Most people are familiar with the concept of a sales funnel. Individual companies may have slight variations on the strata within the funnel, but the basic concept is the same — you have a target market; some subset of that market enters the funnel; over time, smaller and smaller subsets progress down the funnel until out-the-bottom pops a customer.
It’s the job of the sales team to pull those customers out the bottom of the funnel. It’s the job of the marketing to fill the top of the funnel and push those prospects far enough down that they can be handed-off to the sales team.
There are many, many ways to fill the top of the funnel: advertising, promotions, partner programs, referral channels, tradeshows, networking events, telemarketing, etc…, etc…. In 1999, Seth Godin authored a book, Permission marketing: turning strangers into friends, and friends into customers. That book essentially defines a new method of marketing, designed for the Internet, which is trivially explained as getting prospects to ask you for information, rather than blasting information to them unasked. If you’re new to Internet marketing, you may have run across the synonymous phrase, “inbound marketing”.*
Social media is the Twenty-First Century radio tower
Why am I having this digression about inbound marketing when this is supposed to be an article about content marketing? The answer is simple — the second half of the title. Inbound marketing is the best way to use content marketing to effectively fill the top of the sales funnel. But before that, let’s take a step back and quickly define what content marketing is.
Who Is Betty Crocker?
Content marketing is any marketing that involves the creation and sharing of media and publishing in order to acquire and retain customers. This isn’t a new concept. If your mom is older than a Millenial and you grew up in the U.S., you’re almost certainly familiar with it — because your childhood kitchen almost certainly had a Betty Crocker cookbook in it. The Betty Crocker Cookbook is a great piece of content marketing. Everyone wants one — it’s a staple in the kitchen. And what happens when you read a Betty Crocker Cookbook? You start cooking things that have ingredients like Gold Metal Flour, Bisquick Baking Mix, and more than 200 other products that are manufactured by General Mills.
And that’s how content marketing works.
There are dozens of more examples from the previous millennium, and you should use them as inspiration for the kind of content that might appeal to your audience. Here are a few widely different examples:
- The Furrow Magazine by John Deere, since 1895
- The American Express OPEN Forum
- AAA maps
- The Michelin Guide
What do all these things have in common? They’re all compelling content for a specific target audience that are consistently delivered and indirectly attract prospects over and over without ever actively pitching the product.
So You Want to Write A Cookbook?
No, actually you probably don’t. Even if your name is Bob, and you’re trying to market Bob’s Bodacious BBQ Sauce, you probably don’t. And even though you’re not likely here because you’re a culinary inventor, we’ll go with you probably don’t even want to write a metaphorical cookbook.
Why not? Because it’s frighteningly difficult, time consuming, and expensive. Imagine coming up with those hundreds of recipes, testing each one, taking photos of them. Then are you going to self-publish, or go through a traditional publisher? If the latter, good luck. If the former, I hope you’re rich.
But the good news is, Betty Crocker didn’t start with a cookbook, and you shouldn’t either. The first Betty Crocker’s Picture Cookbook came out in 1950. Five years before that first book came out, Betty Crocker was the second best-known woman in America, following First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt.
Long before the cookbook, Betty Crocker started really garnering attention when Betty Crocker Cooking School of the Air launched on a local radio station in 1924.
Create compelling content for a specific target audience that is consistently delivered and indirectly attracts prospects over and over without ever actively pitching the product
Now what’s the 2014 equivalent of the 1924 local radio station? It’s the blog. And that’s where you should start. Your primary place for content creation should be your blog. It’s cheap, it’s easy, it provides a natural platform for “consistently delivered” content, and will provide a natural filter for your targeted audience.
Now that you have a blog, you need to figure out your equivalent of those metaphorical recipes. This is actually the hardest part of the job. You really need to think outside of the box, or, more importantly, to put yourself in your customers’ shoes. If you were them, what kind of content would you want? I can’t emphasize enough the importance of spending some serious brainstorming time around this topic. Whatever methodology makes you happy — mind-maps, white-boards, group sessions, doodle pads — get as many ideas down on paper as you can, then go back and evaluate them. Are they actually appealing to your potential customers? Are you interested in them? (Because, if not, you’re probably going to have a hard time sticking to the generation of new content). Are they broad enough to allow on-going content creation?
Once you have your blog focused and understood, start generating that content, and start publishing it. But don’t dive in too deep at the beginning. After the quality of your content, the second most important aspect of your blog is its consistency of publication. If you search around the Internet, you’ll find that ideally you should be blogging daily. At a minimum, you should be blogging 3 times per week. But to be honest, that’s BS. Yes, those are great target numbers for a company with lots of creative talent on staff, but you’re just starting out. It’s much better that you blog once per week, or even once per month, and do it consistently; rather than blog three times this week, twice next week because you get busy with real work, and then 5 weeks down the road not at all because you ran into writers’s block somewhere along the way and have since gotten preoccupied with other things.
Start a blog. Now.
Pick a great topic.
Pick an achievable publishing schedule.
STICK TO IT.
So how ’bout them leads?
Great. So now you have your blog up and running, you’ve been at it for 6 months, pouring blood, sweat, and tears into those 24 blog posts you’ve written, and the only ones showing any interest are your cat and your two subscribers (which include both you and your mom).
Well, the problem is, you’ve only addressed half of the problem. “Content marketing” is more than just content creation. It’s content creation plus content promotion. If all you do is write great content and put it on your blog, that would be the equivalent of recording that Betty Crocker Cooking School of the Air show and never actually broadcasting it.
Starting from day 1, from your first blog post, you must promote your content.
This is where social media comes in. Social media is the Twenty-First Century radio tower. It’s where you get to broadcast all of that great content you’re creating. And what makes social media even better than a radio tower is that it’s permission marketing. People following you on social media already want to hear from you. They’ve given you permission to share your content with them. Moreover, you get a network effect. When they like your content, they’ll share it with their friends, and their friends who like it will both give you permission to share directly with them (by following your accounts), and will share your content again.
This is why you must be active on all the major social media channels. But you shouldn’t just limit yourself to the major ones. Yes, you should be on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Google+. But you should also be on Tumblr, Pinterest, Instagram, Medium, and any other platform you can think of. And you should be on them as soon as you hear about them.
There you have it — how to fill the top of the funnel with content marketing in three easy steps:
- Start a blog
- Create content for that blog
- Promote that blog on social media
But Wait! There’s More!
I’ll be completely honest with you. If it wasn’t already obvious from the rest of this blog post, this stuff actually isn’t easy. It’s hard work, and it requires consistent effort. And it gets worse. It takes a long time for this to pay off. If you’re looking for a quick source of leads, content marketing isn’t it.
But what content marketing is is a nearly fool-proof long-term plan to build a loyal following and consistent source of truly quality leads.
Don’t believe me? Well, in the vein of internet companies everywhere, I’ll provide some transparency into The Ibis Network itself.
The Ibis Network has been publishing its blog for approximately four years now. In that time, it’s grown its mailing list to over 10,000 subscribers. Today, here’s how The Ibis Network gets its customers:
- Traditional Marketing and Sales Activities: 12.6%
- Referrals: 24%
- Content Marketing: 63.4%
That’s right, almost two-thirds of new customers come as a direct result of content marketing, and another quarter come from those existing customers through referrals. Talk about a loyal audience.
It’s also true that the longer and more you publish, the more successful your publications will be. According to HubSpot, the HubSpot blog generates 70% of its monthly lead target from blog posts not published in that month.
In conclusion, yes, it’s hard work. Yes, it will take longer than you want. Yes, it will still take even longer than that. But ultimately, content marketing will become your single best, biggest, and most consistent source of quality leads.
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* I personally hate this use of the phrase “inbound marketing” because that phrase means something very specific and different to marketing professionals, but, c’est la vie — the world rarely conforms to my lexicographical whims.