4 Types Of Onsite Content To Complement Your Sales Funnel

Woman reviewing online content in a laptop

Your website needs to do a whole lot — it needs to attract visitors, convey what your brand is about, and convert those visitors into paying customers. And you can’t do all of that with just a few pages of content: you need to have content on your site that’s not only targeted to each stage of the sales funnel, but also helps potential customers move through the funnel itself.

The sales funnel maps out the process of how someone becomes a customer, and it’s made up of four basic steps:

  • Awareness
  • Interest
  • Decision
  • Action

Connecting with your target audience and moving them through the sales funnel to the point of conversion is an essential part of running a successful online business — and the content on your website can play a significant role in that process. Not only will this help to guide customers through the funnel; it’ll also boost SEO by ensuring your content is tailored to key parts of the buying process.

Here are four types of onsite content you should be using to complement your sales funnel:

 

1. Blog Content

High quality, engaging blog content is one of the best ways to increase organic traffic to your business’s website, which is a key part of creating awareness and moving potential customers through to the interest stage of the sales funnel.

However, there are millions of blogs out there, and so you need to be able to make your content stand out from the crowd for it to help your sales funnel.

Start with a clear idea of the audience that you’re trying to reach with your blog content — this should be based on the buyer personas for your business. You need to understand who they are, where they go online, what they’re interested in, and what content will engage them or provide valuable insights. You should also do some research into the type of content that your competitors are publishing so that you can identify what works, and how you can do something better.

Laptop showing a dashboard on screen

With these insights, you can start to identify topics and ideas that are relevant to your industry, your products, and will be of interest to your target audience. Keyword research will help you to identify the search terms and phrases that your audience is using so that you can make sure your content ranks in SERPs.

Keyword research includes understanding the traffic potential each keyword could bring, as well as the difficulty of ranking on SERPs with it. Once you’ve published an article, tracking your keyword rankings is also important, although the best SEO automation tools make it quite easy.

The blog posts need to provide unique and valuable information — they shouldn’t be overly promotional. And you need to publish new content regularly to keep your audience engaged.

Most website builders and platforms like WordPress and Wix make it really straightforward to add a blog section to your site. However, if you’re running an ecommerce business using a platform like PrestaShop then you’ll have to use a plugin to add a blog but this will allow you to add categories, tags, and comments to your posts.

Not only will blog content help with your SEO, but it’s also great for sharing on social media and in emails so that you can push your leads through the interest stage.

 

2. Videos

Video content is a great asset for all stages of the sales funnel, and it can be far more engaging for potential customers than written text and images. While videos on YouTube or shared on social media are great for raising awareness, onsite video content is useful for visitors at the interest and decision stage.

Videos provide an ideal way to explain and sell your products or services. For example, if you’re selling software then you can add a short demo video to your homepage that outlines how it works and the benefits it provides. Then you can add more in-depth videos that cover different features and functionality elsewhere on your site as visitors want to learn more.

Man video recording two people

For ecommerce stores, you can add product videos that demonstrate your items being used or worn, which gives a lot more detail than written descriptions or photos. There are many different ways to add videos to your site, but one of the most popular tools is Wistia, which provides additional features like analytics and email capture popups.

Videos can be really useful in the decision-making process — they give leads a clearer idea of the products and help them to understand how it would benefit them. Not only that, but videos also help to build trust with your audience.

 

3. Frequently Asked Questions

While implementing a chatbot is a great way of providing instant solutions to common queries, adding an FAQ page to your website can improve your SEO and help convert website visitors into customers by complementing the awareness and decision stage of the sales funnel. By addressing common questions related to your organization or your products, you’ll be answering some of the relevant questions that your target audience will be typing into search engines.

If you’re able to provide a useful answer then that’s going to drive traffic to your website, which will end up improving your ranking in the SERPs. With a great answer and the right markup, you might even be able to get your site into the featured snippets on the results page.

Once someone is interested in your products or services and they’re looking to make a decision, then a comprehensive FAQ page can help provide all the details and information that they require. If a visitor is looking for answers to a few important questions in their decision-making process, rather than searching through your whole site, the FAQ page provides it all in one place.

This provides a helpful user experience for your visitors, and can help persuade them to choose your business if they’re swaying between you and a competitor. It also reduces the amount of time that your customer service and sales teams have to spend answering the same questions over and over, so that they can focus on supporting your customers and converting leads.

 

4. Social Proof

Social proof is one of the best ways to push your leads through to the action stage of the sales funnel. There are several different ways you can add social proof content to your website, including:

  • Product reviews: Honest, genuine feedback is the most effective type of social proof (nine out of ten customers read reviews before buying a product), allowing your visitors to read about your products in the words of genuine customers and highlighting your products’ benefits in a real world
  • Testimonials: Particularly if you’re an agency or a SaaS business, adding quotes and testimonials from some of your most loyal (and most satisfied) customers is an effective way of convincing leads that your service or product is worth investing in.
  • Case Studies: Depending on the product or service that you’re offering, you can use more in-depth social proof like case studies to convince visitors to choose your business. These give visitors the opportunity to get a better understanding of the real value of what you’re offering.

Not only do reviews and testimonials provide clear trust signals for your customers (and a compelling nudge towards a conversion), but they can also provide potential search ranking boosts when used effectively — even the inclusion of additional text on your product pages will make them more valuable in the eyes of Google since you’re adding more context pertaining to what the page is about, helping search engines determine its relevance.

Onsite content is an invaluable tool, and strategically using a range of different content types can effectively support all stages of the sales funnel. The most important thing is to understand your target audience and provide them with relevant content at the right time (and in the right format) to guide them through the funnel and — most importantly — convert them into customers.

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