Bottom-of-the-funnel content marketing strategy

01/23/2023

Escrito por: Elsie Muñoz C.

I’m passionate about marketing. For the past 10 years, I have been working in consultancy and teaching digital marketing. I love sharing my experiences and learning with others. My expertise is strategic content creation to help your company grow.

We at Smartregy have a different approach to content marketing. We believe a bottom-of-the-funnel content marketing strategy is more cost-effective for your company. Continue reading to know why we recommend this approach, and more importantly, how we can help you achieve your company results through a content marketing strategy. 

As a business person, you are interested in increasing sales and profitability. Every decision you make on your business goes towards growth. It could be on sales, it could be entering new markets or it could be with a new line of products or services. All you want for your business it’s to grow.  And so am I.  When you invest in marketing that’s what you want in return, the growth of your business in any particular area you decide is the best in that particular moment or situation.

The big question is how can marketing help you with the growth of your business. There are many marketing approaches and we have tried a lot of them from inbound marketing to growth marketing and everything in between. The best approach in our experience, working with several types of businesses and industries, is content marketing. According to the Content Marketing Institute, 67% of marketers report that content marketing generates demand/leads (a 7% increase since previous year). 

If you talk about return on investment, definitely the content marketing approach is more profitable than the advertisement or outbound approach. Content marketing generates over 3x as many leads as outbound marketing and costs 62% less (Source: Demand Metric).

Every time we don’t know something, or we want to solve a problem, personal or professional, we start looking for anwers by searching on Google. That’s so common nowadays, for the majority of us, that Google is even a verb. In Spanish, we say Googlear. The SEO software company Brightedge, assures in their research, that 68% of online experiences begin with a search engine.

And every time we search, the results are some type of content. It doesn’t matter what type of problem we are facing, if it’s a business problem or a personal one, our immediate action is to Google it. Younger generations are also searching for answers, but they usually rely on social media for them. 

This is nothing new. Content marketing, as we know it, has been around for more than 20 years. The first time the term “content marketing” was coined was in 1996, by John F. Oppedahl at a journalism conference. Of course, since the advent of mankind, we have looked for a way to express ourselves through some type of content creation. It’s not in vain that marketers continue to say that Content is King.  And I think it’s still around because it works. 

There are many ways of creating content, but I still prefer written content. Maybe because I grew up in the earliest 90s, or maybe it’s because that’s the way I learn. But I’m not alone. According to Demand Metric, 70% of people prefer to get information from blogs than traditional advertisements.

Also, we consider and tested that written content is more versatile and it’s the basis of a great content strategy. From written content, you can create videos, social media posts, infographics, ebooks, and so much more. The other great feature of written content is that is much more skimmable than video content. And this is not something negative at all. 73% of people admit to skimming blog posts, while 27% consume them thoroughly (HubSpot). This is just how people prefer to consume content. 

Many companies are investing in content marketing but they are not happy with it. They are not reaching the goals they want and also many agencies are not able to attribute any gains from these marketing actions. So I understand that many people don’t want to invest in something that is not performing well.

Let us explain the steps of the process that we use to drive results, aka conversions, and sales, to us and our clients, through a well-thought bottom-of-the-funnel content marketing strategy.

#1 Focus on the Conversion Stage

Instead of focusing on the awareness stage of the marketing funnel, and nurturing the users, with more content, until they convert, we should focus directly on the conversion stage or at the bottom of the funnel. Every piece of content we create addresses the pain points that the customer is facing when there is one step to completing the purchase. In our results, you are not going to see a lot of traffic but you will see high-quality leads that are ready to convert. Our approach is more on-demand conversion than on-demand generation. 

If your company is like many others these days, trying to make the most of your budget, focusing on one phase of the marketing funnel is a more cost-effective approach, because you don’t have to create that much content or invest in large and complicated funnels. You are going to focus on the ones that are ready to buy. You are going to take advantage of your competitor’s content! According to a report by the Content Marketing Institute, just 20% of content produced is bottom-of-the-funnel content.

marketing funnel

#2 Identify audience Pain Points

We create content based on the pain points of your target audience, not just on the keywords opportunities we find because many of these long-tail keywords have a lot of opportunities to rank but do not necessarily address the main concerns of our target in the conversion stage. So instead of just focusing on positioning high on search engines, we focus on high rank with the customer’s needs, and this usually happens when the customer is already aware of the solutions and just needs a bottom-of-the-funnel piece of content, to make up his mind and close the deal. 

Of course, this is easier to say than to do. Usually, owners and marketers think that they know the motivations and triggers behind every purchase. But the reality is that most of the content we create is based on our perceptions and not necessarily on how the customer feels or what he needs.

 

#3 Prefer Quality Over Quantity 

We believe that less is more. We create better quality content instead of a lot of blog posts with information that you can find anywhere else. We are not the only ones that think that way. The giant inbound marketing software company HubSpot, which is a machine of content creation, claims that 83% of marketers say it’s better to focus on quality rather than quantity of content, even if it means posting less often.

The activities of content marketing strategy are based on addressing the issues of the customer as if we were reading their minds. To do this, you need to know and understand their needs. Great content is not an easy task. It requires a lot of research, not just keyword research, and talking to your customer. The only way to truly know a customer is to talk to them. There is no other way. To create really great content we should spend a lot of time researching our target. We continually do this, not just at the beginning of the service, because everything changes. We cannot assume that our customer is static and our competition is not doing anything to attract our clients.

#4 Implement SEO and Distribution Tactics

Content marketing is more than writing blog posts. We need to consider other marketing techniques, such as search engine optimization and distribution of the content. As part of our service, we make sure that the content is appealing to the customer and the search engines (Google, Bing, etc.). 

We understand that not everybody is into reading like us.

A recent study by HubSpot found that 54% of consumers want to see more video content from brands and businesses they support.

We distribute the content in different formats including short videos so it could reach a wider audience than our target market. We choose short videos for many reasons, but mainly because they are more cost-effective. Short-form videos (TikTok, IG Reels) and live streaming were the most effective formats on social media in 2022, according to the State of Marketing Report of Hubspot.

 

#5 Create Content Based on Data

We are from a technical background, so we have to measure everything. That’s one of the key differences from other agencies. We love data so we want to measure all we can to assure you that what we are doing is on the right path. Also, we can make better marketing and business decisions and make the adjustments just in time. That’s why in our content you are going to see a lot of statistics, just like in this article. 

Besides the mandatory content metrics, like the number of people visiting a page or how many pageviews, we measure lead generation and conversion metrics. From micro conversions such as new email subscribers, form completion rate, e-book downloads, and actual sales. 

That’s how we approach content marketing strategy, particularly for business-to-business companies. We know that before you can make any buying decision, you are going to do a lot of research. When you find that piece of content that is telling you exactly how you are going to succeed in the issue you’re facing, that’s the moment when you realize you have found the right partner to do business with.

If you feel relate to our approach and the way we create content, we encourage you to contact us for a free consultation session

 

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