Content marketing remains one of the most successful marketing strategies for B2B SaaS marketers. In fact, around 90% of marketers have maintained their content marketing funnel budget from 2021, to 2022.
Content can be used to supplement a variety of approaches, but is particularly popular for those that favor inbound marketing. The primary goal of all marketing content is to provide value to users, and thereby build a relationship based on trust and information.
To truly make the most out of your content marketing strategy, you need to understand the content marketing funnel, and how to implement it within your wider efforts. Your content library should be built around the funnel to ensure that each piece has the best opportunity to resonate with buyers, and generate conversions.
As a B2B SaaS company, how do you build a content marketing funnel and content library to support your funnel? Where do you begin? It can be easy to start generating content, and lose sight of the primary goal. Take the time to analyze your current content, and ensure that you’re targeting buyers at every possible opportunity within their engagements with your business.
What is the Content Marketing Funnel?
The content marketing funnel was built to segment and track audiences through their engagement with your content, and your business. You might also see the funnel referred to as “the buyer’s journey” or “the sales funnel”.
They all follow a similar structure, but in this case, we’re referring to the content that leads receive at each specific stage.
The content marketing funnel tracks from the contact’s first content exposure with your business, through to their final conversion. This might not necessarily be a purchase decision, but simply the desired goal you’re focusing on with each interaction. This could be signing up for a meeting, or downloading a demo.
Whatever your goal, the content marketing funnel allows you to push your leads towards that goal with valuable content at every stage.
Each marketer or marketing team is likely to have varied names or additional stages to their specific marketing funnel. However, the generally agreed stages in every funnel are:
- Awareness/Discovery
- Consideration/Evaluation
- Conversion/Purchase
- Delight/Nurture
The final stage will depend on how important future customer commitment is to your business. However, it’s important to bear in mind that it’s typically less costly to retain an existing customer, than secure a new one.
Types of Content for Each Stage
It’s important to bear in mind that some types of content will be valuable across stages. You can integrate content to perform for inbound, outbound, or paid strategies.
The key is to add value for the customer at that specific stage. Consider what they will need from you in order to evaluate you as an option for purchase.
Therefore, the type of content might be applicable across stages, but the individual purpose will be different.
Awareness
This stage might also be called the discovery phase. Here, your customer might not even be aware that they have a problem, or that solutions exist. It’s likely that they don’t know anything about your company, especially if you haven’t previously spent time focusing on branding within your market. When we talk about demand generation, we are talking about this stage in the content marketing funnel.
Therefore, content at this stage needs to spend time educating these buyers and focusing on their problems (not on your software). Have they come to your content with a specific question? What challenges might they be facing? What would they find valuable as a resource? These are all questions that you need to ask and answer before generating a piece of content for the awareness stage.
The goal is to make them aware of their problem, aware that there are solutions, aware of your solution, or a combination of the above.
Consider the following types of content for those in the awareness stage:
- Blog posts/Cornerstone pages
- Paid advertising
- eBooks/Whitepapers/Guides
- Podcasts
- How-Tos/Tutorials
- Infographics
Consideration
This might also be called the evaluation stage. At this point, your buyer has gathered value from your content. Thanks to your content, they should understand their problem better, and be looking for a solution. You have already been a valuable resource to them in their search for further information, so they might be considering you as the solution of their choice.
However, they might also be considering whether they are happy to make a buy a software and if they are then what criteria they should use to evaluate the tools on the market. Content for this part of the content marketing funnel should secure your company’s place as a purchase option, and nurture the connection with the potential buyer. However, it’s important not to be overbearing. Value is still the aim of the game, and you need to nurture that existing trust into something that drives a purchase or conversion. When this stage of the funnel is done right, you will be setting the selection criteria for the software the buyer will choose, so it’s critical that you work on building up a good content strategy here.
Consider the following types of content to add value at the consideration stage:
- Newsletters
- Further resources eg. Guides/eBooks
- Product overviews
- Social media posts/outreach
- Case studies
Conversion
What constitutes a conversion will be entirely dependent on your marketing or campaign goals. You might be looking to secure a purchase, or you might simply look to schedule meetings or book a demo. Either way, content at this stage will be focused on pushing a buyer towards that conversion.
This content will likely include more information about your company, or your specific solution. You need to prove that your solution is the right choice, and that you can be trusted as a working partner.
Therefore, some of the best-suited content for the conversion stage include:
- Video tutorials/How-to’s
- Customer success stories
- Free trials (solution dependent)
- Product demos
Delight
Finally, you need content to facilitate the delight stage of engagement with your business. This stage can be forgotten, as there is often more effort put into securing the customer, rather than keeping them. However, it’s important to retain customers, as replacing them is far more time and budget-consuming.
At this stage of the content marketing funnel, you need to implement content that supports your buyers. Stay in touch with them, and make sure they are happy with your existing relationship, and your solution. Often, word of mouth can be an extremely successful marketing strategy. Make sure your customers have something to write home about.
Use the following types of content to maintain your existing relationships:
- Email campaigns
- Online tutorials or educational videos
- Social media conversations
- Support documents/FAQs
Content Marketing Strategy
The best content marketing strategies take each of these stages into account. Make sure to generate content that caters to buyers at every single stage of the content marketing funnel.
Take a look at your existing content library, if you have one. Is your content performing as expected? Have you got content targeted at varying stages for a variety of buyers? Take the time to categorize each piece of content, and use this process to understand where your buyers might need more support along the funnel.
You might find you’re neglecting a stage, or that a lot of your content lacks a clear purpose. This is why we regularly audit our content.
Now, whatever your findings, re-structuring your content funnel doesn’t necessarily have to be extremely time-consuming. Often, content can be repurposed and edited to suit a variety of goals and channels. For instance, a blog could be translated into video format, and social media posts could make a valuable email sequence. The important thing is to make sure that each piece of content serves a buyer at a specific stage in their content marketing journey.
At Nituno, we work with B2B SaaS companies to build and fill a full content marketing funnel. Our teams of expert writers and strategies can help you to understand your buyer’s journey with your content, and how you can best encourage them towards a conversion. Get in touch with us today for a content audit.
