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Posted by: Lucid Content Team
Like it or not, a lot of the content we consume online has a very specific purpose: to get you to buy. Or sign up. Or learn more. Even the seemingly fluffy pieces like “The 10 Best Dog-Friendly Hotels in Seattle” have been crafted to influence a specific response.
Why? Because most of the content we read and interact with on a daily basis is part of the content marketing funnel. Learn more about this content funnel and different types of content marketing.
The content marketing funnel visualizes the journey that potential customers go through when considering a purchase, and it’s part of a larger overall content marketing strategy. The content in the different stages supports the customer journey, and good content pushes your leads closer to a purchase.
The four stages of the content marketing funnel are awareness, evaluation, purchase, and delight. Each stage serves a specific purpose in the customer's journey, as should the content presented to the customer in those stages.
A comprehensive content marketing strategy addresses these questions:
- What type of content do I need to create?
- How will I measure the success of my content?
- Where can I improve my content strategy?
To understand how your content fits into the overall customer journey from discovery to purchase, you may want to build a customer journey map.
When potential customers first enter into the content marketing funnel, you should assume that they are unaware of your company or the solution you provide. It’s now your job to make them aware. Top-of-funnel (TOFU) content focuses on educating your audience. You can use content types such as:
- Shareable blog posts
- Social media posts
- Infographics
- Videos
- E-books
- Podcasts
But don’t stress—you don’t have to try every single content type. Test a few that seem to resonate with your intended audience and track their success. With each piece of content you create, ask yourself:
- Are prospects viewing, interacting with, and sharing the content?
- Is my target audience interacting with my content?
- Is there any follow-through after interaction?
Use metrics like time on page, number of reviews, and bounce rate to assist in answering these questions, and dig into Google Analytics to understand more. If you find that your content falls short or doesn’t address the correct audience, pivot. Just because you’ve started on one path doesn’t mean you can’t make changes to your strategy.
We also compiled a list of useful resources and tools that can help with creating or promoting the content pieces mentioned above:
- For creating shareable blog posts, try HubSpot’s blog post maker.
- To schedule social media posts ahead of time using tools like Hootsuite or CoSchedule.
- Read through our how to make an infographic guide, to help you get started on creating your infographic using flowcharts.
- For video editing, try using Apple’s default video editing software, iMovie, which is also pre-installed on mobile Apple devices. If you're not a Mac user, Windows also has a pre-installed video editing option.
- To create quick and easy E-books use Adobe’s E-book creator tool.
- For podcast audio editing, you can try either Audacity or GarageBand.
2. Evaluation
In the middle of the funnel (MOFU), potential customers determine whether they need your product or service. You’re also attempting to build trust with your consumer in the evaluation stage. No one buys from or does business with a company they don’t trust, so look for ways to build that relationship.
Consumers are looking for content that demonstrates why they should choose your product or service:
- Case studies
- White papers
- Emails
- Useful resources/downloads
- Events/webinars
Again, ask yourself if your content is fulfilling its intended purpose:
- Are people converting from this content?
- Am I generating new sales or leads from this content?
- Is this content helping or hurting my end goal?
Good content creation helps incrementally move a prospect toward a purchase. It doesn’t happen all at once, so don’t expect one piece to do all the heavy lifting. That’s why it’s so important to vary the types of content marketing you use and to have a comprehensive content strategy in place.
3. Conversion
Everyone wants to feel confident in a purchase. Give your potential customers very clear reasons why buying your product or investing in your service is the smart thing to do.
The content funnel up to this point has been about getting customers interested in your product. Now, at the bottom of the content marketing funnel (BOFU), give them a reason to buy. By offering side-by-side comparisons of similar products—and highlighting how your product or service is superior—you can easily influence a purchase.
Again, keep in mind the following:
- Does my content have a clear call to action?
- Am I making the purchase process as simple as possible?
Offering a free trial of your service can also lead to a purchase, as long as you aren’t giving away the whole product. An introductory trial gives potential consumers a taste of what you do but should leave them wanting more, since your objective is to convert them to a sale.
4. Delight
Although it’s not part of the traditional content marketing funnel, many companies have added an additional step to retain or delight customers.
Your overall content strategy should be aimed at building an audience and keeping them engaged. That work extends beyond the purchase stage.
Your content should give customers simple ways to stay engaged and share their feedback with your business. Ask yourself:
- Does this content encourage customers to leave feedback?
- Does the content give readers reasons to refer their friends?
- Does this content showcase real customer successes?
Reward your audience with special promotions or early previews of new products. Even if your customer isn’t a repeat buyer, they still have influencing power in their social circles.
Plan for success
Creating content that converts is the number-one objective of the content marketing funnel. With a solid strategy in place, your business will be able to engage with and influence customers at every stage of the content marketing funnel.
But a strong content strategy is just part of the overall equation. It’s also important to understand how your content pieces are performing using defined metrics. Regularly check in on your existing pieces of content and look for ways to improve or repurpose. And don’t forget to give new and future customers a reason to come back.
Engagement does not end with a conversion or purchase. Leverage the planning power of Lucidchart to expand and grow your content marketing funnel.
Use our hub pages as a reference to get up-to-speed on all the main digital marketing techniques. They will help you quickly understand how to make the most of the technique through definitions and recommendations on our member resources and blog articles covering strategy, best practices and the latest statistics.
How to structure a digital marketing strategy?
We believe that an omnichannel marketing strategy is essential for marketers to take advantage of the growing digital marketing opportunities for acquiring and retaining customers - so you can win more sales. Our digital marketing framework for growth, the RACE growth system, helps you structure your digital marketing plan around your customers.
Your 5 step digital marketing plan
We recommend using the RACE Framework to structure your marketing strategy, integrated across Plan, Reach, Act, Convert and Engage.
As you can see via the marketing funnel below, building an effective digital marketing strategy requires these 5 steps which nurture the customer through their experiences of your business while influencing their decision-making process and lifetime value.
The RACE Framework is a streamlined, practical, marketing framework that can be scaled up or down according to your business goals. If you're still not convinced, or need help getting buy-in from your team, check out 10 reasons why you need a digital marketing strategy.
The benefit of our digital marketing framework is you can start to see results from your marketing activities instantly, and you can use data and insights to adapt your plan to meet your objectives as you can see below.
5 stages of planning a digital marketing strategy with examples.
The 5 stages of strategic digital marketing planning include plan, reach, act, convert and engage. In this section, we will summarise the key success factors for each stage of your digital marketing strategy, with examples, integrated across the Smart Insights RACE Framework.
1. Plan
Every successful digital marketing strategy starts with a plan! We recommend you use a data-driven approach, review your current digital marketing effectiveness, and plan to improve from there.
Omnichannel planning opportunities include customizing analytics, setting up KPI dashboards and setting SMART objectives to create a strategy of prioritized improvements to how you deploy digital marketing media, technology, and data to increase leads and sales.
To ensure your digital marketing strategy is working efficiently and effectively, we recommend taking a digitally-focused approach to strategy and planning. Our RACE Framework is designed for marketers and managers to create a fully integrated, data-driven, practical digital marketing funnel to support their business' overall vision.
Our 5-step digital marketing plan guides you through reaching new audiences, to nurturing interaction, converting customers, and encouraging engagement and advocacy. That's why we call it the R-A-C-E Framework.
Digital marketing strategy structure example: 5 minute how-to video
Our digital marketing strategy framework gives you 5 steps to practical strategic business growth.
Here's a clip from our recent Digital Marketing Summit, during which Amelia took 5 minutes to outline our RACE Framework and why it's an increasingly popular strategy tool for marketers today.
Visit our website and sign up for free to catch up her full webinar 'Be adaptable: Optimize your business strategy for growth in a challenging market'.
Strengthen your marketing funnel by reaching more customers and building awareness. Inform your digital marketing strategy with the latest key online marketing techniques to drive visits to your site.
Smart Insights members can keep up to date with the latest marketing techniques across each stage of the RACE Framework. For example, find three steps below to improve your organic search in 2022, taken from our digital marketing trends.
3. Act
Encourage interactions on your website or social media to help you generate leads for the future. Having reached your audience, it's crucial you influence their next steps to move down the funnel towards a purchase decision.
Content marketingHere, strategic content marketing comes into play. Use content marketing to entertain, inspire, educate and convince potential converters during their customer lifecycle.
To influence customer behavior on your site or social media platforms, you should also look into the current wide range of innovations in interaction design, proven to boost engagement with your content. Taff has published this useful summary, with examples, of what they see as the latest interaction design trends which we can see continuing into 2022.
4. Convert
The pinnacle of your structured digital marketing strategy is, of course, to convert more customers. Use retargeting, nurturing and conversion rate optimization to remind and persuade your audience to buy online or offline if phone and face-to-face channels if these are important to you.
Our digital marketing trends highlight three tips for increasing your conversions
- Consider your use of structured always-on optimization. The options for testing are one of the biggest strengths of digital marketing, yet there are still many businesses that don't take advantage of these opportunities.
- Review the sophistication of your website personalization. According to a SmarterHQ report, 91% of consumers say they are more likely to shop with brands that provide personalized content.
- Don't underestimate social commerce. North American e-commerce agency Absolunet has identified the following key signs of the popularity of social commerce:
- 87% of e-commerce shoppers believe social media helps them make a shopping decision.
- 1 in 4 business owners are selling through Facebook.
- 40% of merchants use social media to generate sales.
- 30% of consumers say they would make purchases directly through social media platforms.
5. Engage
Finally, after you're worked so hard to get them, did you know you can increase sales from existing customers by keeping them engaged after their first purchase? Improve your personalized communications using web, email, and social media marketing using the data you already have about them to create hyper-personalized marketing campaigns.
Customer engagement research and testing options for digital marketers today include:
- A/B testing
- Customer personas
- Customer journey and content mapping
- Voice of customer surveys
- Path analysis
- Website customer intent surveys
- Usability studies of digital experiences
- Multivariate testing
Moreover, machine learning enables unprecedented insights into consumer behavior. For example, predictive analytics can be used to identify:
- Best send times to engage an individual (can be based when they originally bought or subscribed, but this can be refined through time)
- Best timing and offer for follow-up communications based on analysis of latency (average interval of response)
- Best product or category combinations from cluster-based segmentation
Download a free digital marketing template to optimize your customers' journeys
Digital marketing channels play a key role in your customers' experiences of your brand. But in today's demanding digital landscape where customers' expectations are outpacing martech developments, failure to plan your omnichannel journeys can lead to a disconnect. Our RACE Framework can help you structure your plan.
Here, you can see how paid, owned, and earned media, alongside digital experience, take roles in reaching new audiences, nurturing interaction, converting more customers, and encouraging engagement and advocacy.
Get started today using our tried and tested step-by-step process. Apply the Smart Insights RACE Framework to optimize your marketing and win more customers.
Do you have a defined digital marketing strategy?
Did you know many companies don't have a digital marketing strategy?
Our recent Managing Digital marketing research report showed that almost half (45%) of companies don't yet have a planned strategy:
Why do you need a digital marketing strategy?
Our blog, 10 reasons you need a digital marketing strategy sets out the 10 most common problems that in our experience arise if you don't have a strategy. This can help you hone the scope and purpose of your digital marketing strategy, and make the case for investment in digital marketing. Examples include:
You don't have a powerful online value proposition
A clearly defined digital value proposition tailored to your different target customer personas will help you differentiate your online service encouraging existing and new customers to engage initially and stay loyal. Savvy marketers tailor their marketing techniques to attract B2B, B2C of D2C sales and leads effectively.
Developing an omnichannel marketing strategy is key to this for many organizations, since the content is what engages your audiences through different channels like search, social, email marketing, and on your blog.
You're not integrated ("disintegrated")
It's all too common for digital marketing activities to be completed in silos whether that's a specialist digital marketer, sitting in IT, or a separate digital agency. It's easier that way to package 'digital' into a convenient chunk. But of course, it's less effective. Everyone agrees that paid, owned and earned digital media work best when integrated with traditional media and response channels.
That's why we recommend developing an integrated digital marketing strategy, so your digital marketing works hard for you! With your integrated plan in place, digital will become part of your marketing activity and part of business as usual. Find out more.
You're wasting money and time through duplication
Even if you do have sufficient resources, they may be wasted. This is particularly the case in larger companies where you see different parts of the marketing organization purchasing different tools or using different agencies for performing similar online marketing tasks.
That's why you need to invest in a marketing strategy that works for you and your team, to plan, manage and optimize your digital channels and platforms. Drive the marketing results you need to achieve your business objectives, and boost your marketing ROI.