Turning that long time audience member of your content marketing into a paying customer is a competitive process.
To ensure your content not only attracts, but maintains a steady flow of traffic to your blog/website, a strategy must be set in place.
A content funnel is a sure-fire way of converting those who just want to view your content, to those wanting to pay for it.
Surprisingly, it’s not that hard to do once you know the ins and outs of it.
What is a content funnel?
Once you’ve gained enough traffic towards your blog/website, it is useful to start thinking about creating a content funnel.
If the ultimate goal is to turn traffic into paying customers, a content funnel should be your next step.
A content funnel, in simple terms is a content marketing strategy where one turns potential customers into paying customers.
It starts at the top of the ‘funnel’ where pools of individuals discover your content/website. [TB2]
It is the goal of this strategy to draw customers in, to the point where the larger pool is narrowed down to a ‘drip’ of a loyal, paying audience.
Keep plenty of strategies in mind
The first big thing to think about is why a strategy in the content marketing business is important.
There are many techniques you can employ to boost the traffic towards your content, like offering it for free, hosting events and even creating premium content. Insert something like “check out my previous article if you want to see how to monetise your content”
While these may help you see profits, a proper strategy like the content funnel is paramount for long-term success.
Let’s say you create a highly successful self-help book that explodes online and generates a profit for your company.
If you do nothing with this premium content, over time the initial popularity will die out and you may see profits starting to fall.
A content funnel in this example could be that you sign up to an email newsletter before gaining access to the book.
This means the audience who already is interested in your content could discover something new you create down the line, rather than losing them as soon as the initial spark of new content dies down.
Whether or not this nets profit, or you monitoring such content, ‘gate-keeping’ tools like this are just one example of a content funnel strategy.
Think long term
Another important step in maintaining a content funnel is how you keep a prospective audience member interested in your content.
The sure fire way, to not only create consistency within your content, but also actively keep audiences around, is a content calendar.
At CLIQ Marketing Content we saw a 298.2% traffic increase in a one month period after creating a content calendar and sticking to it.
This might seem like simple planning, but not only does it build expectation from the perspective of your audiences, it ties into another important content funnel tool: Giveaways.
Hook line and sinker
Planning a giveaway for long standing audiences of your content marketing is a great reward system that will reinforce why your customers are sticking around with your content.
Let’s say for example, that you entice customers with your content/blog, they’ve paid for your content and you want a great way of keeping them around.
It’s easy to think of relying on constantly trying to sell them things to net more profit; it will work out better if you offer them something for free.
A loyal audience member may well be willing to pay for more of your content, but a giveaway sends a more positive message about the customer-business relationship, as well as building anticipation for similar kinds of rewards.
Create diversity with your content
Diversifying your content across the journey of a content funnel is highly important.
The processes from the initial attraction/ discovery of your content to purchasing your content should feature different kinds of content within each step.
Simple ads often feature in attracting audiences, the same person subscribing to your blog ‘converts’ them to your content, therefore them purchasing some kind of content of yours is the end product.
There is no set way or time period this can be done; but understanding the process of diversification is important.
A content funnel is an important content marketing strategy that can ensure the attraction, solidification, and monetisation of a loyal audience.
If you would like more tips regarding content funnels, contact CLIQ Google Ads agency today.
