One of the biggest mistakes companies make with content marketing is creating too much bottom funnel content.
In the sales funnel, bottom funnel content is the content that makes the final conversion.
Imagine that you walk into McDonald’s to purchase a hamburger. The bottom funnel content includes the:
- Product Name: “Burger”
- Product Price
- Description or Image
You could even say that the “Open” or “Push” sign on the door as you walk into the restaurant is bottom funnel content.
Why is this bottom funnel? Because you’ve pretty much already decided that you’re going to buy. You know that McDonald’s exists. You’ve heard good things. You’ve decided to walk into the store. There isn’t much left to do other than make a decision and hand over the money.
If this was as far as we went in thinking about the McDonald’s sales funnel we would attribute a lot of sales to bottom funnel content. The “Push” sign gets a credit. The image on the menu gets a credit.
The folks at McDonald’s know that this content is important. But their actions over the last several decades indicate that they’re more focused on top funnel content. The kind that raises awareness for the brand and its products.
Top Funnel Content
McDonald’s has been very focused in their effort to create top funnel content over the years. Lots of it has been in video advertising. That was a main channel of focus for many companies in the second half of the 20th Century. There were commercials with star athletes. There were sponsorships with musicians. All kinds of things.
But McDonald’s also did a lot of things in other areas. They did a lot of billboard advertising. They knew that many of their customers were driving on America’s highways and in need of quick, delicious food. So billboards made sense.
Top Funnel content is aimed at capturing the attention of a potential customer. That’s relatively vague, but for good reason. Depending on your company’s values and preferences, creating top funnel content can have very few rules. It’s good to have certain rules, but allow yourself to be open to all possibilities.
For example, basketball doesn’t seem to have a lot to do with hamburgers. In fact, before McDonald’s made commercials with Michael Jordan and Larry Bird, it would have seemed foolish. But people were very into basketball in the late ’80s and early ’90s. So to McDonald’s, it was a perfect marriage for some great top funnel content.
Those commercials were 90% entertainment and basketball and about 10% of a call to action to buy a Big Mac.
That’s top funnel content: Entertainment and/or Education. With the strict goal of getting attention for your brand.
You can do it in many ways, including with a blog.
If you’re interested in creating top funnel content on a blog, here are some tips…
1. Questions
The best source of top funnel content is identifying questions people are asking and doing your best to provide the best answer. A great place to start is the questions your target customers are asking in relation to your industry. A dentist could answer questions about everything from toothbrushes to juices. From teeth whitening to jawlines.
But you can even venture outside of your perceived area of expertise. You can answer local questions about your community if you’re a local business. You can answer questions that relate to your hobbies. If you’re the owner of a small business and your hobby is golf and a lot of your customers golf then go ahead and answer questions about golf. And if you don’t have the answer, seek out an expert and ask them the question and use their answer, with credit, for your top funnel blog content.
I like to start here with most blog brainstorming. You’ll get a lot of how-to content, list content and also some vs. content. That last one might be something that starts with the question, Crest vs. Colgate – What’s the Better Toothpaste?
2. Keywords
Keywords are the friendly cousin of questions. When most people visit a search engine, usually Google, they are seeking information. The keyword or phrase they type into Google is the “question” they’re asking as a way to get information. It’s obviously not always a question. It’s close, but not always a question.
Google has their Keyword Planner. There are other paid tools or ones like Ubersuggest that provide some insight into the popularity of certain keywords. But many keywords are first-time keywords. That means people search for a lot of similar things with different keywords and phrases. And they search for very unique things.
It’s good to identify a mix of popular keywords and also keywords that might seem less popular. You can more easily get high rankings with the less popular keywords. From that you can learn how to rank for the more popular terms.
A big thing with keywords, though, is context. When identify a keyword make sure it fits with the top funnel content profile. Lots of people might be searching for “basketball shoes” on Google. But the odds are they are wanting to shop for those shoes, not necessarily read a blog post about them.
A good indicator of top funnel content opportunities is if you see a Wikipedia listing high in the rankings. Wikipedia is the king of top funnel content. At least top funnel educational or information content. They can be beaten though. If you see ecommerce listings, it’s more bottom funnel than top funnel.
3. Entertainment
The commercials with Michael Jordan and Larry Bird were entertainment. It was also a form of sponsorship or branded content. Michael and Larry were entertainers at the highest level with their basketball abilities. People wanted to see them play basketball. McDonald’s created a partnership that would attach their brand to the entertainment.
That creates awareness for McDonald’s and that leads to sales of hamburgers.
Mark McCormack was a 20-something year old attorney when he saw an opportunity in the 1950s. He thought that professional golfers of the time were underpaid for their exhibitions. So he started booking events for certain pros and getting them more events and more money per event.
That led to a meeting with Arnold Palmer. With Palmer, McCormack had a great entertainer and brand partner. Together they created a vision where professional star golfers would command 10 times as much income off the course as they would earn on it.
Arnold would help create top funnel content for everything from golf clubs to cars to motor oil and a lot more.
Where are your customers getting their entertainment? How can you create new content or partner with existing content creators to create a brand partnership?
4. Copy & Innovate
There is a lot of blog content out there.
As you look around you’re going to inevitably find content that exists. You want to see what is working. If something is ranking #1, #2 or #3 for a keyword or question, it’s something good. It’s something that people want. You don’t have to reinvent the wheel.
But you also don’t want to straight up copy. That will never work.
What you’re trying to do is improve upon the best content. That can mean a lot of different things. It might mean adding more detail to the answer. It might mean adding more information. It might mean adding your own stories and examples.
That’s where the innovate comes in. See what is doing well. Don’t change the entire dynamic of your answer. Fit the profile of what’s working, but add your own spin.
5. Internal Research & Expansion
If you’ve been doing some top funnel content creation on your blog, preferably for a few years, you can go into your analytics and do some internal research. See what has been doing well. See what has been lagging behind. This can provide some great insight into the trends and topics that are hitting home and that provide some opportunity.
When starting out with a blogging strategy I like to experiment a little. Then when something shows a little promise I like to expand in that area and continue experimenting. Then if something starts to show a little promise you can invest more effort into that area.
For example, say a lawyer is blogging about legal questions, local questions and also some golf questions. The legal area is doing well. The lawyer expands on those questions. But then later the golf posts starts doing well. The lawyer can expand in that area with more blog posts.
Conclusion
Top funnel content is the main goal with a business blog. If you’re doing bottom funnel content you’re going to struggle. It can seem counterintuitive. Bottom funnel content, by its nature, converts at a high rate. Top funnel content is more difficult to track because it usually doesn’t lead to conversions right away. And usually those conversions are attributed to something else.
But you can bet that McDonald’s could tell that sales improved after those commercials with Michael Jordan and Larry Bird. The “Push” sign on the door may have gotten the credit. But the folks at McD’s probably knew better.