What Online Business Experts Use at the Top of the Funnel
Online business experts use free content to showcase their expertise and they primarily distribute in three forms: podcasts, blogs and YouTube videos.
An equal percentage use blogs and podcasts with a lower percentage including YouTube. About half of the experts I analyzed combine two content types. For instance they might combine a blog and a podcast or a podcast and a YouTube channel.
Ok – so now that I’ve answered the most pressing question, let’s add some context. Awhile back I got curious how online business experts construct their acquisition funnels and product roadmaps, so I did an analysis of a handful of leaders in the space. Most of them have names you’d recognize like Amy Porterfiled, Selena Soo, Peaceful Profits (Mike Shreeve), Wake Up To Freedom (Sarah & Justin) and Female Entrepreneur Association Carrie Green. In all I looked at 15 different online businesses that are currently selling digital products or services.
In this article I cover how they currently draw people in at the very top of the customer acquisition funnel. As part of my research I also got the scoop on product price points, how many lead magnets they have and what topics they cover, and product offerings. But I won’t be sharing that info here. I’ll only be sharing the details inside the free newsletter I send out every week. If you’re interested, you can sign up here.
What is the Top of the Funnel?
When people start talking funnel speak it can get really confusing really fast because what they are often talking about is how people progress on their journey of getting to know you or in more academic terms, the customer lifecycle. In short, how does a potential customer get from not knowing you exist, to discovering you, to getting to like, know and trust you enough to buy from you. And then if you’re really lucky, tell your friends about you and buy from you again and again.
How the Experts Leverage Free Content at the Top of the Funnel
The majority of the experts create free content and distribute it as either a podcast, a blog or a video. They also use social media as a discovery tool and all of them use paid advertising across various social media channels. But for the most part, the strategic purpose of their social media is to drive traffic to their longer form content – the podcasts, blogs and videos – OR their sales pages.
The graphs below show how the choices of for top of funnel content by media and also by media combinations.
A surprising number actually push content across two mediums, but as I discuss in the analysis section, often this is reformatting the same content for multiple platforms.
Top of the Funnel Strategies Used By the Experts
Here are 3 key takeaways from my Top of the Funnel analysis.
- Frequency is important
- Leverage platforms that help people find you
- You don’t have to do everything
Frequency Is Important
The experts are creating fresh content at least weekly and most of them have been doing it for multiple years. As I see it, this gives them several advantages.
- It creates a broad and deep trove of searchable insights lending to their credibility and expertise.
- These types of content have a much longer shelf life than instagram, facebook and tiktok posts.
- Publishing frequently helps each piece of content do double duty. It not only creates awareness but it builds the customer relationship. So if you’ve never heard of someone, you might discover them via their blog or podcast or YouTube channel. But then you might subscribe and continue to absorb their content before and after you purchase. If that content is coming at you on a weekly basis, this person is much more likely to stay top-of-mind for you as a thought leader.
Leverage Platforms that Help People Find You
The experts pushing content across multiple platforms are doing it strategically because each platform (and media type) represents a different way to get found:
- Blog = internet search engine (google/bing/etc.)
- Podcast = podcast platform (spotify/apple/etc.
- Video = YouTube
The power of using podcasts and/or videos is that in addition to being searchable, the podcast platforms and YouTube also function as recommendation engines. That means if someone isn’t searching for you but lands on content similar to yours, they may end up discovering you.
You Don’t Have to Do Everything
Even though all of these experts have teams, just over half of them remain focused on a single platform. Of the group that publishes on multiple platforms, the podcast + blog group is primarily posting show notes as a blog post with a link back to the podcast. And several members of the video + podcast group are posting video that is simply the podcast content over a static image. I don’t find this particularly engaging, but it successfully provides another path for discovery and cross links.
I’ll wrap this up by noting that you actually don’t have to create free podcast, blog or YouTube content at all. Wake Up to Freedom currently drives 100% of customer acquisition through advertising. And they connect with anyone who becomes their customers via email. So if pushing out new content on a regular basis feels like too much for you at this point in your business, there are other ways to get discovered. The most important thing is that you have some sort of strategy to do it.
What's Next?
My next analysis will focus on how the experts are using free downloadable content to grow their email lists, but I’ll only be sharing it with my email subscribers. If you want in, sign up for my free newsletter here.
