are the same; they, like their real-life counterparts, don’t all want or need the same solution. That’s ...

Executing Perfect Content Marketing

Following are the steps for creating your first Content Campaign Plan:

Choose avatars.

Brainstorm content assets.

Choose the vehicle an...

Plan for asc...

Step 1: Choosing avatars

Decide which avatars (also known as a buyer persona) this content targets.