The Old Sales Funnel
We’re all aware of the traditional sales funnel. Site Visitors become Leads, Leads become Opportunities and Opportunities are converted to Sales. It’s been around for years and it served its purpose well.
Why It’s Now Outdated
But the internet and social media have have made this old sales funnel model outdated. The speed and effectiveness of our ability to communicate about your brand, our customer experience and alternatives to your brand has simply exploded.
We use social media, email, forums and review sites to discover the truth behind a brand before we buy by reading about others’ experiences with the brand. This is part of what Google calls the Zero Moment of Truth.
In other words, marketing doesn’t end with the sale anymore. It extends far into the customer relationship.
The Content Marketing Sales Funnel
In their new book Managing Content Marketing, Robert Rose and Joe Pulizzi propose a new funnel – the Content Marketing Sales Funnel.
The authors posit that after you’ve converted your opportunities to sales, your job as a marketer has only just begun. Keeping your customer satisfied with superior customer service and content that reinforces the customer’s buying decision is just as important.
Get Satisfaction is a great company out of San Francisco that helps their customers build post-sales communities with innovative software.
Content Comes in Many Forms
As an inbound marketing agency, we talk a lot about pre-sale content – blog posts, whitepapers, webinars, podcasts etc..
But if we extend our thinking about marketing to the post-sale side of things, we discover a whole set of other content that needs thought about.
User Generated Content
User Generated Content (UGC) is all the content that your customers create while engaging with your brand. This may be reviews, support requests, questions, compliments or suggestions.
People create this UGC all over the place. It can show up on social networks, forums or on your own site. Are you listening?
Customer Support Content
Any content that is created by your customers interacting with customer support is valuable. Is this data making it’s way back to Marketing or is it locked into some customer support database?
CrossSell & Upsell Content
If your customer has given you their permission, cross and upselling in a helpful way is a great excuse for creating good quality content. Often this will take the form of an email. Please make sure the email content your create is actually useful to your customers and not company information that is less relevant to their lives.
Creating Evangelists
The ultimate goal of any marketing organization is to get your customers to talk about your brand in a positive way. Of course, they’re not going to do that if they’re not satisfied with your product or service first.
But assuming you’ve got a great product, the next step is to start reinforcing that quality with follow-on content and superior customer service. This will help you to increase your retention, sell other products and eventually create evangelists that will do your marketing for you.
Tall order, we know.
But as Seth Godin says, “That’s all we have left“!
Content Marketing at Spark
Content Marketing is at the core of what Spark Marketing offers our clients. Let us know how we can help you with your content marketing program.
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Posted by CristiSpahr on November 17, 2011 |
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Tags: content marketing, sales funnel, user generated content
