In a perfect world, the only copywriting that business owners would need to pay mind to would be a single sales page. This single landing page would be so spectacular that prospective customers would arrive on it as if by magic and immediately be convinced that they should buy whatever product or service was featured on the landing page.
Alas, we do not live in a perfect world and instead have to create various pieces of sales funnel copywriting that are mapped to broader business objectives.
Let’s take a quick step back.
Whilst marketers might speak about funnels with greater frequency than laboratory technicians, it isn’t necessarily something that is part of everyone’s everyday chatter. To make sure that the rest of this article makes clear sense, here’s a quick explanation of what funnels, and sales funnel copywriting, mean in the context of sales more generally.
What’s in a funnel?
As the name suggests, a funnel in marketing is a helpful way of thinking about the stages of your customer journey. At the highest level, you have your ‘top of funnel’ which refers to customers who are just setting out on their buying journey, then you have ‘middle of funnel’ which is the customers who are getting warmed up to the idea of your product, and at the bottom you have those who are likely to make a purchase in the near future.
The challenge is identifying what kind of sales funnel copywriting is necessary to move people from the top of the funnel to the bottom. Yes, it’s that simple.
Or is it?
Breaking down the funnel
Looking more closely at the stages, it becomes clear that each one requires a slightly different approach to ensure that you’re effectively nurturing prospective customers into paying ones.
Top of funnel
Right at the top of the funnel, where you’re building volume and awareness, you’ll want to think about producing high-level content that supports other elements of your other brand awareness strategies like ads and word-of-mouth promotions. This might take the form of blog posts – a bit like this one you’re reading – or newsletters and whitepapers. The tone should avoid being overly sales-oriented and instead work hard to convince customers that you’re a trusted and authoritative source when it comes to your offering. Done well, this will convince customers to engage further with you and move to the middle of the funnel. You might think of it as you getting your foot in the door as a copywriter.
Middle of funnel
At the middle of the funnel, your copywriting strategy should be oriented around education and providing customers with resources that will reassure them that you’re the expert to trust. By doing this you’ll capably defeat the competition and bring your prospective customers to the bottom of your funnel. In other words, you’re doing everything you can to refine your approach to converting prospects into leads.
Bottom of funnel
Once you’ve got people to the bottom of your funnel, it’s time to think about copywriting that will clearly state your proposition and bring them even closer to buying. To do this, you’ll want to think about producing customer stories and case studies that effectively illustrate how you’ve previously solved problems similar to the ones that your customers are facing. In short, it’s time to ramp things up and sell as hard as possible. In fact, you would be doing your business a disservice by not doing this at the bottom of the funnel stage.
Altogether, a copywriting strategy that is mapped to a sales funnel is a proven model to complement your work towards conversion rate optimisation. It is of course crucial to keep in mind that funnels can move at the pace of light, or take months or even years. This will of course be determined by the product or services you provide and the kind of time it takes to reach a decision before buying them. If you’ve got any questions about what your mapping should look like, get in touch.
