Presenting the wrong kind of content to customers at a particular point in this journey can drive them away instead of drawing them in. Here’s a handy guide to help you understand the major parts of the content funnel and what content works best at each point.

Advance Awareness About What You Offer

At the top of the sales funnel, potential customers are just becoming aware of your existence. They might be in search of answers to general questions about your industry, or they might stumble upon your site while browsing the web. This is the largest part of your funnel, as many of the people who encounter your company may never move forward toward a purchase.

For customers at this stage, a blatant sales pitch or instructions on how to make a purchase would be inappropriate. The primary goal for this stage is to hook site visitors with informative or entertaining content that makes them come back for more or investigate further. Content for the awareness stage of the buyer’s journey should also build brand awareness and authority so that consumers view your brand as the best in your industry.

Focus on the Consideration Process

Consumers at the consideration stage of the buyer’s journey are in the process of gathering information to decide whether to buy and which company should get their business. They might be evaluating your offerings and comparing your company with others in the same industry. Content you produce for this stage of the sales funnel should focus on convincing customers that your product or service is the best fit for them.

Related: How to Pull the Trigger: Perfecting Your Sales Funnel

Potential customers at this point want in-depth information. Detailed articles, white papers and case studies are all appropriate for consumers trying to learn more about your company, industry and specific product offerings. Use content at this part of your sales funnel to satisfy the curiosity of site visitors, and start making gentle suggestions that move them toward purchasing by adding calls to action.

Drive a Purchase Decision

At the end of the sales funnel, consumers have narrowed down their options and reached the point where they are ready to buy. Content aimed at these consumers should help drive that final decision and make the process of buying as easy as possible.

During this last phase of the buyer’s journey, reviews and ratings can help consumers make that final decision to buy. Special offers and sale pricing presented at this point can create a sense of urgency.

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Content Funnel Considerations

Keep in mind that how long consumers spend in each part of the funnel can vary significantly by industry and by the type of product or service you’re offering. B2B clients often take longer to make a purchase decision and need more information during the consideration process. Consumers of streaming services or entertainment media might make purchase decisions quickly once you capture their attention during the awareness stage.

Engage your audience and increase conversion by creating the right kind of content for each stage of your sales funnel. To learn more about it, get in touch with us and we’ll help you develop effective content pieces for your brand. Fill out our contact form or call us at (888) 983-3103.

The post Is Your Content Helping or Hurting Your Sales Funnel? appeared first on Crowd Content - Blog.

Without well-defined buyer personas, your writers and content developers are left guessing who their audiences are. By developing a detailed sketch of your ideal customer, you ensure that everyone is on the same page regarding content creation, and you make it more likely that your content actually reaches the intended market. Fortunately, developing buyer personas is fairly simple.

Understanding Buyer Personas

Buyer personas are imaginary characters that embody the traits of your most desirable consumer groups. In essence, each individual buyer persona embodies a different subset of your customer base, and the buyer personas you create are specific to your industry and business.

A sporting goods company might create a buyer persona depicting a 30-year-old mother of two boys who lives in a suburb in the Midwest and whose children participate in soccer, basketball and baseball. A hip, modern office furniture company might have a buyer persona depicting a single 25 year old who just got promoted into a junior leadership position at an urban tech company and deals directly with both upper management and clients. The more specific your description is, the more effectively you can target your buyer.

Most companies who use buyer personas create documents describing each of these buying groups. A buyer persona document might include demographic information, interests, purchasing motivations and specific concerns of the imaginary customer.

It should be specific, not overly general, and should take up about a full page. Writing the buyer persona in first person can help you clarify the challenges and issues your imaginary customer faces.

Steps for Developing Buyer Personas

The first step to developing a buyer persona is to define the most general characteristics of that customer group. Start broad and narrow down the details as you work on each persona. Some specific things to include in your first rough buyer sketch include:

• Age
• Geographic location
• Specific industry
• Job title and duties
• Typical activities she does throughout her day

Once you have a general sketch of your buyer, dive into more details, such as:

• Her objectives and goals
• Her place in the decision chain for purchases
• Problems or obstacles she typically encounters
• Challenges and frustrations she deals with frequently
• Where she is in the consideration process with regard to purchasing your product or service

After developing a cohesive buyer persona that gives your team a good grasp of who this customer is and what they need from your company, you can also flip the script to address specific ways you might want to target her as a customer. Things you might add onto a buyer persona to give it more value include:

• Individual and long-tail keywords that directly target this specific buyer persona
• Engagement patterns, such as social media use, device preferences and who she trusts for recommendations or advice
• Media consumption habits, including where she gets her news
• The types of content she responds best to, such as informational articles, entertaining videos or highly visual infographics
• Specific questions she might have about your specific company and its offerings

Contact us to help you develop buyer personas for crowd-based content creation and ensure a coordinated brand identity tailored to your specific customer base.

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The post How to Develop Buyer Personas to Create Powerful Content appeared first on Crowd Content - Blog.

Producing social media posts isn’t quite the same as writing content for a blog or website, but your social posts and web content should complement each other. The goal isn’t just to drive up your rank in the search engines, but also to drive traffic directly to your site from social media platforms. If you want to maximize the impact of your social media, here are six ways to really make your posts pop.

1. Go Visual

Social media users love visual posts, so include a photo, video or infographic to draw eyes and encourage sharing. Choose compelling images that tell a story or make the reader curious about what’s going on.

2. Focus on Every Word

Tight writing is required when you only have 140 characters or a small text box to get your point across, but simply stating the facts doesn’t get anyone excited enough to interact with your brand. You don’t have to go the click-bait route to get your audience engaged, but you do need to give them a reason to continue scrolling through your social media posts or visit your website. Use leading questions, maintain a conversational tone and imply what’s beyond the link without revealing everything to incite curiosity in your social media followers.

3. Tailor Your Content

Different types of social media posts work best on different platforms. A photo that works well as a Pinterest pin might flop as an Instagram image, while a clever Tweet may not quite be the right fit for your Facebook fans. Research and understand the demographics of each site before posting to ensure each post ends up where it belongs.

4. Use Hashtags Wisely

Whether or not to include hashtags, and how many you should use, is extremely platform-dependent. On some platforms, such as Facebook and Twitter, too many hashtags makes a post feel cluttered. Instagram users expect lots of hashtags and use them to find new accounts to follow. Trending hashtags can draw eyes to your post if the tags are relevant, or they can turn off potential followers if the connection between hashtag and post is too tenuous.

5. Get Influencers on Board

Influencers are social media superstars that can bring attention to your site with a single mention. Avoid mega-celebrities as influencers and approach smaller social media personalities that have a group of extremely dedicated fans in your particular niche.

6. Let Your Social Media Team Go Wild

Sometimes, business social media pages can feel too staid and underwhelming. Give your social media team some leeway to be playful, controversial or clever to get followers talking about your brand. Showing off a bit of personality drives engagement, making it easier to get those elusive clicks and shares.

The post 6 Expert Secrets to Make Your Social Media Posts Pop appeared first on Crowd Content - Blog.

Understanding Long-Form Content

Before you can optimize the length of your posts, you need to understand what long-form content is. Not everyone defines long-form content the same way. Some bloggers consider anything over 1,000 words to be long-form content, while others set a limit of 1,500 or 2,000 words as the absolute minimum.

Effective long-form content isn’t just about length, though. Old black-hat SEO tactics such as keyword stuffing and writing long passages of useless filler content don’t deliver any benefits and can actually harm your search engine rankings and shareability. Instead, focus on adding more value to your site instead of just more words. Posts that delve into the nitty-gritty details of a topic work effectively as long-form content, while posts that meander off onto tangents don’t tend to perform as well.

Search Engines Love Long-Form Content

Ranking at the top of search engines for a given keyword is the goal of many bloggers and website developers, but there’s a lot of mystery about what tactics actually get you there. A 2012 study by SerpIQ looked at search engine rankings for more than 20,000 individual keywords and found that content length correlated strongly with how well specific pages ranked. On average, pieces of content ranking in the top 10 in search were consistently over 2,000 words.

One reason long articles perform so well in search engines is that well-crafted longer pieces tend to include more long-tail keywords. These multi-word keyword phrases get you hits whenever someone types those exact words into a search engine, and they also indicate to search engines that your content is completely on-topic for your niche.

Long-form content also tends to garner more backlinks than shorter content because other sites link to it as an authoritative reference or as in-depth background material for their own articles. Having plenty of quality backlinks is another well-known tactic to boost your own site’s search engine results.

Boosting Engagement with Long Articles

Long-form content doesn’t merely cater to impersonal search engines; it also helps keep actual readers more interested and engaged. Visitors view your site as an authority and put more trust in what you say when you have long-form content. People are also more likely to share long-form content on social media, which brings in new readers and gives search engines another clue that your content is valuable.

Savvy modern bloggers don’t look just at how many people visit their pages. Modern bloggers also have to consider how long visitors stay on particular pages, whether they click through to other pages on the site and if they actually convert from visitors to buyers. Long-form content performs better for all of these metrics, making longer pieces the best choice for bloggers who want to grow their sites and increase their overall revenue.

The post Is Long-Form Content the Way to Go? appeared first on Crowd Content - Blog.

Research the Possibilities Before You Pitch

Ensure you’re ready for your big outsourcing pitch with all of the details you need to make your boss take notice. Before you even consider setting up a meeting, gather information about which specific tasks you want to outsource and the steps you need to take to outsource those tasks.

If you’re interested in handing off content creation, social media management or marketing to an outside team, research the expertise and capabilities of the company you want to use. Be able to answer any questions your boss has about how much outsourcing might cost and how long the process is expected to take. The better prepared you are to hit the ground running, the more likely your boss is to let you implement that specific plan.

Show How Outsourcing Benefits the Company

For your boss, the biggest selling point is how your proposal generates revenue or saves the company time or money. Put the focus on company gains by showing how outsourcing helps your company meet key performance indicators. Explain how outsourced content or social media posts can help you attract new customers.

You might also want to emphasize how scaling up or scaling back your outsourcing makes it easy to control costs and save money, especially compared to paying an in-house team to do the same job. For maximum impact during your pitch, collect data on how much time it currently takes to complete similar tasks in-house and create charts to show the savings visually.

Address Potential Concerns

Your boss is likely to have questions and concerns, especially if the company hasn’t used outsourcing before. Consider any potential issues with outsourcing and try to address them early in the pitch before your boss brings them up. Don’t bring these things up as potential problems, though.

Instead, integrate the solutions into your pitch to circumvent any objections. For example, if you think your boss might be concerned about losing control over your brand identity, show how you plan to create detailed brand guidelines to ensure that outsourced content fits into your company’s brand image.

Try Alternative Strategies

Ask for a trial run if your boss seems hesitant to outsource a larger project. Suggest outsourcing a smaller project for a limited amount of time to test out the concept. Once you have hard data showing the benefits of outsourcing compared to prior in-house efforts, it might be easier to convince your boss to scale up your outsourcing efforts.

Once your boss is on board, make sure your outsourcing efforts succeed by choosing a company with the experience and creativity needed to handle your project. Contact us about our enterprise content solutions to get started.

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