by Calvin Smith
Last month, I discussed the importance of automating your top of the funnel marketing campaign. In addition, I noted several pieces of content that are optimal for that stage of the marketing funnel. So by now, you should have deployed an automated top of the funnel marketing campaign and your leads are being nurtured to the middle of the funnel, right? Great! Let’s continue with the next stage of the process: the middle of the funnel.
This blog will discuss middle of the funnel marketing and the pieces of content you can deploy to continue nurturing your leads through your marketing funnel.
What is the Middle of the Funnel?
In the top of the funnel, I noted that marketers should be making a concentrated effort to educate their new leads about their company. Moreover, I discussed that the top of the funnel could be called ‘Brand Awareness.’ In the middle of the funnel, you should still continue to educate your leads, but now is the time to generate further interest from them.
By now, your leads should have a fundamental understanding of who you are as a company and the services that you provide. Now, your leads enter the start of the ‘consideration’ stage. The middle of the funnel is where you can start to show your leads why your offerings will be beneficial to them and might be the answer to some of their business challenges.
The middle of the funnel is also a stage where you can start to separate leads who are in serious consideration of your business offerings and investing time into evaluating your offerings, versus those who still need more time discovering your brand and whether your offerings will be of use to them.
With this background in mind, it’s now time to supply your leads with relevant content. Let’s dive further into what content you can deploy to nurture your middle of the funnel leads.
What content are you deploying to nurture your middle of the funnel leads?
Content to Nurture Your Middle of the Funnel
As stated previously, at this point you have most likely deployed content in the top of the funnel that educated your leads about your company and allowed them to become familiar with your offerings. In the middle of the funnel, we do not want to deviate from this strategy but rather enhance your educational efforts and at the same time, start the process of showcasing your offerings. I will discuss a few pieces of content that can help educate your leads and will nurture them through the middle of the funnel, pushing them down to the bottom of the funnel.
Survey
A survey is a piece of valuable content that I believe is often overlooked and underappreciated. This type of content allows you to understand your leads further and discover some of their pain points—how did they hear about your company, what do they value, why are they looking for a particular service?
For example, here at Aragon, we offer distinguished, objective, and action-oriented research and advisory that offers professionals the immediate insights they need to address their business and IT challenges. Deploying a survey helps us to better understand the IT challenges a business might be facing or other issues that they may be experiencing in an ever-changing technology environment. Surveys simply help you as the marketer understand and identify a variety of pain points your lead is experiencing.
Blogs
Blogs were discussed as a piece of content applicable for your top of the funnel marketing campaign, but here again, blogs are also a vital piece of content to incorporate in your middle of the funnel marketing campaign.
The benefit of blogs is that they can be short-form or long-form informational pieces. Blogs are a versatile piece of content that are easily consumed and easy to create. In addition, at this stage of the funnel, you can start to write blogs that have your middle of the funnel leads in mind. Like a survey, blogs are a great way to touch upon their pain points and how your offerings come into play.
Use Cases
Use cases are an excellent piece of content to show leads the value of your brand but also how you separate yourself from competitors—and in some cases, how you have outperformed your competitors.
At Aragon, we are the only research and analyst firm that has deployed visual research. We take pride in highlighting how the videos that accompany every research note go in-depth to cover key concepts, technology trends, and competitive insights in just a few minutes or less. Furthermore, our visual research is backed by client testimonials who rely on visual research because it’s a powerful way to quickly process and understand information, and it helps them put technology insights to work faster than their competitors
Checklists
Checklists are a great source of content that allows your leads to start thinking about how well your brand meets their needs. Providing this type of content allows your leads to go step-by-step and determine what is missing from their organization that will improve business processes.
In August, Aragon deployed an enterprise security checklist. Enterprise security is a hot topic and area of concern, and we want our clients and prospective clients to ensure they have reliable and effective security measures in place to protect confidential data and information. We can then help them fill in the gaps of their security strategy.
Bottom Line
The middle of the marketing funnel does not often receive the amount of attention that it deserves and requires. It’s an important stage where leads are considering your brand and business offerings. It’s essential that you devote the same amount of time and resources towards your middle of the funnel campaign as you would towards the top of the funnel or even bottom of the funnel (which will be discussed next month). Remember, it’s vital that you are providing your middle of the funnel leads with content that is still educating them about your services but also at the same time, allowing them to explore their pain points and evaluate if your offerings will be a solution to their problems.