Turning your website visitor into a customer is a long process. First of all, you have to turn a visitor into a lead.
Then, you’ll build interest in your product before closing the sale.
All along this journey, you need valuable content. Whether at the awareness, evaluation, or sales stage, prospects will take your intended action through effective content marketing.
Now, how do you exploit content marketing at the top of your sales funnel (TOFU), also called the awareness stage?
How do you move more of your website visitors to the next stage in your sales funnel?
After all, Demand Metric found that 47% of buyers will read 3 to 5 pieces of content before they contact a sales rep.
If these pieces of content are doing a poor job, you’ll lose many prospects and, ultimately, revenue.
Here are 5 content marketing tips to turn your website visitors into warm leads.
1. Create educational content for your audience
At the awareness stage, most of your visitors are unaware of their problems. And for those that have an idea, they’re looking for the best solution.
In other words, they’re up for grabs if you make them aware of their needs. And provide value to them.
Here, visitors want to get educated about their problems and possible solutions. Therefore, some essential parts of educational content for your website are:
- Defining your prospect’s problem
- Showing them the process of how to solve the problem
- Mentioning your service or product where necessary
Of course, the content you provide visitors will depend on your business. So what do your buyers need at the point of problem recognition?
For instance, if you offer plumbing repair services, your prospects have an urgent need if one of their pipes gets clogged up. How can you educate them to solve this problem immediately?
You can tell them about a temporary solution until a plumber gets there to fix the problem. If you provide enough value with your content, this visitor might decide to employ your services.
In this case, you need a few pieces of content at the top of the sales funnel.
See an example from Benjamin Franklin Plumbing providing information about a worry homeowners have when their pipes get clogged.
However, if you sell cars, this is rarely an urgent purchase. And because of the amount of money involved, people generally conduct more research to get the best deal.
So, in this case, you need more pieces of content at the top of the sales funnel.
Ultimately, the amount and complexity of content you need will also depend on the complexity or cost of your service.
The definition of educational content will depend on the information your prospects need and how well you can provide it.
2. Use lead magnets and content upgrades to capture leads
In most cases, a website visitor will leave your website without making a purchase. In fact, Ad Roll estimates that 98% of first-time visitors will leave a site without buying.
As a result of this, you must have a way of bringing a prospect back to your website. An effective way to achieve this is to capture their information.
And you can do this using landing pages. So not only should you create quality landing pages, but you should also have many of them.
For instance, a HubSpot study found that when companies increase the number of their landing pages from 10 to 15, they got a 55% increase in leads acquisition.
That said, one of the most effective ways to capture leads on landing pages is through the use of lead magnets. With lead magnets, you’re providing a piece of content that can solve an immediate problem for your prospects.
Some examples of lead magnets are:
- Ebooks
- Reports
- Cheat sheet
- Template
- Whitepaper
- Webinars
- Videos
- Discount
To create a lead magnet, you must consider a problem your ideal buyers are facing and provide the solution. The best practice is that your lead magnet should be short so that viewers can use it immediately.
See an example of a lead magnet by Digital Marketer:
Looking at the piece of content, you can see that this will interest most Facebook marketers. With this lead magnet, Digital Marketer generated 35,859 leads in 60 days.
With lead magnets, you can use content to solve a prospect’s problem and build trust.
Apart from a traditional lead magnet, you can also use a content upgrade. The main difference between a traditional lead magnet and a content upgrade is that you have a content upgrade on a blog post rather than a dedicated landing page.
Usually, a content upgrade is just a PDF version of the page your visitor is viewing. Even in cases where the content upgrade is different from the page content, it’s usually a related topic.
See an example of a content upgrade from Noah Kagan:
This is another example from Brian Dean:
By using a content upgrade on this post, he got a 785.01% increase in conversions within a month.
For pillar content where you provide great value to visitors, a content upgrade can be a reference material for them. And an opportunity to capture their details and follow up with them in the future.
3. Target keywords with informational and navigational intent
Unless a prospect already knows your website, they’ll probably use Google to find the right service. And as you’ll agree, they usually don’t have an idea of the business or product that can solve their problems.
It’s no surprise that according to Pardot, 70% of buyers use Google at least 2 to 3 times before making a purchase decision. So it only makes sense that when they’re ready to buy, they’ll go for a company that has been showing up regularly in searches and answering their questions.
The big question is: is your website showing up for the keywords potential buyers put in the search box?
At the awareness stage, most prospects are looking for information. Therefore, when conducting keyword research, the aim is to find keywords that prospects use.
Generally, there are 4 types of keywords based on searcher intent:
- Navigational keywords
- Informational keywords
- Commercial keywords
- Transactional keywords
For instance, if you sell TV or own an affiliate site, one question you can ask is: what are the searches a prospective buyer is likely to make at the beginning of their search?
One such term is “best TV + year.” When a searcher puts this term in the search box, what information are they looking for? Do they just want information about a single TV set? A simple Google search can show you what a searcher is looking for.
You’ll find that such a searcher is looking for information about many TVs based on different criteria. Therefore, meeting the searcher’s intent for a keyword will boost your page rankings for those keywords.
Thus, you can get more people into your sales funnel and, hopefully, convert more of them.
4. Repurpose written content into other formats
For most businesses, the default form of content is written content. But over the years, other formats have grown in popularity.
For instance, in a HubSpot study, 54% of buyers expect businesses to share videos.
To buttress that, Edison Research revealed that 27% of Americans listen to podcasts monthly.
This is saying that you need to go beyond just written content to turn more visitors into leads. And this doesn’t even need to take a lot of work.
All you need to do is repurpose your current content pieces into other formats your ideal buyers want to see.
Some content formats to consider are:
- Videos
- Audio
- Infographics
- Slides
- Podcasts
- Webinars
By using other content formats that your ideal customers may prefer to written content, you have a bigger opportunity to provide value. Furthermore, you can get these viewers to take the actions you want.
5. Reach a bigger audience through guest posts
One of the significant challenges businesses face is getting many people to the top of their sales funnel. Because, let’s face it, it’s impossible to convert every prospect at the top of the sales funnel into a customer.
So the more people you can bring to the top of your sales funnel, the higher your chances of gaining more customers. Whatever business you do, there are industry websites that have a much bigger audience than your website.
These websites already have the type of audience you want to reach. With guest posts that address issues at the top of the funnel, you can attract part of this audience to your website.
Generally, people engage in guest posts to:
- Build brand awareness
- Capture leads
Build brand awareness
As a business, you can use content to build your authority and position yourself as an expert in your field. Furthermore, you can increase popularity during this process.
When most people publish guest posts, there’s an author bio at the end of the post and a link to the author’s website. Through a guest blogging campaign on high-quality websites, you can improve search engine optimization and bring more people to your website.
See an example of a guest post author bio for Dr. Sharonrose Samelak:
This is a guest post about chiropractic care in pregnancy which is top-of-the-funnel content. In addition, there’s a link to the author’s website in the author’s bio.
Capture leads
Though a less popular tactic, it’s effective in capturing leads directly from your guest posts. Usually, this is in exchange for a lead magnet provided in the guest post.
Here’s an example of a guest post by CoSchedule founder Garrett Moon, with a content upgrade inserted into the post:
Alternatively, you can capture leads through guest posts by linking to a landing page in your author bio rather than your homepage. On the landing page, visitors can submit their details to claim your offer.
See a portion of the author bio from Brad Hussy’s guest post on how he used ConvertKit to sell online courses.
When viewers click the link, it leads to this landing page where they can enter their details:
Having said these, you must publish guest posts on authoritative websites. You need to find high-quality websites in your niche and pitch them a quality topic yet to be covered on their website.
Of course, your topic should be top-of-the-funnel content that can pull viewers further into the sales funnel.
Conclusion
Content marketing at the top of your sales funnel has a big impact on acquiring customers and revenue down the line. Furthermore, effective content marketing at this stage brings more leads into your sales funnel.
Follow these tips today to bring more people into your sales funnel and pull them towards the bottom.
But what if you think you’re incapable of creating the right type of content at the top of the sales funnel? Fortunately, I can help your business create the type of content you need to achieve your targets. Get in touch with me.
