Marketing Funnel Stages: Moving onto The Middle

Marketing Funnel Stages: Moving onto The Middle

Congratulations on moving your content consumers from the awareness stage to the middle of the marketing funnel, known as the evaluation stage. Now what?

Middle of the Marketing Funnel Content: Lead Magnets

Middle of the funnel marketing employs lead magnets to move people to the final, conversion stage. Any free offer a business provides in exchange for a user’s contact information is a lead magnet. The purpose of a lead magnet is to encourage content consumers to give you their contact information. Your top of the funnel marketing content has piqued these individuals’ interests, but if you want them to make a purchase, you have to give them something that doesn’t cost anything but offers real value.

Lead magnets take on a variety of formats, including but not limited to:

• Checklists,
• Infographics,
• Calculators,
• eBooks,
• Swipe files, and
• Cheat sheets.

Developing Lead Magnets

Creating lead magnets that achieve the goal of capturing contact information is not as easy as throwing together blog content or social media posts like you did at the top of the marketing funnel. A successful lead magnet must:

1. Provide immediate gratification.
2. Be rapidly consumable.
3. Focus on a single, specific solution.
4. Help them achieve a desired end result.
5. Offer both a high perceived value and high actual value.
6. Demonstrate your expertise.
7. Shift the user’s perception of your brand from content provider to a company they might buy from in the future.

During the lead magnet development process, you must have a solid understanding of your audience. You should develop a buyer persona, a detailed description of your target customer, to guide your efforts. To create a thorough buyer persona, you need the following information about your ideal customer:

• Demographics (age, gender, geographic location)
• Needs
• Pain points
• Values
• Priorities
• Buying habits
• Psychographic characteristics
• Other distinguishing features

Implementing Your Lead Magnet

After researching buyer personas and deciding on a format, you’ve finally completed your lead magnet. Next, you’ll need to implement the offer on your website. The best method for doing so is building a squeeze page that presents the lead magnet, has a convincing call-to-action, and is distraction-free. Depending on the platform on which your site is built, there are a variety of tools available for building squeeze pages such as OptimizePress, Instapage, Lead Pages, Unbounce, WordPress Landing Pages, or Thrive Architect.

Additionally, to capture the opt-in data you collect from users, you have to connect an email marketing tool to your squeeze page. Try services such as AWeber, Constant Contact, Emma, MailChimp, or Campaign Monitor.

Don’t skip testing your squeeze page to determine which version most effectively captures leads. Conversion rates increase by up to 300 percent when correct targeting and testing methods are implemented. You can use Optimizely, Crazy Egg, VWO, Kissmetrics, or Unbounce to test your squeeze page.

Promoting Your Lead Magnet

Your squeeze page is built, tested, and connected to an email marketing service. Time to get the word out about it. Use the buyer personas you created earlier to develop targeted pay-per-click and social ad campaigns. If you have an active social media presence, post about your lead magnet on your profile pages. Include links to your squeeze page throughout your website.

To gauge the success of your middle of the funnel marketing strategy, measure the conversion rate on your lead magnet squeeze page, overall list growth, and email open and click-through rates. Refer back to these metrics to inform your efforts the next time you decide to build a lead magnet.

When the lead magnet starts to generate a list of people interested in your business, it’s time to consider what content you are offering them at the bottom of the marketing funnel. Next month, we’ll get into the details of creating content for the conversion stage of the funnel, so check back then!

Want to learn more about lead magnets? Download our free eBook, Creating Lead Magnets that Work, now.