Last week, Parse.ly’s Head of Marketing, Dave Cardiel, and Demand Generation Manager, Rebecca Allen, joined MURAL’s Social Media Manager, Sarah Parker, for a webinar to address the challenge of learning to swim in a sea of data. 

We’re drowning in data. If you work as a content strategist, in media, or as a marketer, you probably have access to more data than you can reasonably interpret. But it can be tough to decide what to focus on, what you should actually be measuring, and what data is the most efficient and useful for your goals.

That’s where the Content Marketer’s Funnel comes in. It’s a framework for measuring the impact of your content strategies. Marketers use a marketing funnel or buyer’s journey model to understand their objectives and key metrics, and the Content Marketer’s Funnel presents a similar framework for content and marketing strategists.

In this webinar, 2 revenue marketers discuss the different types of content at every stage of the funnel and how to think about your content’s performance. Let’s take a look at some of the highlights

How do we define content?

“We consider content to be the product or the marketing for our organization, and there’s a few audiences that we serve here at Parse.ly. Content can sometimes trend more towards being the product, right? The monetization is through ads, digital subscriptions, events, cantors, IPS and so forth, and companies are gearing their content to achieve one or all of those things within the programs.”

“For a lot of teams, they’re thinking, ‘Hey, we have a blog and we’re gonna send out these emails, and that’s our strategy…’ but they’s so much more to it than that. We don’t wanna overwhelm anyone, but there are so many other things that are part of it. For example, your social media is part of your content strategy, and if you have a video strategy, that’s definitely part of it too. Those things overlap most of the time, and even thinking about things like help docs that you might create goes into it.”

Why should we be considering the content marketer’s funnel?

“We want to understand our audience better, we want to reach them better, we want to inform and obviously focus on the value creation behind that, so if we can get those few points across as we go along, and as we systematically go through this, we’ll be in a good spot as content marketers. That’s where the funnel comes in.”

What’s up with the awareness stage?

“This is where a lot of content marketers always start from, especially if you have a newer team. You’re going to really concentrate on growing that awareness of your brand and putting most of your energy into planning content that’s gonna help people find out what your brand does and what you believe. You know what you’re about, and you really kind of go from there.”

“So this is gonna be things like blogs, and then thinking about maybe how you wanna break those blogs down into sharing them on social and stuff like that. It’s the first points of contact that most people will have with your brand, so it’s whatever makes sense for your brand and for your team, depending on the resources that you have. This is more of the basics that you wanna get out there and not super detailed and technical yet. That will come later”

How should we be thinking about the engagement stage?

“The engagement side of things is where we really start to engage our audience, educate them more, and kind of pull them in even further down the funnel. You want to try to find a nice balance of pulling people down the funnel willingly, hopefully not kicking and screaming.”

“You should think about your organization’s KPIs, or key performance indicators. There’s nothing wrong with whoever is running point on content at your organization sitting in on those KPI development meetings that leadership is cultivating. Remember, you’re writing to your audience. You should understand why you’re doing things and get your understanding of what those indicators are on a month to month or year to year time table. You should be writing and gearing your campaigns to that because at the end of the day, your KPIs need to be achievable.”

How can we use content to drive bottom-funnel purchase decisions?

“This is a place where you really need to make sure that you know your audience very well. When you’re writing to a practitioner audience, which would be someone who is actually doing the work, like a social media manager or maybe a team of writers. They usually aren’t making the budget decisions, so in that case, you wanna think about having some content that can help them convince their boss that this is a good investment for them to make. So if you’re talking to someone and they’re like, ‘Yeah, I love your product, I would buy it if I could, but my CMO just really isn’t sure that we need to spend this money’ you can say, ‘Well, I have this handy guide that you can use to help convince them,’ or whatever it is that makes sense for your specific brand audience.”

“The journey that they are on with you, being able to point to that and provide helpful resources for them throughout can make a really big difference in making that conversion with their boss easier. After that, then you start thinking about how you’re going to help nurture them as a customer from that point on.”