Develop new content

- Full-funnel marketing is about using content to stay top of mind with prospects throughout their buyers journey. Now, top of the funnel content aims to get in front of your target audience even when they're not in the market for your offerings. At the bottom of the funnel content nurtures prospects until they're ready to purchase. As you build up a complete content strategy do so by considering what part of the funnel content is for to make sure that you have full-funnel content coverage. Consider that people on average consume ten plus pieces of content before making a purchase decision.

And that means that you really need to promote content to introduce your brand, build trust, provide helpful information, and ultimately lead to purchase decisions. Nurture your leads by slowly moving them through the purchase funnel with more and more targeted content to lead them towards that purchase decision. And to get there you'll likely need to develop new content after maximizing content you already have. And it can be hard to get a new content strategy off the ground. Especially if you don't have any data for what's worked and what hasn't in the past for your brand.

So a great place to start is to write about all things that interest LinkedIn members. In a recent survey LinkedIn asked members to cite the primary reason they follow companies on LinkedIn. And the results showed that 76% of members wanted to stay informed on the industry news. But 63% wanted to stay up to date on the latest news from the company itself. And then 49 wanted to learn more about the company's products as well as services. Now, what we see here is strong bias towards industry news, company news, and information about products and services.

And this doesn't come as a surprise. People come to LinkedIn to better themselves so industry news is very important. They're also increasingly consuming more content to make purchase decisions, so product and company news is also just as important. And just like sales reps wouldn't just walk to a prospect at an industry event and ask for a phone number or a credit card for high consideration decision, same applies to your content marketing. This just doesn't work because there's no relationship yet. Now, you need to deliver relevant content at every step of the buyer's journey. And the best way to engage with professionals on LinkedIn is to start by developing content relevant to their industry and your products and services.

Top of the funnel infographics and slides are a fantastic starting place. Create pieces with your company's perspective on the latest industry news and drive awareness around your brand, and any mention that validates what you're doing. Then continue building bottom of the funnel demand with content like eBooks, webinars and white papers. In other words, offer low friction content to prospects at the top of the funnel and then reserve your high friction content for those who are closer to converting. Now, I'm going to leave you with this chart from the Sophisticated Marketers Guide to LinkedIn. It's a great overview that outlines ideas for what to share, setting your objectives, key metrics, and action items.

It's fantastic way to get started as you brainstorm creating new content for your content marketing strategy. You can find the full version of the Sophisticated Marketers Guide in the exercise files.