Most businesses start blogging using the traditional content marketing funnel hoping that their clients will go through all the stages: Awareness -> Interest -> Consideration -> Evaluation -> Purchase.
They do it because a most content marketers suggest this generic strategy to them.
However, blogging along this funnel may result in a waste of time and money with mediocre and slow results.
Here’s why:
Blogging takes time to bring tangible consistent results.
You need to plan your content, write it, edit, have it indexed, promote, audit and evaluate – all of that is relatively slow and you won’t see any return for several months.
If your start strictly with top of the funnel content and produce articles aimed at awareness you may delay everything even further – for years.
However, as a business, your main goal is to get to good ROI as soon as possible.
That is why we suggest moving up from the bottom of the funnel.
That is, first cover all the commercial intent keywords and topics.
Most of them are covered by your service and product pages, but there are always other purchase-related content opportunities that you can turn into blog posts. Remember, blog posts usually outperform pages, so you can’t afford to count only on your pages.
90% of the businesses we’ve helped grow online already had an audience that’s looking to buy what they were selling. That’s the audience you need to harvest first, before you even think of addressing the unaware and uninterested.
Once you cover all the purchase-related queries with your blog posts, move on to the comparison and evaluation ones. Those are the people on the fence, figuratively speaking they are “next in line” to learn about your offer.
Awareness & Interest are at the top of the funnel, and you need to target these topics in the very last order, literally when you are already “out” of purchase-related topics. Awareness & interests topics are broad, they help you expand you reach, branch out into adjacent audiences, discover more opportunities and audiences. They are all great and useful in the long-run, BUT only work on them once your blog has captured all the purchase-ready visitors!
If you blog from the bottom of the funnel up, you get to money faster.
Remember, blogging is an investment, so you need to be careful building your content plan.
Unlike ads, blogging takes longer to get to ROI, so don’t waste your budget on top of the funnel content at the very start.
If you’re wondering about the best way to go with blogging for your business, reach out to us and request a consultation.