How the Content Marketing Sales Funnel Works for Corporate Partnerships
"Marketers almost always...look at what sent traffic here and that's where they assign the budget. Right? Because they're tracking actions down here and they go, 'Oh, well, fantastic. You know, these people down here, look at this. Social in green sent no completed transactions, screw social. Stop wasting your time on Twitter and Facebook and LinkedIn...Those are a waste of time, because look, they didn't send us any transactions. Oh, yeah?'"
Source: Ad Astra UK
The above graph and the below video from Rand Fishkin of Moz are must see and watch as they clearly explain the content marketing sales funnel, how it works and why it only works when you have content at all three phases: Know, Like, Trust.
Now, Rand's not talking specifically how the funnel works for landing corporate partnerships so let me interject a few comments to coincide with his remarks.
2:20: Rand is absolutely right here that organizations only want to fund the bottom of the funnel. The corporate partnership team closes a deal and management yells: "We need to hire more people to sell corporate partnerships!" But the opportunity didn't originate from the partnership team. It came from a prospect seeing a blog post, watching a video, etc.
3:00: Corporate prospects are checking out your site before they ever pick up the phone or email you. You have to give prospects the opportunity to learn about you and research your organization before they ever have any contact with you. Without these assets in place, you'll get fewer calls and emails from interested prospects.
6:30: Not everyone is going to want or able to do this, but Rand makes a good point on setting up first-step attribution tracking in Google. Keep in mind that this video from Rand is from a few years ago. I found this recent article on Google attribution that you might want to read.
7:20: Content is must-have it provides a steady drip of prospects. Without this, your partnership team will just be making cold calls (and, I can assure you, they will not be very happy). It starts with people finding you on the web and interacting with your organization online.
Here's my challenge to you on the graph at the top of this post. Within each part of the funnel are content assets with a checkbox next to them. How many of these can you check off? If the answer is not many - or the ones you did check off are of questionable quality - I think we've figured out why you're not recruiting more corporate partners. 😉
Hmmm...who could help you solve this problem??? Call me, maybe? 😁
