By James Ellis

Content marketers love to talk about the power of content. It slices, it dices, it makes unsightly blemishes disappear. Mix some with water to make a paste and it will polish the silver. Content is the cheat code of marketing

But when they talk about content, they usually focus on content that increases lead generation. That’s not a bad thing. We all love new leads. But content can do a number of different things. Content that excites and interests isn’t the same as content that convinces and assures.

So if content works at every level of the sales funnel (and I’m convinced that it can), you need some intentionality.

What do you want this content to do?

Break your sales cycle into stages. Everyone’s funnel is different depending on what book they’re reading at the time, but list every stage. What kind of content will speak to people at each and every single stage?

You might be concerned that your targets won’t know how to find the content for their stage, consider that people in each stage will be looking for different content and will use different terms depending on if they don’t know who you are and if they are trying to validate that you are the correct solution provider. At the awareness stage, their search terms will be about “how to fix…” while their validation stage might be “product name reviews.”

Having killer content at each stage in the sales funnel isn’t an accident. You need to be intentional and build for each stage.