GUIDE

The Content
Marketer’s Funnel
A Three-Stage Guide to Attracting, Engaging and Converting Customers

Content as a marketing function fulfills the constant need for “words on the page.”

Those “words on the page” have a big job: they must resonate with audiences, influence high
engagement, create episodic experiences, and convert customers to benefit your business’s
bottom line. To showcase the true value of your content, you need to pair a proven strategy with
the right technology to deliver the right information at the right time to the right audiences.

According to an eCommerce Foundation study, 88 percent of your customers are researching your
company through your online content before they ever reach out. Buyers are introduced to your
company and to what you do through content, and ultimately, it informs their purchase decisions.

Make sure you understand how to serve them at each stage of their journey.

88%
of your customers are
researching your company
through your online content
before they ever reach out

The Content Marketer’s Funnel 2

Introducing The Content Marketer’s Funnel - a comprehensive framework for content strategists,
creators, and marketers. It has everything you need to start your content strategy, whether
your team is small and just starting out, or you’re part of a larger team looking to iterate on your
process. This ebook breaks down the valuable work content strategists do, showcases insights
to build the audience you want, empowers you to capitalize on the true value of your content, and
enables you to readily share results across your organization.

This ebook examines the flow and the metrics to help prove the value of your content in our all-
digital climate. By definition, a marketing funnel is a modern application of the power of persuasion.
For The Content Marketer’s Funnel, familiarity with your company combined with your ability to
create and publish valuable information will be the recipe for success.

A lot of what we’re discussing here can be made easier by using Parse.ly, which was created to
overcome these challenges:

Understanding your audience Informing your strategy Focusing on value creation

Directly measure audience Leverage 30+ content metrics Use content conversions and
engagement with content to craft your content strategy attribution to understand the
on your sites and apps to to drive your business forward true impact of your content,
understand your audience and to fine-tune your strategy

But whether you use Parse.ly or not, the

recommendations below are easily applicable
for any marketing program. With these pointers,
you’ll be equipped to create a content funnel
that systematically turns your audience into
revenue-generating customers.

Let’s dive in.

The Content Marketer’s Funnel 3

A key question to ask when setting up your content strategy is: What are you looking to achieve?
Content strategies can be used to support a number of purposes, like increasing brand awareness
or growing your customer base. Starting from the top and heading down the funnel, we’ll cover
common content employed in each stage. The goal is to provide inspiration for your own content
marketing funnel and arm you with metrics at each stage to ensure you’re confidently measuring
and tracking success.

Before starting, the critical first step is to dig in and understand who your ideal customers are. The
emphasis here is on “ideal.” Only then can you develop content that compels and converts those
customers. It also helps you understand who you are targeting and why. Once defined, the path to
measuring the impact of the content becomes much clearer.

Our goal is for content strategists to use The Content Marketer’s Funnel to prove the value of
content marketing to the business, stage by stage. The funnel has three main stages, broken down
to fit within the parameters of your goals or key performance indicators (KPIs). Those stages help
you ask the right questions and match metrics to those goals.

Awareness

Paid Owned Earned

Engagement

Generate
Educate Nurture
Leads

Decision

Drive Conversions
& Revenue

The Content Marketer’s Funnel 4

Awareness
Awareness

Paid Owned Earned

The top stage of the marketing funnel is awareness.

The awareness stage’s goal is to provide introductions Engagement
to your company, brand, and maybe your products/
services. The key with this stage is to cast a wider net Generate
Educate Nurture
Leads
for different audiences than your “core” and to answer
questions about topics you have expertise with. Decision

We classify content that falls in the awareness stage in Drive Conversions

three different ways: paid, owned, and earned media. & Revenue

Paid media is any paid advertising initiative executed

by your company; owned media is any type of content
that your company creates, owns, and maintains; and earned media is any content about your
company that is organically shared by people outside of it.

Let’s go into detail on what those types of content look like in practice and how they fit into your
overall strategy.

What content is in the Awareness stage?

As with all stages in the marketing funnel, content types will vary from company to company by
industry, company size, and the audience’s willingness to engage with the content. For a larger
company, you may be able to invest more in top-of-funnel content through paid promotions on
search engines or PR efforts. For a brand working within the IT space, you may need to publish
more technical top-of-funnel assets to assert your credibility. And if you’re primarily marketing to
a young adult audience, like an e-commerce skateboarding business, you may want to tailor your
content to social media and video platforms.

Here are ideas of what might fall in your company’s awareness stage:

• Videos • Events

• Website copy • Partnerships

• Paid promotion/PR • Podcasts

• Ads • Social media posts

• Sponsorships

The Content Marketer’s Funnel 5

Understandably, it may be necessary for smaller companies to spend less or stay scrappy at the
awareness stage. It’s commonplace to see heavier investment at the middle- and bottom-of-
funnel stages.

However, the awareness stage is often overlooked. Content teams tend to focus on the later
funnel stages. To ensure the rest of the full-funnel marketing works as it should, gradually winning
over and qualifying new buyers along the way, the funnel must be fed from the top. Make it a
priority for a social media manager, events coordinator, or fellow content marketer to create
content for the top-of-funnel in whatever lean way works for the bottom line–and keep SEO top-
of-mind.

Examples in the Awareness stage

Any marketing funnel stage can look vastly different by company or business, industry, or goals
for content. We’ll share two different examples for each stage to showcase what these can look
like for two very different companies, whether by budget, company size, or industry. The aim is to
get you thinking about what the application of this stage could mean for your audience, content,
and marketing goals.

For a massive brand like Progressive, a catchy, relevant social media ad (like their take on Animal
Crossing) is a prime example of a piece of top-of-funnel content. They’ve even made a new
handle for their beloved spokeswoman, Flo, alongside their “main” company Twitter account for
greater brand impressions:

(Source: Progressive Twitter)

The Content Marketer’s Funnel 6

For the work management platform Fibery, which connects a product team’s tech stack to their
company’s organizational goals, top-of-funnel content must educate readers about what the
product does and why they need it.

In the example below, you can see how Fibery adjusted the messaging on their homepage to
better communicate the power and value of their tools. Remember, the content on your homepage
is typically the first thing your target audience reads when researching your brand. Hone in on the
messaging that resonates most with your audience to optimize top-of-funnel conversion by testing
headlines, website copy and CTAs.

(Source: Fibery Connect)

(Source: Fibery Build)

The Content Marketer’s Funnel 7

What metrics are most important at the Awareness stage?

Content should be closely aligned with the KPIs of each stage of the funnel. In the awareness
stage, these will be high-level metrics like traffic to your website, specific page views, social
shares, or other tallies of top-of-funnel activities, like event attendees or leads gathered from
sponsorships or collaborations.

For the Progressive ad example above, the metrics to track have traditionally been views,
“impressions” in social media terms, and click-throughs to determine its effectiveness versus
other ads. Ad platforms for social media provide a dashboard to follow these metrics, but tracking
interest or true engagement on non-ad social requires a bit more digging or simply using more
content-centric analytics solutions.

You want to be looking at deeper social metrics like social referrals, social interactions, and social
referrals per interaction. Parse.ly has direct integrations with nearly all social media platforms, so
we’re able to surface these more meaningful metrics. We even show you the specific accounts who
share or refer to your company’s posts.

In Fibery’s case, in order to see which homepage messaging is creating the most top-level
awareness for their brand, they can measure which version of the homepage is viewed more often
(traffic), for how long (engaged time), and if the A/B testing calls to action are clicked.

The Content Marketer’s Funnel 8

Engagement
Awareness

Paid Owned Earned

At this stage the goal is to foster further engagement,

often in exchange for contact information to convert Engagement
that reader to a true lead. It’s about driving your
audience from passively reading a piece of content, for Generate
Educate Nurture
Leads
example, to actively engaging—be it a click, download,
or webinar registration. Decision

In the age of digital marketing, as a rule of thumb, Drive Conversions

this action is frequently a click. What can motivate a & Revenue

prospect traveling down the funnel to raise their hand

and say, “Hey, I’d love to get some more information”?

The key at this stage is educating the audience, proving the credibility or depth of your expertise,
and, ultimately, solidifying those previously passive audience members as viable, interested leads
who want to learn more about what you are selling.

What content is in the Engagement stage?

Think of the engagement stage as deeper conversations about industry-specific topics that aren’t
completely centered around your products or services. This could be a webinar, an in-depth
ebook, a newsletter, or whatever compels people to trust your company, come to you for authority,
and, ultimately, be willing to give you their contact info.

A larger company might host a weekly workshop or webinar with a panel of subject matter experts
in their industry.

A specialized company like a marketing agency might create an ebook around marketing
best practices.

A media publication might launch a weekly newsletter to notify their audience of recently
published content.

Here are more ideas worthy of your company’s engagement stage:

• Nurture campaigns • Data studies

• Online courses • Case studies

• White papers

The goal of the engagement stage is to capitalize on that initial awareness by delivering more
educational information and opportunities to engage with your company. Ideally, your audience
will give you their contact information in exchange, allowing you to engage them further.

The Content Marketer’s Funnel 9

Examples in the Engagement stage
GUIDE

For content marketers, Parse.ly publishes about every

aspect of the digital content industry. For example, we
released a timely data study about what happened in
the world of content during the disruptive year of 2020.
We’ve also posted evergreen content that helps content
marketers be better at their jobs, including a tactical ebook
on how to write a content marketing budget. With both
pieces, we required a form-fill to make sure we collected
audience contact info and effectively turned them into
leads. How To Write A
Content Marketing Budget
(And Actually Get It Approved)

Chorus.ai is a sales conversation intelligence platform that helps customers drive team
performance, build stronger relationships, and acquire unbiased market intelligence. To speak
directly to their sales audience and capitalize on high-level awareness, they publish resources
regularly on sales methodologies and how to effectively close sales, as well as comprehensive
competitive reports on conversation intelligence. These resources always require a click-through
to read or download so that Chorus.ai collects user information and generates leads for its sales
team.

(Source: Chorus.ai State of Conversation Intelligence)

The Content Marketer’s Funnel 10

What metrics are important at the Engagement stage?

Monitoring how effectively your engagement stage content is fostering trust for your business
derives from engaged-time. This helps you understand which content is holding the attention of
your audience and is providing real value.

Engaged-time is useful for understanding how valuable your content is to your audience at
more granular points along their journey through your funnel. This metric is especially helpful for
companies with longer sales cycles, either because they have more expensive products/services
or the sales process involves many decision makers.

Below is what this sort of complex B2B buying journey can look like:

(Source: Gartner)

The Content Marketer’s Funnel 11

Beyond the surface-level engagement metrics of timestamps, time-on-page, or bounce rate,
Parse.ly’s engaged-time metric and heartbeat pixel determine true engagement interaction levels,
areas where other analytics platforms fall short.

Engagement is a key step to qualifying the right leads, so whatever engagement you’re fostering
here should also map directly to a decision-ready stage. As with other stages, this will vary from
company to company: it could be content downloads to show interest in a closer-to-decision topic,
or email or newsletter sign-ups to continue getting product updates or content roundups from your
archive. Tracking content conversions will provide valuable insight into what’s working.

Downloading a piece of content, for example, indicates a potential need for your product or service, so
the number of downloads represents engagement. If a particular email drip sequence ends with a click-
to-download option, you can also measure email opens or click-rates along the way.

The questions you should be asking at the engagement stage are: ‘Did your audience act in a way
that indicates they’re ready and willing to learn more about your products or services?’ and ‘Are
they ready to be sold based on what you know from their more meaningful, deeper interactions
with your brand or content?’

For any company, remember that the key to this mid-funnel stage is loading up the top with a
broad audience. Qualification processes are necessary as your audience progresses down the
funnel. But the more awareness you start with at the top the better. It’s crucial to make a strong
first impression.

The Content Marketer’s Funnel 12

Decision
Awareness

Paid Owned Earned

The decision-marketing stage of the funnel is just what

it sounds like: getting your audience to make a decision Engagement
that makes you money. The actions at this stage
are directly tied to revenue—swiping a credit card Generate
Educate Nurture
Leads
or signing a contract, or the final steps that indicate
buying readiness—signing up for a “hard sell” product Decision
demo with a salesperson, or signing up for a limited
free trial by inputting payment information. Drive Conversions
& Revenue

The commonality of these actions is that they

represent other ways of saying, “I want to buy what
you’re selling!” or “I’ve decided to give your company a chance to solve my problem.” You can think
of this as what many marketers term opportunity creation.

What content is in the Decision stage?

The following are some ideas of what could fall in your decision stage, but they are certainly not
limited to this list:

• Add to cart

• Case studies

• Product or service reviews/testimonials

• Subscription signups

• Onboarding, knowledge guides, how-to videos, user forums/communities

The Content Marketer’s Funnel 13

Examples in the Decision stage

CallRail, a marketing platform that connects businesses to communicate with leads and customers
and track all their activities (calls, texts, form submissions), has a free 14-day trial of their
marketing software. This is usually the final step in their buyer’s journey before purchase.

(Source: CallRail)

Social media influencer and fitness/nutrition expert Steph Gaudreau runs a program periodically for
women to level up their energy and strength. Depending on enrollment, she maintains a CTA for signing
up or for inputting email to be placed on the waitlist. Again, a last step in her buyer’s journey.

(Source: stephgaudreau.com)

The Content Marketer’s Funnel 14

What metrics are most important at the Decision stage?

Again, at the decision stage, it boils down to money—the KPI that executives care about. It’s the
bottom line, closed won revenue, or the summation of revenue-driving actions from your audience.
Parse.ly’s content conversions tracking feature allows you to tie content performance directly to
revenue.

Monitoring your bottom-of-funnel performance is undoubtedly important to drive business, but it’s
only one piece of the puzzle. People at your company who don’t work in content can become hyper-
focused and myopic on the bottom of the funnel, sometimes to the detriment of the business, so
remember to use this ebook to help you prove the value of your content all along the way.

Remember, bottom-of-funnel content loses its punch when it’s not balanced with educational,
higher-funnel materials. Simply saying “buy, buy, buy” on your website will have your leads saying
“bye, bye, bye.”

The Content Marketer’s Funnel 15

Conclusion
Optimize your company’s marketing funnel with Parse.ly insights

To know the effectiveness of your content marketing funnel, track relevant KPIs and metrics
at each stage. As with any marketing initiative, content strategy requires advanced thought
and planning to achieve the best results. By following the steps we’ve outlined in The Content
Marketer’s Funnel, you’ll be on your way to a documented, scalable strategy that targets the right
audience and achieves those bottom-line results.

Unlike other analytics platforms, Parse.ly ​​is agile enough to cater to each business’s measure
of content success. Interested in seeing how Parse.ly can augment your data-driven content
marketing? Get a demo from our expert team of data nerds.

TALK TO US TODAY