Internet Marketing Digital_marketing_for_dummies | Page 87

Source: http://www.digitalmarketer.com/content-marketing/
FIGURE 4-2: The three-step marketing funnel.
Cold prospects cannot evaluate your solution until they are first aware of the problem and
of your solution. If prospects are unaware of the problem or the solution that you offer
through your product or service, they obviously won’t buy. Therefore, conversions are
impossible until prospects have first evaluated the possible courses of action they can take,
which include buying your product, buying a competitor ’s product rather than yours, or
doing nothing and living with the problem. To move prospects through a marketing
funnel, you need to provide content designed to satisfy their needs at each of the three
stages:
Content at the top of the funnel (TOFU) that facilitates awareness.
Content at the middle of the funnel (MOFU) that facilitates evaluation.
Content at the bottom of the funnel (BOFU) that facilitates conversion.
Blogs are fantastic facilitators of awareness (top of funnel) — but they do a poor
job of facilitating evaluation (middle of funnel) and conversion (bottom of funnel).
Also, at the risk of pointing out the obvious, evaluation and conversion are super
critical to your business. To move prospects through the middle and bottom of the
funnel, you need other content types, as shown in Figure 4-3 and explained in detail in
the following sections.