4 Marketing Funnel Essentials

There are endless pieces of information about improving your marketing

My goal is to simplify the idea of a marketing funnel for anyone getting started or wondering about what to prioritize

This is going to be the simplest breakdown of a content marketing system. These are the core components of a content marketing funnel.

1. Market
2. Traffic
3. Content
4. Offer

1. Market / Target Audience

There must be a group of people that find what your business provides as a product or service valuable.

Without this, you may as well not even try to go at the rest of these simple marketing funnel components.

TAM = Total addressable Market

2. Traffic (People Going to Your Website or Offer Pages)

Traffic is the number of visitors you get to your website. This is measured by Google analytics.

Types of Traffic:

1. Paid traffic – pay to play / pay per result (results could be views, clicks, calls, leads, etc.)
   1. Facebook ads
   2. Google ads
   3. YouTube ads
   4. Etc.
2. Earned traffic – organic, content, and residual results from paid campaigns
   1. Content writing
   2. Content marketing
   3. SEO
   4. Etc
3. Owned traffic – you own the channel you are communicating, marketing, and selling on. You either have an email list or sms list. Those are the top two most popular forms of owned traffic sources
   1. Email lists (full of info about leads and pipeline)
   2. Text / SMS lists (full of info about leads and pipeline)

3. Content

Content is just the communication and format that you use to interact with and inform your potential clients.

Some examples of content are:

• YouTube how to videos
• White papers
• Case studies
• TV shows / Movies
• News
• Instagram photos
• Tweets
• Emails

Hopefully, you get the idea.

The goals of content vary based on a few things:

1. Customer Avatar / Persona
2. Stage of Journey Customer is In (Top, mid, or bottom)
3. Industry
4. Your core offer

4. Offer

Your offer(s) should be irresistible (high perceived value for low cost or low effort).

If you get your offer sequences right, getting results for everything else comes so much easier.

When I say offer sequence, I just mean the sequence of offers that should be made in order to drive prospects further down the buyer’s journey or sales funnel.

An example of an offer sequence for one of our core offers (lead generation) would be:

1. FREE CONTENT – Blog post on “how to start selling business services online”
2. LEAD MAGNET AKA FREE IN EXCHANGE FOR INFORMATION – Facebook ads set up workbook or video series
3. TRIPWIRE OFFER – Full Funnel set up video course and breakdown (very thorough and actionable)
4. CORE OFFER – lead generation service package (monthly service)

The first “offer” is a free piece of content that anyone can read or consume without having to give anything in exchange except for their time and attention.

The second “offer” is a more valuable but gated piece of content usually referred to as a lead magnet.

Gated content or lead magnets is content that requires someone who is visiting your site to provide personal information in exchange for the (usually downloadable) content.

Lead magnets or gated content could be a recipe, a discount code, free software, access to “new” information before anyone else has access to it, and anything else you can think of that people would give up their contact information for.

Once you get someone to download a lead magnet, you (in an ideal situation) should have them automatically segmented into one of your different audience buckets.

And from here, once you’ve captured their information, it’s your responsibility to continuously overdeliver in terms of value at each stage following.

Marketing Funnel Essentials: Resources

If you’d like more information about the marketing funnel or other aspects of digital marketing, below I’ll be putting some links that you may be interested in soon.