Great content offers website owners a plethora of benefits.

That’s why brands, big and small, from Red Bull to your neighborhood’s coffee shop, are trying to better serve their customers by providing relevant and interesting content through various channels.

However, creating content can be very time-consuming and expensive, especially if you don’t have a large budget and a content marketing agency at your fingertips.

So how do you choose whether to create a viral cat video or invest in writing up a technical whitepaper? Or should you just spend time updating your website’s FAQ page instead?

I will share some tips and ideas for developing a good website content strategy based on the conversion funnel concept.

Conversion Funnel

From a business standpoint, a good content strategy is one that:

• Represents the business well
• Engages potential consumers in a non-intrusive way
• Helps increase sales or meet certain objectives that the business has

Before you start developing a content strategy and integrating it with your website production processes, it’s crucial to understand the journey your customer takes from initially hearing about your company to making a purchase.

In general terms, we can refer to the journey that a person takes from being a non-customer to our customer as the conversion funnel.

A generalized conversion funnel can be comprised of four steps (borrowed from the marketing industry):

• Awareness: The stage of initial contact with the customer. This is when the customer first learns about your company.
• Interest: Once the customer is aware of your company, she might become interested in you.
• Desire: After the interest of the customer is aroused, the customer could reach a point where she starts wanting your products and services, although no purchase action has been made at this stage.
• Action: At this stage of the conversion funnel, the customer is not only wanting and daydreaming about your product/service, but also musters up the money, time, and effort needed to buy it.

The acronym AIDA helps us remember these stages, and it’s borrowed from the marketing industry.

Customer behavior differs widely across all these stages.

Someone who has just learned about your product (awareness), for example, will behave differently when compared to someone who already wants to buy your product (action).

The goal of content strategy is to quickly and effectively drive the customers from awareness to interest to desire to action by providing the right content for each stage.

Create Optimal Content for Each Conversion Funnel Stage

For our discussion, let’s draw out a hypothetical scenario.

Let’s say that we have created a new photo-editing application and we are now ready to sell it.

Let’s call our hypothetical software: Photoshot.

Photoshot’s target consumers are web designers and photographers.

As a marketing strategy, we have decided that online content is a means to getting our target consumers to buy our software.

Let’s discuss content strategy in terms of the awareness, interest, desire, action conversion funnel.

Awareness

Our potential customer is not yet aware of Photoshot.

At this point, our goal is to start him on the conversion funnel by first making him aware that our product exists.

What are some general questions that web designers and photographers have (our target consumers) about photo-editing software?

Some examples might be:

• "What are some popular photo-editing techniques I can try in my design/photography projects?"
• "Where can I see good design/photography work?"
• "Who are the top designers/photographers in the industry?"
• "What websites can I go to if I want to learn about design and photography?"
• "What are some new web design/photography tools in the recent months?"

In other words, our potential customers, not yet aware of Photoshot, ask very general questions that anyone working with photo-editing software will encounter on a regular basis.

At the pre-awareness stage, our potential buyers aren’t specifically asking about Photoshot because they aren’t aware it exists.

If we develop content which answers these general questions, we could get their attention because we helped them answer something they need answered. We give them something of value.

By producing content that’s desirable to our desired customers, we are starting the conversion funnel; perhaps, when they finish reading our interesting content, they become interested in us.

Interest

When our customers become interested in Photoshot, their questions and demand for content changes.

For example, they might now be thinking of these questions:

• "Is Photoshot better than my current photo-editing software?"
• "What’s so special about Photoshot?"
• "Am I missing out on anything by not using Photoshot?"
• "How, exactly, does Photoshot work?"

Desire

If we are able to compellingly answer questions about our software, our customer might decide that he actually wants it.

Sometimes we can get him to take action quickly after he starts desiring our product.

But sometimes he might add it to his "wish list" of things to buy someday, rather than looking to buy it immediately.

The questions about our software at this stage might be questions like:

• "How do I convince my boss that I need Photoshot when I already have photo-editing software?"
• "Do I have an upcoming project that would benefit from this software?"
• "Are there any ways to get this software for free so I can at least experience some of its benefits right now?"
• "Do I really need to buy this now?"

Action

These are the questions that a typical customer might ask when they are about to buy Photoshot:

• "What OS does it support?"
• "Can my computer handle Photoshot? What are its system requirements?"
• "Can I pay for my purchase easily? (PayPal, credit card, cash, etc.)?"
• "Are there any limitations on how I can use this software?"
• "Can I download it, or do I need to go to a physical store to buy it?"

The Optimal Type of Content Changes at Each Stage

The needs of our customers are completely different at each stage.

Therefore, when preparing our content strategy, we should go through each stage of the conversion funnel and tailor our content for each stage.

Focus on the Most Important Stages of the Funnel

You now understand how customers move from awareness to interest to desire to action, as well as what types of questions arise during the conversion funnel journey.

Developing content for all of these stages is a lot of work, so you need to prioritize.

It’s crucial to understand which stages of the conversion funnel would help you the most at any given time.

For example, if we only see 10 visitors per day on our website, our problem is awareness. Developing an FAQ on how to buy and install our software will not help because no one is interested and desiring our product yet.

Instead, we could start with a series of blog posts on design trends or guest posting in a leading design blog to help create awareness.

Alternatively, if we have a healthy level of site traffic but customers constantly ask us how to buy our product or how to set-up the free trial, then we need to develop content that addresses these types of questions — maybe a webinar or video on using the software — instead of routing our limited resources on creating viral infographics and guest blog posts.

You might be asking how you could determine which stage of the funnel are the most important at any given time.

There is no clear-cut answer.

However, it often makes sense to see where the bottlenecks are.

You might ask yourself the following questions.

• "Do I see a lot of visitors to our website?"
• "Do potential customers know about us?"

If not, we need to work on awareness.

• "When we guest post on other websites, do the customers click through to our website?"
• "Does our company interest them?"
• "Do they wonder how it works?"

If not, we need to work on interest.

• "Are the customers interested in buying our product?"
• "Do they believe it is a great, necessary product?"

If not, we need to work on desire and prove the benefits to the customers.

• "Do people understand how and where to buy our product?"
• "Are my conversion rates similar or better to others in the industry?"

If not, we might need to work on action.

Distribution Channels

No matter how wonderful your content is, it will not find the customer by itself.

You also need to decide how you are going to deliver it to the customer.

The optimal content distribution channels differ for each stage of the conversion funnel, and therefore you need to learn where the customers typically find content at each stage.

For example, our customers at the action stage of the funnel are already looking for photo-editing software. They are probably using Google to search for various options. They might also look at industry blogs, forums, and review sites to find out what option is the best.

Therefore, in order to capture that audience, we will need to develop content that would answer the questions arising at that stage.

But more than that, we need to think of ways in which our content is disseminated. It could be search engines, blogs, forums, review sites, YouTube — we need to figure out what the most effective means of getting a piece of content in front of the right people is.

Our customers at the pre-awareness stage are probably not looking for our company at all. Therefore, we could get their attention by attracting them with an interesting topic, let’s say by developing a collection of inspirational photo-editing work, a tutorial on photo-editing that uses Photoshot, or a set of graphic design resources. The distribution channel could be our own blog or industry blogs.

Depending on the bottlenecks in your conversion funnel, you can now focus on creating the content for the stage that would help you the most at any given time.

Content Strategy Matrix

I have created a table that could serve as our map towards using content as a marketing method for Photoshot, our hypothetical software.

Creating your own table can serve as your cheat sheet for your content-based marketing efforts.

Continual Improvement of Content Strategy

Finally, you should never rest on your laurels and assume that what worked yesterday will work tomorrow.

Your competitors are constantly thinking about how to produce the most compelling content and lure the customer’s attention.

Therefore, you should continuously experiment with various types of content and distribution channels.

Double down on the ones that work, while limiting your efforts on those which do not work.

Make sure that you measure your actions, try to understand which parts of the funnel require the most attention at any given time, see which content works best, and which distribution channels are the most efficient.

Related Content

• How to Create Content Maps for Planning Your Website’s Content
• Getting Users to Sign Up: Factors in Design and Content
• How I Earned A Lot More on Projects by Changing My Pricing Strategy
• Related categories: Content Strategy and Business

* Box software graphic created using "3D software box" PSD.

About the Author

Dalia Lasaite is the CMO at CGTrader.com, a community-based online platform for 3D artists where they can sell, share and buy 3D models. She has been working in start-up marketing for the last three years in Lithuania, UK, and US. You can contact her at on Twitter @dalialasaite.

The post How to Create Better Content Using the Conversion Funnel Approach appeared first on Six Revisions.

Responsive web design is popular and it’s absolutely no secret. It’s what experts are calling for and what many brands are switching to. It’s not just about creating a mobile-ready site, but about making your site visible to every browser size, whether via desktop, tablet or smartphone.

The tricky part about designing for responsiveness is creating a site that looks good big and small. You have to take lots into consideration before you break open your design program and go to work. It’s an extra step that typically ends up being well worth it in the finished product. It’s very evident when a designer doesn’t plan for responsiveness; sites tend to look really bare and boring.

It’s absolutely imperative that designers maintain their creativity throughout responsive sites. With more people using tablets and smartphones, you want to be sure everyone is able to view your site. Here are some tips to help you keep creative and effective when designing for the responsive web.

1. Use excellent typography

With responsive sites, you have to consider what’s going to look good on a smaller screen. Good typography is a staple of any good web design but it’s almost necessary in responsive web design. As screen sizes decrease, most of the elements should transform and shrink or move as well. First and foremost, your typography should have this capability.

Secondly, you should be using different headings and various sizes in text.  Now, we usually use very large sized headlines and headers for our desktop designs. This does not have to discontinue in its entirety because you’re thinking about smaller sizes. Just making sure you’re using a plugin, like FitText, to decrease the sizes of your text. This helps.

Smith uses many different typefaces to create a very interesting look and feel. They also vary the sizes of these fonts throughout the site. What’s interesting in the desktop mode, is the way the text and paragraphs are lined up in different columns. When the window is scaled down, the text collapses into one column. Fortunately, the text remains consistent by maintaining the same scale and style.

Smashing magazine tends to do the same. They get rid of the right side of the design (the advertisements) entirely when the window is scaled down. However, the text wraps inside the window and the styles, colors and sizes all remain consistent.

2. Use great images

Imagery, like typography, is extremely important in any website design. Also like typography, in responsive designs, when you view a site on smaller screens, your pictures should also appear smaller or scaled down. There are tons of different layouts and different image sizes that can be used in a responsive design. It’s important to pay attention to the images you choose and how you’re using them because they will undoubtedly change. As screens get bigger or smaller, images change shape and reveal or crop out certain portions of the image.

Ideally, you want to make sure your large, photographic images to have no graphical content on them that can be cropped out when windows change size. In addition, when you’re creating graphical images, you’ve got to make sure you’re creating an image that loads fast and will be visible on a smaller screen. This is why designers have embraced flat design. It’s just easier.

At Pandiscio, first you have to notice how the larger header image looks on a desktop. It’s full, extends to the sides and is pretty high quality. As you shrink the window size, the images get smaller, change shape (from rectangular to square) and get cropped. They’ve found images that look good when the screen changes size.

KinHR is a site that uses lots of different graphical elements as well as photographs. Notice that when large and when small, the header images become smaller like in the Pandiscio website. However, with the graphical elements in the body, the images get smaller yet maintain their shape and don’t get cropped.

3. Don’t sleep on the navigation

Point blank, if people have no clue how to get around your site, then they just won’t. Navigation is harder when dealing with responsive design because we are used to creating navigation for landscape designs. Now, we’ve got to create navigation that can be easily condensed to fit portrait dimensions.

It’s not a huge problem when you have a handful of links. You can either make your menu smaller or condensed near the top or you can create a drop down menu for viewers. Of major importance is how you handle navigation with more content heavy websites.

Mashable has tons of links because they have tons of categories and and even more articles. On top of that, they have their own company-centric pages that have to be linked to as well. Mashable decides to create a pop-out menu on the left side of the screen for smaller browsers.

Monocle has two top tiers of extensive navigation for their site. For smaller browsers, they’ve created a slide down menu for the utmost content and have just condensed the second tier of navigation.

4. Make it fun to use

When you click on links online, you probably have to sit there and wait for things to load before you see a page. On phones, it’s extra annoying to have to precisely find the next button in order to move towards more content. Stuff like this isn’t fun nor is it intuitive.

Paying attention to the details and making your site more intuitive makes your site more shareable. Think about what it’s like to use a site on any browser size. Think about what websites should do when you call for an action. Find these things and fix them so your site is easy, fun and intuitive to use. It also makes it a bit more interesting!

Mud makes their site more interesting by paying attention to their transitions. They create a very sleek feel by allowing many of their elements to slide down and fade in rather than just moving abruptly and showing up. It makes a world of difference. 

Neue Yorke uses lots of movement when going from portfolio item to item. Again, it creates a very high-end feel and keeps viewers interested in what’s soon to be revealed.

5. Think outside the box

When all else fails, just be creative. Responsive web design is not meant to be a constraint on the way we create websites. There’s always room to use creativity, whether it’s via coding or designing.

Enso has created a site that looks as if it has no chance of being responsive. Notice how they’ve changed the layout a bit when the size gets smaller, but they’ve maintained their brand and creativity.

TBWA has a site that has some great design. But they also have great images. And they also have great typography! They’ve used it all here to make a very unique and interesting responsive web design.

Conclusion

Maintaining your creativity in responsive design, or in any web design is as simple as sketching out your concept and revising it to keep your goals. The fun stuff happens more easily as you begin to plan how you want your website to work and function, rather than starting out with that. Responsive web design doesn’t have to be this big, almighty task that designers are afraid of. It’s rather simple! Keep all the previous things we discussed in mind and create sites that are just out-of-this world! Good luck with your responsive web design.

What tips would you share for keeping responsive design engaging? Have you found a very creative responsive design? Let us know in the comments.

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