Content is king

“Content is King” they say. And it’s true. 

Once you’ve made and optimised your home page, unfortunately it’s not time to sit back and relax. It’s time to produce. 

Content appears at all stages of the sales cycle. 

• Top of funnel content is what you’re likely to find on social media channels, in the press or at events. It attempts to amplify your reach, to entertain, be informative and answer your customers questions about a particular pain point. It’s the “ah-ha” moment that we have when we’re scrolling through our social feeds. 

• Middle-of-funnel content is more in depth. It can be anything from a whitepaper to email marketing, webinars or live events. The purpose of middle-of-funnel content is to nurture your leads until they’re ready to buy. 

• Bottom of funnel content is more serious business. It’s the type of content that a potential buyer would show to their boss during a pitch on why they should work with you. It’s your portfolio and it’s case studies which help the buyer feel empowered to make the right decision.

This next section is going to focus on the types of content you will need to host on your website.

Top of Funnel Assets

The idea of a funnel is quite simple. It’s the entire customer journey from introduction, to how you nurture those leads to closing a deal. Top-of-Funnel content helps introduce your brand to the marketplace. It’s the awareness phase. 

At the top-of-funnel, your content should aim to inform your target audience that you exist and about topics related to your brand. It’s primary goal is not focused on selling. 

You should focus on understanding what type of content your target audience responds to and create a constant stream of it. This is not the place to create something and let it fall to the back of your website. Instead, it should be a rolling machine. 

For example, if you’re a company that focuses on measuring impact, you could create content that relates to the impact ecosystem, how to measure impact and why it’s important that investors see impact measurement. 

One of the most classic examples of this type of content is the research paper in exchange for an email address. As soon as the stranger enters their email address, they transform into a lead. The following is a list of top-of-funnel content which can be hosted on your website:

• Pillar Content. As discussed in the previous lesson, pillar content will be a cornerstone of your expertise. Long-form blogs that give an in-depth analysis to the customer's problems with the status quo and how to solve them.

• Blogs. Blogs are one of the best ways to have the right people find your content. Your website’s blog should do its best to provide answers to your target audience's pain points. Keep in mind that you should always link these blogs back to your pillar content. You have many tools at your disposal to do this and they include, but are not limited to the following posts:

  • How to’s

  • Why you need to

  • 5 reasons why

  • How we use X to power X

  • The complete guide to

  • A cheat sheet of X

  • The ultimate glossary

  • How to craft a successful X

  • Mistakes to avoid when doing X

  • 10 X best practices

• Free downloadables. These can be anything from a whitepaper or eBook to a slideshow shared on LinkedIn. Any type of content that provides your target audience with free digestible resources is a key pillar to value-driven content. Consider exchanging these for an email address if you think it's that valuable.

• Guides. Guides are essentially step-by-step long-form articles which help your potential clients solve their pain points. Usually hosted on a company’s blog page, they’re a valuable asset for organic search. You can usually identify a guide online by the title “The Ultimate Guide to X” or “How To Develop Your Sustainability Strategy: A Start To Finish Guide” or “Ten Steps To Transform Your Business”. When writing a guide, consider how you go about your business and write it out for a customer who wants to do the same. For instance, if you have an online 3D printing business, your guide could be The Ultimate Guide To 3D Printing Your First Product and then name each step in the process. 

• Events & Webinars. Events and webinars are fantastic ways to engage your target audience in a non-sales environment. Whilst they are relatively different in practice, the theory behind why they work is fundamentally the same. They put a name and a personality to a face; and we’re much more likely to trust a person than a company. What’s more, we’re programmed to trust the recommendations of people much more than a brand itself. An event can influence, inspire, and impact people’s lives. It can be a talking point or a point of assertion for people. In turn, they’ll likely begin to believe in your brand and share their experience with their trusted peers. 

• Research Studies. One of the best ways to have your content promoted for you — and earn you backlinks from other websites at the same time — are research studies. This is arguably one of the most powerful approaches to drive traffic to your website through both press and organic channels. Research can include a survey of your potential clients and report, or their client, and focus on a number of topics including pain points, opinions and forward looking objectives. Consultancies use this tactic a lot and you can recognize them in headlines like “90% of CEOs believe in X”. Research studies are not only a great way to establish your business as a thought leader, they are also fantastic ways to engage your potential clients in a valuable and non-sales manner.

Middle of Funnel Assets

Middle-of-funnel content nurtures your leads until they’re ready to buy. They’ve been introduced to your brand. 

They’re leads... but they’re not ready to purchase yet. They need help. They need convincing that you're a good option to work with. There are three main things you need to give them here

• Social proof

• Educational content

• Product demos

This is the type of content that is made to entertain, to build confidence in your brand and to improve the client’s perception of your solution. In short, it should build the lead’s intent to buy. 

Middle-of-funnel content is educational and entertaining. This form of content marketing can also include email, but in this section, we’re just focusing on assets for your website. We’ll get into email marketing later. The following are three examples of middle-of-funnel assets:

• Whitepapers & eBooks. A whitepaper or eBook is usually hosted on a website and promoted through both native and paid channels on social media and search engines.
  
  They aim to help a prospective client solve a particular pain point in exchange for client information. They’ll often be sent in the form of a PDF to your email address after signing up.
  
  You’ll want to package your solution in a way that your buyer persona will actively be looking for on the web. 

• Case Studies. Case studies are an in-depth look at your portfolio. Before buying, 9 out of 10 people are looking for proof before making a purchasing decision.
  
  A case study should follow the structure of: 1) Introduction — where you identify the client’s key problems, 2) background information — where you set the scene, 3) evaluation of the case at hand, 4) the solutions which your business implemented, 5) and the direct result this had on your client’s business challenges.
  
  They should be accompanied with personal anecdotes from your clients and outside statistics to support your argument along the way. I always recommend that my clients host case studies on the front page along with client testimonials (in addition to having a dedicated page for them in your portfolio).

• Social Storytelling. When someone has already been introduced to your brand, a great tactic is to let them into the inside life of the business.
  
  This can mean interviewing your clients or employees and asking them about things that matter to them. Hosted on your website’s blog and cut into short form for social media, this can be powerful content to engage during the nurturing stage. It gives personality to a brand.
  
  Social storytelling can be either raw and unedited content or a short-form documentary. The main thing is that it lets the viewer in behind the scenes of your business, vision or mission and gives them a feeling of being part of the story.
  
  You can also ask your employees to contribute to creating this content which boosts their personal brands as well as giving them a feeling of being valued in their positions.

Bottom of Funnel Assets

Bottom-of-funnel content increases transparency in the buying process. It helps your buyers feel like they are making the right choice by choosing your solution or innovation.

The role of this type of content is to nurture prospects and customers to aid in sales conversion. Without it, you may attract prospective clients to your website but they may leave empty-handed. One of the main reasons your website fails to retain the convincing elements of the sale are inconsistency in the message flow, insufficient proof of concepts or insufficient social proof.

Providing the following type of content will help your brand increase it’s chances of conversion at a crucial stage in the sales cycle:

• Portfolio. A product portfolio is a crucial element of your bottom-of-funnel strategy as it helps the company determine the types of projects you’ve done in the past and whether you’ll be able to fulfil their specific needs. I like to group my client’s portfolios into sections which satisfy a number of clients needs and get more specific the deeper you go through them.

• Customer Testimonials and Reviews. Potential prospects want to see what your previous clients have said about you. Having a set ready can help them in their buyer journey, but they should be quantitative where possible. When you’ve finished a project, ask your clients for a review and you can always offer to make the process easier by writing it yourself. Just make sure you get it checked off. Alternatively, you can always reuse the reviews and testimonials from your LinkedIn and your case studies to be stand-alone quotes. 

• Impact Measurement. This is an important function in any sustainability or impact-driven business. Yet it’s also one of the most elusive. Measuring your impact as a brand is a difficult and complex concept and one that can cost more than most brands can afford. Yet there are tools popping up like Climate Impact Forecast — used by a number of Climate KIC brands — which can help entrepreneurs measure their projected impact. I’ll go into impact measurement in more detail in Chapter 11.

• Pricing Guidelines & Estimates. Pricing is about knowing your customer. It can be one of the determining factors of your business and it can also lock you into less-than-desirable contracts when you get it wrong. It’s normal then that entrepreneurs don’t want to put prices on their website. However, the fact is that visitors want to know — or at least have a ballpark idea — on whether or not they can afford to use your solution. The key here is confidence in your brand; if you believe that you should be charging what you charge and believe that you’ve demonstrated that with value to your prospective clients, then you should have either a pricing guideline or at least an estimate of how much they will spend on your website. Ultimately, it saves time, avoids the awkward budget questions later on down the line and shows that you’re confident in your ability to sell for that price.

• Tutorials & Live Demonstrations. Lastly, tutorials and live demonstrations are a great way to help your new clients see what they’ll get by engaging with you. By taking them through your product or service at an execution level, you can smooth out or directly address any of their concerns in real time. A product demo shows your customer how the product works visually and enables them to experience a more expensive product at no cost. 

As with all content, you can always be creative when making bottom-of-funnel content. For example, take SodaStream’s 3D product demos which are located around the world including Tel Aviv airport. The demos include a cage which holds 10,657 used plastic bottles; the equivalent of one family’s plastic consumption over a five year period. The installations are so successful because they show the huge amount of waste produced in a graphic way, strengthening SodaStream’s overall value proposition. 

Repurposing Content

All of these forms of content can also be reused and repurposed across the entire customer journey. For instance, you can turn a product tutorial into a YouTube video or cut it up into shorter clips with highlights for Instagram. You can also turn each case study into a press release or a blog. By repurposing this content, you can save yourself a lot of time and effort in the creation process.