April 2022: Tying Content to the Sales Funnel

One of the first questions we ask our lead gen and custom content customers is: what stage of the sales funnel (top, middle or late) are you focusing on?

At BenefitsPRO, our ABM/Activate products offer the ability to find firms/companies that are displaying likely interest in your product/service and indicate where they are in the sales funnel.

And we also have different lead gen programs that track to different stages in the sales funnel. So you can choose broad programs to drive awareness leads, and more targeted programs to drive later-funnel leads.

But what content types align best with the three stages of the sales funnel? Here’s some guidelines from our audience marketing and custom content teams. And check out the key trends employee benefits marketers need to know that follows these tips.

Content Types Aligned to Sales Funnel

Top of the Funnel – Awareness. Define the Challenge/Opportunity

• Educational: Informative content that answers a question. Think of content around regulations, compliance, and improving efficiency.
• Thought leadership: Forward-thinking and macro industry trends.
• Research: Collecting data that supports a challenge/opportunity and puts it into context.
• Premium programmatic units that grab attention but can be dialed up or down at a moment’s notice.
• Immediate gratification: Solves a pain point, improves efficiency right away. These may come in various types but think along the lines of forms to modernize your contracts, quick reference infographics for compliance, or excel sheets to easily calculate some industry formula.

Mid-Funnel – Consideration: What types of solutions are available?

• Tip-based content: Quick tips or deep-dive tactics to improve your business, team, or solve problems.
• Buyers Guides: Step-by-step content that outlines options available to solve a problem or enhance your capabilities.
• Checklists: Short-hand version/summary of buyers guide.
• Evaluations: Tools to assess what your team needs, where it’s at, and what to consider.

Bottom of the Funnel – Justification: What are proof points that show the solution works?

• Case studies/testimonials: How you solved a customer problem.
• Use cases: When the product is new and you don’t have a case study.
• ROI Calculators: Prospects can input high-level data from their business and see potential outcomes.

Here are some examples of content our Custom Solutions team has created along these lines. Click here to see our Custom Solutions Showcase.

If you’d like more information about our ability to target leads and content that is aligned with your sales funnel strategies, please contact me at [email protected].

Trends Employee Benefits Marketers Need to Know

• Health care fraud and lawsuits – The employee benefits and health care industries continue to make national headlines for all the wrong reasons. From health care systems accused of Medicare fraud and excessive hospital admission rates, to lawsuits about lab billing, to an ever-growing number of health care fraud cases, benefits advisors and other industry professionals have numerous examples of the many ways in which the healthcare system is broken and rigged.
• The Great Resignation is still in full swing, with employers seeking whatever means they can to keep workers happy and entice new recruits. One tactic we’re hearing more and more about is on-demand pay, which allows employees to access their earned income on a real-time basis, giving them better flexibility to deal with unexpected expenses. Will this be a boon recruitment, and will it become the new expectation for payroll management? We’ll be tracking the trend to find out.
• The pandemic continues to affect employees’ plans for retirement, with nearly a quarter of those surveyed saying they will have to retire later than planned.