Inbound marketing has quickly become one of the most effective methods of marketing a business, generating leads, and decreasing conversion times. Whereas outbound marketing takes a blanket approach that often lacks strong targeting, inbound marketing and a successful content messaging strategy takes your strategy to the next level of lead generation and customer engagement.

Instead of abiding by old outbound marketing methods that include buying ads, buying email lists, and hoping for leads that likely aren’t very qualified, inbound marketing focuses on delivering quality content to your audience where and when they need it the most. By efficiently aligning the content you publish with the interests of your audience, you can organically attract inbound traffic that you can then engage and delight over time.

If you’re finding it difficult to move prospects along your sales funnel and aren’t sure why they’re getting stuck somewhere in the middle and then falling off before converting, then it’s important that you continue reading. In this blog, we’ll teach you how to build an effective content messaging strategy that will lead to additional conversions for your business and increase the satisfaction of your current customers.

Incorporating the Flywheel Method in Your Content Messaging Strategy

In order to understand how content moves prospects through the flywheel, it’s important to first understand what the flywheel method is and how it works in comparison to the sales funnel approach. Both concepts are used commonly in sales and marketing, but in modern inbound methodology, the flywheel model is the preferred method.

The flywheel model is a more comprehensive, unified way of representing the forces affecting your company’s growth. Whereas funnels lose the energy you put into them once you reach the bottom, flywheels are great at storing and releasing energy. Now, what does this mean?

Funnels are good at producing customers but don’t really consider how those customers can continue to help you grow. In a funnel, the buck stops once a prospect becomes a customer, and all the momentum you built acquiring that customer dissipates. Each day, each month, and each quarter, you have to start fresh.

Whereas funnels lose their momentum at the bottom, flywheels leverage customers’ momentum in order to continue spinning and creating energy. And because they preserve momentum so well, all of the additional energy you add to spin it faster adds to the capacity of the whole. The aim of this is to leverage your customers’ experiences with your business and turn them into advocates.

There are three stages to the flywheel method. Those stages are referred to as the Attract, Engage, and Delight stages.

How Content Moves Prospects Through the Flywheel/Funnel

Attract

Attracting is about using your expertise to create content and conversations that start meaningful relationships with the right people. At this stage, prospects are provided with the right content, at the right place, at the right time via search engine optimization (SEO), social media marketing, and other high-level marketing communications. SEO helps to position your brand in search rankings where your ideal customer is already looking for the products or services you provide, while other Attract-level marketing helps to increase awareness of you in other channels.

Engage

Engaging is about building lasting relationships with people by providing insights and solutions that help them overcome roadblocks and achieve their goals. During the engage stage, the goal is to convert prospects into leads by providing more specific, targeted, and helpful content. Examples of this type of content include case studies, ebooks, white papers, and so on to demonstrate your expertise in a topic and position your business as the solution to their challenges. Once you effectively engage your leads, it’s the sales team’s job to convert the lead into a customer.

Delight

Delighting is about providing an outstanding experience that adds real value, empowers people to reach their goals, and helps them become promoters of your company. So even once a lead becomes a customer, they’re still meant to be engaged through informational content, social media, and email marketing. The goal of delighting customers is to solve their issues and simultaneously turn them into promoters of your business.

When it comes to your business, the actions that are taken by each team have a cross-functional impact. Marketing affects how fast prospects move through the sales process. Sales affects how likely it will be that prospects will become satisfied and successful customers. And lastly, your service teams impact whether your customers eventually become promoters of your brand.

Your content messaging strategy is important at every stage of your flywheel method. If you’re not providing valuable, informative, and engaging content to your audience, the likelihood that they’ll convert into a customer is slim.

Working on Your Content Messaging Strategy

In order to effectively drive engagement, it’s important to provide prospects with thought leadership in the form of blogs or articles. Monthly blogs covering various topics in your industry are a great way to drive engagement. Optimizing this content is important as it gets the information in front of the people who are searching for it at the exact moment they’re searching for it.

This goes for social media and email as well. It’s important to utilize these channels to continue providing prospects with valuable content to further engage them and send them along the flywheel.

Use case studies, ebooks, white papers, and targeted emails to answer any potential questions that your prospects have along the way as you get them to convert to customers. Continue to provide these pieces of content even as they become customers because the more satisfied they are as a customer, the more likely they are to promote you and your brand, which is the ultimate goal.

NgageContent Wants to Help With Your Content Messaging Strategy

If you believe that your content messaging strategy is close but not quite up to par when it comes to best practices in the industry or following these top trends, our team is here to help you.

If you have any questions or would like to speak to someone about how we can help you, please reach out. We’re here to help.