November 21, 2014: What is “mid-funnel” content? It’s typically a mix of long-form material such as e-books, webinars, videos, white papers, and other serious stuff — that’s situated at an intermediate position in the conversion chain. Here’s Kevin Lee on this topic:
Your wide-funnel content (blog posts, social media messaging) might be performing well, but is your mid-funnel up to snuff?
Mid-funnel content needs to perform. It needs to move people who’ve already opted in to your messaging through some action, (typically Subscribe, Like, or Follow) to conversion.
It’s important because most businesses serve (or would like to serve) more than one kind of customer. For example, a psychologist might offer therapy programs for both individuals and families, and a digital marketing agency might offer SEO and social media services. Some firms serve so many discrete market segments that they must create dozens of content libraries for each segment.
Even if you don’t have to go this far, creating effective mid-funnel content that aligns with your desired segment can be expensive. And because creating mid-funnel content is an ongoing task that takes place alongside your wide-funnel activities, it can be challenging for a team to manage.
Here are some four ways to ramp up your mid-funnel content offerings for maximum impact:
1. Leverage E-Books
Create a unique e-book for each of your audience segments. Even if this e-book doesn’t happen to be a 200-page opus, it should provide sufficient value for what your downloader paid for it (typically, per the standard inbound marketing model, the right for you to contact him/her again). Most content marketing teams have access to the Microsoft Office Suite, making the mechanics of e-book creation process painless and efficient. Editing tasks are typically performed in Word, final formatting happens in PowerPoint, and the final result will be a PDF. A few years back, creating large PDFs was not a best practice, but bandwidth constraints have eased, search engines have an easy time parsing them, and thus the PDF has become a universally accepted method of distributing business documents.
2. Reprocess Your Wide-Funnel Content
A blog post created a year ago to get buzz, search visibility, and generate awareness might be attracting no hits right now, but that doesn’t mean that it’s worthless. Such an article – when combined with other old articles written on the same theme – might provide enough heft for a credible mid-funnel content item such as an e-book.
This extraction-based approach doesn’t work in every case. For example, an article written on the topic of SEO in 2009 will have very little applicability to today’s world, given the rapid churn of algorithms, tactics, and best practices in the field. In this case it would be better to simply throw it out, rather than considering it an active candidate for an e-book project. But many other blog topics are less perishable. Focusing on what you’ve already published and mining it for e-book content is a great way to jump-start the creative mid-funnel process. Sometimes all that’s required is a mild updating and copy pass to create a new product that can be immediately put to work in the mid-funnel.
3. Use SlideShare
This platform (with upward of 60 million monthly users) may be an ideal platform for showcasing your mid-funnel content. However it’s probably a mistake for you to simply upload your complete mid-funnel content library to the service, because it’s harder to determine who watched it (whereas if you put the PDF on your site you can get as much insight as your own analytics provide). But Slideshare still has value, and the service has been making more “pro-level” features available to its regular users, including improved analytics. Consider creating an edited/abridged version of your e-book for SlideShare that shares value without “giving away the store.” The result may be exposure of your brand to a desirable, unduplicated audience your other organic marketing channels may be entirely missing.
4. Consider Video
Video is an excellent medium for in-depth explanations of complex subjects. Because it’s a sequential medium, video is uniquely suited for “step-by-step” instructional tutorials. While the production costs of creating a quality video are very high relative to e-books, an entertaining and informative video has almost unlimited potential.
Furthermore, the definition of “quality video” has changed in the popular mind in the past several years. Sometimes “low-tech” (cell phone) videos are adequate to convey your story (although you’ll still have to put as much thought into them as you’d put into a traditional big-budget shoot).
To evaluate whether video content will be effective (both in its mid-funnel role and in terms of gaining wide-funnel awareness for your company), check YouTube for content in your business vertical. You may find that there are very few competitors using the service for the distribution of similar mid-funnel content, which means you’ve got an opportunity. Do the same for Facebook. If you’ve got a video ready that’s perfect for any observable niche, upload it; if such a video doesn’t exist, create it!