Sound digital marketing is built on a proper understanding of the various stages of the customer buying funnel and how to fit together a strategy that will drive the conversions that each stage requires. Winning in the middle of the funnel, during the attraction stage, is by the far the most challenging stage of marketing online.

Filling the top of the funnel with likes or website visits, and the bottom of the funnel with paid phone calls and form fills, are all more scientific and predictable. The middle of the funnel is an art form — where good companies become Rembrandts because they leverage the experiences their prospects have in this stage as cannon fodder for wide-reaching influence after they become customers.

Basically, the middle of the funnel is where you lean on proper user experience to create a customer who not only garners a deeper understanding of the product or service they are about to buy, but an advocate who’s ready to talk about the company from a place of literal experience and not just because they’re a maker of widgets.

Winning The Attraction Stage

Alas, Rembrandts are not a dime a dozen for a reason. So what do they do to win in the attraction stage?

The most significant move you can make in describing your business is to position your language around the often unspoken, emotional issues your product or service overcomes. This is the most conversional tactic you can apply to marketing online. Most companies very clearly understand the external/physical solutions they provide, but very few present those solutions through filtered language that speaks to heart and not the head.

Give your product or services an identity that causes your shoppers to espouse a deeper seated experience to their friends and family. That identity is most impactful when it is borne out of the emotional victories your customers experience when consuming what you offer.

Painting a Victorious Landscape

Sit with key leaders on your team and pose these questions:

1. What emotional response do we want our prospects and customers to have when they…

• Visit our Website?
• Read our About Us section?

2. What colors resonate with these emotions?

3. What external problems do we solve? What internal ones?

4. How do we most concisely communicate these ideas in written language? In video?

Combine all of the answers from your team and land on a middle ground of what you are after and immediately move your messaging, palette, and content focus to align with this new found legend.

Building a Deeply Engaging Strategy

By using the above process as a starting point, you can then determine the proper content strategy that expands on these ideas through blogs, landing pages, social campaigns, video, etc or any other middle of the funnel tactic.

The tactics of effective digital marketing are story-agnostic; people don’t lose online because they blogged more or built longer landing pages or made funny videos. They lose online when they do these things and the content within them does not align with solving the emotional problems of their customers, via the delivery of a physical product or service.

Winning here doesn’t result in simply more business; it drives a brand built on a story and creates advocates ready to share the message.

By: Trey Sheneman