Beyond the funnel: A new approach to content marketing

Far too many content marketing programs fail to connect the brand to customer problems before the customer starts looking for a solution. At this crucial and overlooked point in the customer journey, most brands provide content about the product and the industry, when they should address specific customer pain points.

There’s “a gap that exists in almost every program … when it comes to how to position your brand to put it into the consideration set,” said Liam Moroney at The MarTech Conference last month. “One of the biggest impacts is it creates a very jarring experience. It switches very quickly from thought leadership to product but fails at placing your brand into the consideration set for buyers.”

The winding customer journey

Moroney, co-founder of Storybook Marketing, a demand generation agency specializing in B2B SaaS, laid out a plan for solving this problem. The first step is to stop thinking of the customer journey as a straight path from awareness to consideration to purchase.

“[Customers] are simply not going through this linear path,” he said. “Much as we want people to, much as we build our programs to, brands are being selected in the minds of buyers through mental lists that are developed long, long before those solutions actually come up.”

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Instead of the buyer’s journey, marketers must focus on establishing mental availability: Having their brand come to mind when a buyer encounters a problem. Doing this requires using category entry points and having content that associates your brand with the specific problems it solves.

Category entry points are situations or cues that trigger a buyer to think about a problem and potential solutions. A cloud HR software vendor might target content around “management challenges for hybrid and distributed workforces” or “improving the onboarding experience for remote workers.” These topics address real problems potential buyers face and position the brand as knowledgeable and helpful.

Marketers need content that maps to these category entry points. But … 

How do you do it?

“How do you map content to this? How do you actually go about creating a content section in your overall program that helps you address these category entry points?” Moroney asked.

By focusing on problem-centric content and thinking about content not just on the funnel level, but in terms of what it is trying to communicate to the audience. Fortunately, because your product is the solution, you already know what the problems are.

 “We have a tendency to focus on the solution a lot more than the problem,” he said. “We fall in love with our own solutions. We see our technology as worthy of talking to everyone about, and we often forget about the problem that it solves … but the problem is ultimately what the audience is interested in.”

Dig deeper: The AI-powered marketer’s roadmap to the future of content

This content shouldn’t avoid mentioning the product but should primarily demonstrate a deep understanding of the problem and how the brand approaches solutions.

It’s all about the problem

Content that resonates with the audience’s challenges and provides valuable insights, establishes the brand as a thought leader and trusted source of information. Because of this, the brand is much more likely to come to mind when a buyer starts considering potential solutions.

This is a longer-term strategy and may not result in immediate sales — the ultimate success metric. So, what do you measure to find out if you’re succeeding?

“From a measurement point of view, consumption is key with this content,” Moroney said. “It’s not a conversion tactic. It’s not a demo request driver. It’s content that will seed into their minds, develop memory structures, but those memory structures will be far more valuable than a lot of the lead lists that you’ll develop with that middle and bottom-of-funnel content.”

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