You Ask, I Answer: Bottom of Funnel Content for Conversion?

In today's episode, Jen asks, what do you suggest for building content that persuades leads to make a purchase decision? Ah, bottom of the funnel content. Um. So here's what we need to do. We have to remember what buying is.

It has long been known and long been proven that buying is an emotional decision. People buy on emotion and then they rationalize it with facts and data. So our bottom of the funnel content has to do two things. One, it has to satisfy the buying emotion or provide the buying emotion that aligns with our audience, and then it has to provide the supplementary stuff that helps somebody rationalize the decision, either to themselves or to their bosses. All of our content has to have those two parts at the bottom of the funnel.

It doesn't really matter what format it is, as long as it is something that people can use to fulfill those two needs. That if we're providing a very different tone, like a lighthearted, whimsical tone would be a mismatch for that, as opposed to uh maybe a very authoritative tone that says, Hey, we know what we're doing. You can feel good about your butt being covered by the fact that we know what we're doing. Um that tone, that emotion is what we want to sell on. And then you match that with, and here's all the evidence, all the proof, all the stuff that uh the PowerPoint slides and PDFs and awards and all this stuff that prove that your decision that you have already made is the right one.

It reassures you, it it provides evidence that the decision you've already made on an emotional basis is the right decision. If you take, say, a coffee shop, uh, what emotion does a coffee shop sell? For a lot of people, they think it just sells coffee, right? Um Starbucks proved that wrong. They proved that with the third space idea.

It's not work, it's not home, it's a third space, and that provides uh a sense of peacefulness, right? Sometimes, or uh integration or community. And these are complex emotions, but in doing so, Starbucks has figured out how to appeal to that emotion and the and the people it attracts, is they want that feeling that they give people. This is a hub of your community, it's a place where you can see friends, uh, there are strong associations, and they play up on that. You know, they have the the music that you can buy that is is curated by their teams.

The noises, the scents, the smells, all that stuff is part of the emotional sale that Starbucks is making, and then of course, you have the in some ways the coffee is is secondary, right, to the experience and the emotion they provide, and the coffee is kind of the the justification. I'm I'm just going out for coffee. Right? I'm it's not you're not saying to you know your boss uh or whoever I'm just going to to hang out to get the heck out of this place because I can't stand another minute in this office. Um you're saying I'm just going out for coffee.

That's the rational justification for the emotion that somebody is seeking. So how do you determine that emotion? Well there's a bunch of different ways to do it. Um focus groups with prospective customers asking them what decisions they're trying to make um surveys, one on one interviews, qualitative social media data, uh inbox data, observational data where uh depending on the type of business and the type of product you're working with, you may have like a an anthropologist or an ethnographer just watch people. You know they come in, uh you know they sit in the corner with their clipboard and they just watch people.

Uh that's Starbucks has done for example a tremendous amount of ethnography of their customers to understand what is they're doing, why are they doing these things in this place, uh in this space. And domain expertise if you have been on the other end of the purchasing decision, you know what you were feeling and you can obviously chat with other folks who have have had those experiences to try and and understand them. One of the tools that uh I use frequently for this sort of work is uh IBM Watson tone analyzer taking a pile of text and sticking it in and it will distill out sort of the the core emotions that are in uh a piece of text, such as your customer service inbox, your social media accounts. Um if you have the opportunity to do so, you can uh with as law permits, uh, take phone calls and have them transcribed and have your customers' words that they're saying on the phone transcribed and then distilled down using a service like tone analyzer to better understand the emotions. Now, one of the tricks with tone analyzer, and this is kind of a an insider's trick, is that it only delivers you know percentages of the basic emotions, you know, anger, joy, fear, sadness, surprise, etc.

Uh, you need to use a uh emotion tone chart or an emotion tone uh matrix to figure out are those the primary emotions or are there are the more complex emotions that are are built from that. For example, uh anger and fear uh often get blended together to form jealousy. Um there's a number of excellent resources, just Google for them on uh on emotional matrix uh identification. Once you have that data, then that's how you reorder your landing pages, your downloads, your blog content, all this stuff, anything that's at the bottom of the funnel, um, is something that you need you would re-engineer with that emotion in mind, so that um you know what it is that you're serving and can see okay. Here's the data that we've collected of the emotions of our customers at time of purchase.

Here's the the data about the emotions that we're conveying in our text. How much overlap is there? If there's no overlap, they're totally separate, they dine at separate tables. You've got a problem. Your bottom of the funnel content is not going to convert as well because you're not addressing the emotional needs of the buyer.

If they are very, very close, then chances are your bottom of the funnel content works really well because the buyer has come in to say, I feel this, and I want to feel this. I want to feel reassured. I want to feel comforted. I want to feel emboldened. Some buyers may be like, I want to make my mark on the organization.

I want to I want to demonstrate my capabilities. And if your tone does not match that, again, it's a mismatch. One of the trickier things for complex sales like real estate, uh, college education, so a lot of B2B is that they may be a group of buyers. Right? There may be multiple decision makers, in which case your emotional tone has to find that balance.

You know, who is the decision maker or decision makers, and what are the different emotional needs that they have that you need to fulfill, and then provide the evidence for that. That can be really tricky. It's very complex, and so one of those things where you may have to have customizable content and have like sales professionals, sales representatives who know how to read people's emotions and deliver targeted emotional content to each person. Say, like you need to feel reassured, you need to feel emboldened, you need to feel uh safe, and then they provide content for each of those things. So that's how you build bottom-of-then funnel content that converts.

It's not a question of formats or tricks or anything like that. It is a question of making sure that you uh you facilitate the buying decision uh that is emotional in nature. If you have follow up questions, leave them in the comments box below. Subscribe to the YouTube channel and the newsletter. I'll talk to you soon.

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