As you continue to put content out there and reach the right types of folks, you begin to be known for a certain ability, skill, product, or service and people begin to come to you looking for answers.
They may just be trying to figure out a specific problem on their own, or they might be looking for you to help them solve that problem through your product or service. Either way, that is an inbound lead.
How do we talk to these people? How do we create content that attracts these people and helps get them to the holy grail of conversion at some point?
#1 — What are they trying to accomplish?
You need to start at the top of the funnel by identifying (1) what objective your prospective audience is going after and (2) how can you assist. How can you be the guide?
The answer to this question is the basis for the long-form pillar content piece you need to create. Whatever your customer is trying to achieve, answer that question in how you can assist them through long-form pieces of content.
#2 — What are their little questions?
From there, they might have specific questions along the way. These matter along their journey and you need to use those questions to develop your ancillary pieces from the long-form pillar content that you developed.
If your long-form pillar content is a video, for example, pulling the snippet of that video that answers a customer’s specific question would be the ancillary content you push out to answer that specific question.
You might even make an FAQ page on your site and insert that little piece of content as part of the answer so people can start to get a feel for the answers to their specific questions.
#3 — What obstacles are they facing?
This is the same thing as the specific questions but these might require you to directly message someone who is struggling with a specific issue. You might develop a quick answer you can send directly to that person and tell them whatever the answer is.
As you have that conversation, you can develop a longer piece of content to also put on your site to answer specific questions. Take that conversation, anonymize it, and turn that into a piece of content.
By doing so, you’re reactively addressing the questions people have and you’re proactively developing real-time questions into future pieces of ancillary content.
Give them a chance to buy
The biggest leak we see in marketing funnels isn’t some missing code snippet or some other technical error, it’s simply not asking for the sale.
If you don’t ask your customer for a sale after all the work you’ve put into your content process and pipeline development, you’re not making the value you have available to them.
Eventually, you’ll lose their interest. They’re going to get bored with the surface-level solutions you’re offering. They’re going to want something deeper, something more.
If you don’t deliver, they’re going to find a solution that speaks to their actual problems from someone who provides the value they need.
You are doing a disservice to your customer if you are not consistently asking for the sale.
This is precarious a little bit. You don’t want to be those people who have incestuous pop-ups saying “buy, buy, buy, buy, buy,” but you do need to have the gumption to ask for a sale when it’s time to do that.