What do your prospects see, hear, and read at every stage of their awareness journey? The answer should form the basis of your sales funnel content strategy. And to ensure your strategy succeeds, you need to engineer it to move deals forward.

Why?

Because your sales funnel content translates straight into buyer confidence in your brand if you match it carefully to the stages of buyer awareness.

And if you work with marketing to share your insights as a sales leader, you can also influence the content your reps have at each stage so it makes sense to them.

In this article, we’ll look at

• what funnel content strategy really means,
• why awareness-stage content matters, and
• how to match content to each stage.

What is a Sales Funnel Content Strategy?

This is a deliberate plan – not an ad hoc kamikaze system! – for how each piece of content  used by sales and marketing supports a specific stage in the buyer’s decision process.

This is in direct contrast to a random content calendar. You need strategic alignment of what to use when – while also leaving your reps freedom to choose appropriately from the kind of content available at that stage.

When this is the case, however, you don’t necessarily need a large volume of material. It’s more about how you orchestrate it. And that should be detailed in your playbook.

When assembling your strategy of how your reps will use what material when, think about it from your potential buyer’s perspective.

They expect to be led through their process with you in a logical fashion – even if they don’t quite verbalize it like that. They will feel the chaos if that’s what you give them!

And as a sales leader, you obviously need to own the narrative flow through the funnel even if your marketing people write it.

So, why does all this strategy matter?

Why Awareness-Stage Matters in Sales Funnel Content

There are – as you’ll know – three awareness levels. But it’s easy to underinvest in the top of the funnel, as we’ll show:

Problem-aware

Your prospect feels their pain or they wouldn’t be on your radar at all as your target market. The problem is they can’t name it adequately or in detail. If they could, they would know better what fix they’re looking for – but that comes later.

So, you need to stay in the realms of showing them your story of insight and empathy at this first stage of awareness.

“Why you should choose us” is out of place at this point!

Solution-aware

Now that your prospect has come to realize the extent and effect of the “pain” they’re in, they’re ready to explore solutions. They need one. But it’s too early to make it “your” solution.

At this awareness stage, they need education and guidance about solutions. If you use your authority to explore the topic with them, they’ll realize you know what you’re talking about.

This breeds the trust you need to take the conversation forward to the next stage.

Brand-aware

At this awareness stage, your prospect is comparing and shortlisting, because they’re now on top of what they need and have a deeper understanding of their problem.

Here’s where you can introduce

• some proof,
• evidence from previous buyers,
• some reassurance that your brand is the best solution.

So, if you resource your sales funnel content in this way – with material that works with your strategy at each awareness stage – your reps will already have the right language to use when they need to move the deals forward. The materials themselves will speak to each stage.

Sales Funnel Content Matched to Each Awareness Stage

As we’ve indicated up top, your sales funnel content strategy must encompass and mirror what your potential buyer is thinking at each point, not what you want to shout about!

We’re not dealing with the age-old benefits vs. features argument here.

We’re talking about how to help your prospects move through their awareness stages by matching your materials to their needs. This can take quite a while in B2B, whether you sell a product or a service.

However, once your prospect moves to the brand-aware stage, you have a range of opportunities to keep them onboard via your content.

Here are some examples, but it’s impossible to cover all scenarios.

When we work with you as consultants, we help you find exactly what you need for your sales teams.

But here’s an inkling of later brand stage material to use – thinking of brand-awareness in three parts:

Early stage: thought-provoking insights, benchmarking reports, simple ROI explainers.

Mid stage: comparison guides, case snippets, video demos.

Late stage: risk-reduction assets – FAQs, implementation timelines, peer endorsements.

As an extra tip, you can use these materials inside your sales meetings because they help your reps verbalize around the content and acquire a natural way of dealing with these slightly more technical assets.

We mentioned earlier how you, as a sales leader, can engineer your content flow. We’ll look at that now.

How Sales Leaders Can Engineer Their Content Flow

While working out your sales funnel content strategy, encourage your teams to look at content as a pipeline asset rather than an “ooh that’s nice to have.”

Then, within that viewpoint, discuss how sales feedback from them can help all of you in sales engineer and shape marketing priorities and therefore materials. Collaboration with marketing is always beneficial to both teams!

(Silos are bad news as we’ve previously mentioned here and here.)

Your sales funnel content strategy hinges on a logical sequence of suitable material that tells your story in a way that’s appropriate to each awareness stage.

Let’s look at some practical questions to help you with your funnel strategy…

Three Questions to Audit Your Current Sales Funnel Content Strategy

This could be thought of as self-diagnosis!

• What do our buyers not yet know that would help them trust our approach?
Uncover early-stage content gaps.
• Which buying stages keep stalling – what story would unstick them? Tie content to sales friction.
• Do our reps have quick access to the content that proves our promises?
Address internal enablement.

360 Consulting Can Help Solve Your Sales Funnel Content

Our group experience at 360 means we have worked in all verticals and horizontals. We know the problems that can arise with getting the right marketing materials available to your reps at all awareness stages.

If you want us to help, give us a call today.

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