How to Create Content That Will Move Your Leads Through the Sales Funnel: What to Create

Table of Contents: How to Create Content That Will Move Your Leads through the Sales Funnel

1. How does content marketing fit into the sales funnel?
2. Top-of-funnel content
3. Middle-of-funnel content
4. Bottom-of-funnel content
5. Determining what to create
6. Creating your content
7. After you publish

Keyword research

The first step in any content creation should be keyword research. We won’t spend too much time here discussing this, but if you’re not sure how to get started, feel free to check out The Beginner’s Guide to Keyword Research for SEO and our article on How to Identify Quality Keywords.

Once you’ve spent some time figuring out what it is that people are searching for in your industry, you should have a relatively list of long-tail keywords. And if Google’s Keyword Planner isn’t returning enough results, you may want to check out other tools, like KeywordsFX or Quora.

Identify knowledge gaps

After doing your keyword research, you should look for gaps in the knowledge that already exists online. What are people looking for that they can’t find? What questions are being asked, but not answered? If you can figure that out, you have a great chance of creating successful top-of-funnel content.

You may think that everything has already answered, but even with the billions of pages already out there, it’s impossible to have quality information on every topic that relates to your industry.

Figure out where content falls in the funnel

Hopefully, between keyword research and identifying knowledge gaps, you are able to come up with quite a few solid ideas for content. Once you do, you’ll want to map out where everything falls in your sales funnel.

Divide your ideas into top-of-funnel, middle-of-funnel, and bottom-of-funnel, and figure out which format suits each topic best. Then, see if there is a logical pathway between your content.

For example, let’s say you run a pest control service. After doing keyword research, you see that lots of people search for “how are spiders getting into my house?” Maybe you find a ton of interesting (and terrifying) statistics and turn them into an infographic that provides an answer to that question. Then, you link the page with your infographic to a page titled “How to Get Rid of Spiders,” which links to a contact page.

By creating those three pieces of content, you answer a commonly-asked question in an interesting way, provide a solution to a problem that you can safely assume they have, and introduce them to your contact information. Perfect!

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