Brain Dump #3: Content, Leads, and the Sales Funnel

Inbound marketing should drive your sales funnel – and that means content

B2B sales amounts to nothing more than taking people who have never heard of your brand or your products and somehow converting them into happy customers – while extracting money from them for the privilege.

The process for going from this point A to point B is the sales funnel – funnel being the appropriate metaphor because you might have a large number of prospects entering the funnel at one end, yielding a much smaller number of paying customers at the other.

As any Glengarry Glen Ross fan will tell you, the raw ingredients that make this funnel work are leads – sales prospects who have shown some interest in you or your products.

Focusing sales efforts on leads, however, is mostly a waste of time, as traditional lead gen techniques are outbound (see my last Brain Dump for a discussion of outbound vs. inbound marketing ).

Instead, inbound marketing should drive your sales funnel – and that means content.

At Intellyx we have two written content deliverable formats. Our BrainBlog is our 1,000-word article format that is best-suited for top-of-funnel activities, while our 2,200-word white papers fit into the middle of the funnel.

The mid-funnel papers have a straightforward value proposition. Prospects are interested in our client’s products and want to learn more, turning to third-party content like ours for perspective and validation.

However, the top is the most important part of the funnel because it converts people who have no knowledge of you or your products into leads – but not by spamming them or twisting their arms Glengarry-style, but by engaging them with content that interests them.

To this end, our BrainBlog articles are provocative, interesting, and engaging – articles people want to read to the end, share on social media, and circulate among their coworkers.

Sometimes our clients publish BrainBlogs as guest blogs on their own web site, but more often than not, they get a third-party publication to run them (on either a paid or earned basis).

Regardless, people typically find the articles through search engines – not because of any SEO mumbo-jumbo, but because the articles discuss a topic that interests them.

We tone down the marketing in these articles to a minimum – perhaps simply mentioning the client in passing, or perhaps quoting one of their customers saying something nice about them.

Some readers of the article will want to learn more and reach out to our client – and that’s when they become leads.

Copyright ? Intellyx LLC. No AI was used to write this article. Image source: Craiyon.