Breaking Down the 5 Sections of a Successful Digital Marketing Funnel. Part 2 of 5.
Understanding the client journey through the five sections of a successful marketing funnel can provide great insight in creating relevant content tailored for step of their decision making process. In part two, we will discuss the Consideration section. Tune in.
Breaking Down the 5 Sections of a Successful Digital Marketing Funnel (Part 2 of 5)
Hello Michael Winn, Chief Digital Officer of Digital Opps, a division of RB Oppenheim Associates. Happy Monday to you guys, thanks for joining me today on the virtual lunch and learn from Digital Opps, where we talk about digital marketing strategies and tactics to help grow your business. So today we’re going to step into part two of a five-part series that we’re covering on breaking down the five sections of a successful digital marketing funnel.
For those of you who may not have listened to or chimed in to session one, section one where we talked about the awareness stage. We’re talking about the funnel which is traditionally thought of as a good sort of visual for thinking about the consumer’s’ journey from general awareness to consideration to conversion then into loyalty and advocacy, sort of these five stages. We talked last week about section one, awareness where we talk about digital empathy, looking into hashtags, really observing and thinking and feeling and putting your mind in the framework of what it means to be your consumer as they navigate the internet and think about your product industry or services that you offer.
So today we’re gonna talk about section two which is called the consideration stage. In this stage what we’re really doing is recognizing that this user has already done a pretty decent amount of educating themselves on your product or service or industry, so they’ve done several Google searches and now they’re coming back because during their search something stood out about your company or your brand specifically. So they’re looking for more information and through this I think it’s really important to understand that they’re looking to take a deeper dive. They’re looking for further examples that you are an expert in your field and that you’re going to provide the level of service that that they’re looking for. They’re looking for very specifics when it comes to either options or features or benefits. That’s what we’re looking at.
So let’s talk about some content strategies that you can provide these visitors in a digital format to really help them go through and have a successful journey as they pass through this consideration section of the digital marketing funnel. Number one, I think we can start off with obviously blog posts that are written with specific focus on specific questions that are related to your product or services. Now when I’m talking about this blog post, I think it’s important to remember you need to shoot for around a 1,000 words, 1,500 words would be great. You can do a Q&A style, you can do a case study style, as far as the writing is concerned something some people would describe this as sort of foundational to white papers or ebooks which is another great content type of content that you could introduce to people who are in the consideration stage of your digital marketing funnel. But again, with the blog post being able to have that Q&A type of format, create links that go back to the product page that they were looking at or back to the to the service page they were looking at that can be really helpful in strengthening your value proposition. And also give a contextual point of reference, it’s to that feature benefit type of structure.
So again, I bring up white papers, ebook, or case study, recently I came out with our solve that one of my favorite tools for social media marketing which is called HootSuite, who’d like the owl suite like the place you would stay in a hotel. HootSuite calm which is a free tool for marketers to be able to use for scheduling and publishing social media content. They recently came out with some information for 2018 that represented some internet behaviors when it comes to how many people are on the plan and how many people have internet access, how many people have social media accounts. Some really great information; it was a very exhaustive country by country, live, there were literally like 50 or 60 countries maybe even more, represented in this white paper. It was really kind of laid out like an infographic, which was really interesting. So it was a white paper but it was designed visually as an infographic, which is highly engaging. I thought was really smart the way they set that up, so your company, your brand can do that too. Really think about what are some of the different percentages as far as usage or effectiveness. What kind of data can you put together in a visual form to sort of guide them through your process? Whether it’s a service process or a sales process, let them know what they can expect once they engage with your company and those can be in the form of white papers, ebooks, or case studies. And then infographics of course another really useful tool.
I think right now we use a tool called Join.Me, which is a very similar like GoToMeeting, GoToWebinar, some of these platforms you can have basically free online sessions where groups of people can come and register for free and find more information and really interact with you. So we like Join.Me, it’s very user friendly. I want to say they’re pro version is like less than $200 a year. Again it’s a great tool at that level, I think you can have up to two dozen people attend at a time. So really a great platform to create a nice experience without going to some of the bigger players, like I mentioned like joining GoToMeeting or GoToWebinar which start off at like $99 a month. The webinars really can provide you an opportunity to provide information in a recorded format or screen share or video invite multiple people have a chat functionality and really dive into the specifics. Almost pre-purchase conversation so long-form videos also would be another best content strategy for the consideration phase.
And then comparison data if you’re gonna do a comparison in the industry to compare a product a product side by side or the competition side by side with yours. Again a comparison, think about when you a member of the days before the internet, and you were trying to buy a car. You would go get consumer reports. They would have a side-by-side comparison of here’s this car and here’s its features compared to this car on this car and here’s its features. So comparison data is always very helpful especially for someone who is in the consideration stage of the journey through the digital marketing funnel.
Tomorrow we’ll be back to talk about section three, which is the conversion section of the funnel. Again my pleasure to always meet with you guys and share digital strategies and tactics. My name is Michael Winn, I am the Chief Digital Officer of Digital Opps, a division of RB Oppenheim Associates and we will catch you guys tomorrow have a great Monday!