How to fill Holes in Content Funnel Causing your Trouble

Not satisfied with your website`s revenues? In easy words, you simply don`t know how to plug holes in your content funnel that are costing you money, right?  Here I am going to discuss every possible issue you may face in your marketing and website context which can leave serious effects on your living. So, tighten your seatbelts!

When you are developing personas, you need to get a brief Intel about your target audience and what will attract them. You must understand what your readers/client need in the context of your product and services. The key to success here is making your reader feel like an expert before they make a final decision. Chances are your reader might not only be looking for the best deal in price but the perfect package which will talk for itself and your company.  But what should be the attractive features or headers of your product?

Obviously you should come up with a plan with goal of understanding the needs of a reader while he is surfing online to buy. Don`t think of it as a headache or another routine job but as an art which needs to identify its user`s needs and later fulfill them in different stages. Some of the as follows:

Guide for using Personas and User Journeys for Qualitative Content Auditing

How to CX Map

For your own convenience, map your search to funnel and align using the segments you identified in keyword research. Remember, using this combination with ethnographic details is more effective yet it saves your breath.

By a series of ethnographic research, you will be able to identify the phases of user activity and see what your users were trying to accomplish. Name these phases and later review them in content and targeted segments!  This way, you can easily see who is accounted for what and how your content will help. A large portion is done by Qualitative auditing by a research analyst or content strategist. This is the point where content and readers come together.

Performing a Qualitative Content Audit

Starting with crawling while using the Screaming Frog`s SEO Spider. The SEO Spider with automate collection of required Intel points important to your page lists. However, you will need to physically review every single page and make notes at their start in order to emerge.

After viewing every page, you will notice you can glance at different pages without the need of spending your time reading every word. Don`t blow it out of proportion now, I am not advising you to be a lazy content audit but for a product page. You need to understand their layout and general points so you can improve them. If a website is too large for you, you can always select a representative sample of pages.

For every page, you need to collect these data points:

• Content Identity

An identifier for every page which can be referred across several deliverables as you work on content strategy, these are the decimal numbers reflecting your website`s structure. The homepage can be represented either as 0.0 or 0.1 while a first level subpage of your main category will be at 2.10 and the child page will be 2.11. You can use any schema you like but make sure you remain reliable.

• Page Title

Better known as Metadata, it is crucial that you write these correct. Metadata jogs your memory for what is the purpose of your page and if it doesn`t help then, you know what should be fixed at first place. You can easily get your Metadata from Screaming Frog. In addition you can also get the Meta description. However, it will fail to impress you so better avoid it.

• URL

This is where your content lives on the internet. Screaming Frog can help you obtaining it!

• Format

The format of your content, is it in HTML form, PDF, Image, Video or an Info-graphic?

You can easily parse this from Content field provided by Screaming Frog. You need to double check it by using other fields because sometimes what is shown in header as “Text/HTML” is not correct.

• What is it?

Provide a short description for your content in easy words. This is in context with your page title so you need to give a quick flashback of the page.

• Target Segments

Target Segments are your persona`s user story as well as requirements. Think of it as making a qualitative judgment for where this content will resonate with your readers. keep in mind this field only offer one or two persona`s or in some cases, none. So keep it short and sweet!

Target segment helps you determining from our audience`s perspective whether your content is worth reading or not!

• Target Need State

Target Need State is always based on your user`s journey. At what stage fails to engage?

Once again, you need to make a qualitative judgment call for determining whether your content fulfills your audience`s needs or not.  However, this time you have to take an irrespective of who you are writing for!

• Is your Content Link Worthy or Not?

Something to think about, would anyone care to link your content? It’s a straight “Yes/No” thing, so be careful.

A judgment call based on your knowledge of web and the type of content which attracts links. Keep in mind, a boring page is not link worthy while an entertaining and informative is!

• Is your Content Worth to be shared?

Would anyone be willing to share your content on social media? Another “Yes/No” thing!

What is a share worthy content which is also link worthy?  Surprisingly, in some cases the converse appears to be the truth! For instance, you may link to a white pager in an article but you won`t share it on your social media.

• Is your Content, Outdated or Redundant?

You need to ensure that your content is up to date, have a unique purpose and is important for developing singular paths throughout your website. In short, it helps trimming the fat!

Suggestions

In your opinion, what are the options or content today. Can you update, delete or repurpose something? If you can, why would you bother, for typing and grammar errors?

Anything you believe can be done should be noted here, throughout the review, you will begin to develop a sense of what you have and what you don`t, who it will serve. Keep in mind that these data points are not exhaustive. You can easily review the qualitative features you want. The aforementioned field mentioned here is just provided to help you and make you useful to your clients and their causes.

Choosing the right Intel for Quantitative Content Audit

Everyone wants to pull some data for supporting what works and what don`t based on quantifiable calculations. As digital marketers, we shouldn`t feel empathy for users and do consider the hard facts of their behavior. When it comes to quantitative, you can easily review the metrics relevant to your goals if you get into trouble. Below are the figures you might want to put on your “Stay out of Trouble Tips” list.

• Content ID
• Organic Review
• Overall Conversion Rate
• URL
• Request Conversion Rate
• Social Traffic
• Tweet Count
• All Traffic
• Organic Search Traffic
• Time on Website
• Like Count
• Bounce Rate
• +1 Count
• Inbound Links

All these metrics are self-explanatory, not exhaustive. Quantitative data points should be considered for what is important to the strategy of your website.

Performing Quantitative Content Audit

If you are familiar with the qualitative side then you an easily copy and paste Content ID as well as the URL into a sheet. If you are somewhat not familiar with it, then I believe Screaming Frog can help you out!

Put Social Crawlytics to good use and pull share data while using the SEOGadget Excel Plugin to grab some data from a number for SEO resources namely OpenSite Explorer, Grepwords and others.

If you take my word, I like to use Social Crawlytics for pulling out the CSVs from data pints and using VLOOKUP for function. VLOOKUP is faster than direct pulling data using data pull-ups.  However, the tradeoff loses ability for automatic updates to the earlier mentioned later.

To be honest, Excel`s conditioning format for this process, it makes clear which pieces of content will help you. Among these sets, you will figure out what grows quickly and how it performs. In addition, you will also know the holes and how you can fix them.

Mind the Gap

In the early stages, ensuring the transaction is always the smart thing to do. The transactional step always pays in the end. But if you only want to be treated like an expert and looking forward to take advantage of specific products and services. You need to research and get all information in order to make sure you are making the right decision.

As you do research about other companies in competition with the one you considered earlier, at some point. You may want to come back to your first choice. But why! There are high chances that the first company may caught your eye with something special that you couldn`t find in others. In simple words, the first company succeeded to fill the holes for converting their viewers into potential clients. However, it won`t be limited context for long time.

For instance, consider buying something that you know nothing about! Solar Panels sounds interesting, doesn`t they!

At first look, whatever you are reading about them will always be complicated and it might make it hard for you to decide. Therefore, prepare for the long haul! As you know nothing about their marketing segments, pick a site or brand which you believe won`t have solid (hard to understand content for amateurs) content. This process may feel a bit daunting as a lot of people will sign up but always know that the company is well aware of this situation. The company identifies this as a key stage and considers it as objective for speaking with people about their products and services thus conveying their message.

After taking the previous points in account, it will be suffice if you don`t have content for each phase in your user experience, you are missing out a lot of opportunities. In simple words, you are losing ranks in search just because your competition took care of this phase. My advice will be taking this opportunity and show your clients what an experienced and well establish brand name and website looks like. Last but least, don`t forget about social media because it’s both entertaining and educations for each and every phase.

Differentiate Actions Items from Content Audit

You need to know that the content audit will leave good affects if you take action for it. You need to start looking for stages in user experience for which the content is derisory. Remember, these are the holes in your funnel!

In addition, you also need to keep an eye for content which you can repurpose. Like white paper, these can be the data visualizations or posts which you can update and turn into evergreen content to fulfill your user`s needs.

You also need to keep an eye open for content which no longer benefits your user (and you). Update it or get rid of it. At the end, look for content which performs the best at different stages. Study it and make more of it!

If you paid attention to what I said earlier, you should realize by now that you need to keep on building more content to help your users. Apart from that, healthy content (both in quality and quantity) makes you feel confident as well as encouraged and aware. This will boost your revenues.

Take Caution on your Exit

Always remember, Content was never the King and it never will be! Your customers are the King while your Content is just a jester in their court. When you realize your goals and target audience, you have taken the first step to a successful content marketing campaign. Content marketing campaigns can fly blind and they can miss the mark for customers who can be entertained but not completely satisfied. But this shouldn’t let you down. Keep up the good work!

With that being said, I`ll admit I was a bit mouthful their but if you study my points properly, you will realize the holes in your funnel and know how to deal with them. But before you fly off, I would love to know about?

• Your recent issues with content marketing
• Your experience in content audit
• Did you face any surprising insights?
• How you leverage for better results?

Please feel free to share your experience with us!