Speaker 1: Hey everybody, welcome back. In this video we're going to talk about a simple five-step content marketing funnel for your small business. Now how do you get customers to come to you without paying for advertising? Well there are essentially two kinds of marketing. There's promotion, which is paying for advertising, and then there's attraction, which is getting customers to come to you through delivering content, that is, free value. The goal of content marketing is to leverage the power of attraction. Now content marketing can be complex, it can take a long time to build a broad library of content and a broad ecosystem of platforms where you deliver that content, but it doesn't have to be complex. So as I said, in this video we're going to talk about a simple five-step content marketing funnel that any small business can use to get new customers, and I'm going to share with you exactly what you need to complete each one of these steps. Now taking a quick break, now might be a good time to hit that subscribe button and bang that notifications bell if you want to get more videos on the power of branding and marketing and design that are going to help you build your business. All right, now let's jump into it. Step number one. Say a person wants to buy a new widget or product or service. They search the web for articles about the best widget for every budget, and then they find your company blog and website with an article that you wrote using that title. You use specific SEO-focused keywords in your blog article title and throughout your article. You also create a LinkedIn post that links back to that article on your website. Now here's exactly what you need to complete this step. Number one, you need a company website with a blog. You can build that on Wix or WordPress or Squarespace. Second, you also need a LinkedIn business profile. You can set that up for free. Third, you need an article that discusses important information on the types of products and services that you sell using commonly used Google queries of people asking questions about your category. Now here's step two. At the bottom of that blog article, you have a call to action, a CTA that points to a downloadable e-book called How to Choose the Best Widget for Your Needs. The visitor needs to enter their email address in order to download that e-book. Now here's exactly what you need for this step. Now don't get scared. You don't have to write a big, long actual book. You can create a three to seven page PDF, a mini e-book with valuable insider info, and answers to questions that you get asked all the time by your customers about your products and your services. Second, you also need an email service provider to capture the email addresses that people are going to be entering to get that download. And you'll have to use a service like MailChimp or ConvertKit to do mass emailings because if you try to do mass emailings from a regular business account, you will get flagged as spam and no one's going to be getting your emails. Now moving on to step number three. The customer has signed up for your email list and now they're going to start to get weekly emails from your business. In those emails, you're going to be sharing industry news. This could be curated articles from other sources or it could be original pieces of your own. Sharing trends or videos that you found that support the importance of the solutions that your widgets provide. Share news about what your company's doing, any kind of innovations, any kind of trade shows you're going to. And in one of those emails, you're going to announce an upcoming webinar. Now here's exactly what you need to complete this step. You need a designated person in your company who collects industry news and can write a basic decent quality email. And then you also need someone who understands how to use the email service provider's layout functions on their SaaS website so you can lay out your emails and send them. So moving on to step number four. So your email subscriber goes and signs up for your webinar. You develop a slideshow or a webinar that's anywhere from 20 to 45 minutes long. It discusses some little known or new or underutilized feature or function of your widget. Then during the webinar, you make a suggestion for the attendees to go and watch a video on your website homepage. And that video is going to hold a special bonus for them. Now what you need for this step is you need a Zoom account, which is also free. If you have a super large webinar, you may need to pay for the larger webinar capabilities. You need two people, one to give the presentation and one to moderate the comments and questions and engage with the viewers. So step number five is that the attendee of the webinar heeds your call to action and they go to your website and they watch your promotional video. Now the webpage analytics company Moz has shown that homepage videos boost SEO by anywhere from 300 to 400%. So just having a video, explainer video on your homepage is a really good idea. And the bonus that I mentioned that you have in that video is a discount code to receive 10% off of their first purchase of your widget. Now here's exactly what you need for this step. You need a website homepage with a clear problem solution copywriting pathway. That is you're explaining what their problem is, what the solution is, the widget that you are going to offer and why your widget is better and different from everybody else's. And then in the promotional video, you have an introduction of your widget, its functions and its benefits, and then you offer the bonus of the 10% off. And finally, the big payoff, a happy and well-informed customer takes advantage of your 10% bonus. They buy a widget from you and they start a new relationship with your company. Now as I said at the beginning of this video, all of these five steps in this process are based on attraction. But in order to boost the traffic in each one of these steps, you can also purchase traffic. You can promote through paid advertising. You can use paid ads on Facebook or Twitter or LinkedIn or Google AdWords, wherever. Now these ads are going to drive traffic to each of the five stages of this process. So let's review these five simple stages again. Step one is you have a blog article with a call to action. Step two is you drive them to a downloadable ebook where they give up their email address. Step three is you start delivering emails to them. Step four is you have a webinar sign up in one of your emails and you deliver a webinar. And step five is you drive them to a promotional video on your website with a 10% bonus. So that's it. A five step simple content marketing funnel that you can use to get new customers for your business. If you like this video, make sure you hit subscribe and bang that notification bell. And if you need help, whether it's with brand strategy or design or copywriting or marketing, reach out to me at Philip Van Dusen and let's work together to get your business performing at the level that you never thought possible. And with that, thanks again for watching. Bye for now. Transcribed by https://otter.ai