Warning: this post gets a little complex. Yet, once you understand the information therein, you’ll be much smarter than most companies who use internet marketing.

You’re probably at least a little familiar with the “sales cycle” concept, right? Your customers—whether other businesses or consumers—take specific steps before they finally make a purchase. For businesses, this timeframe can extend to 2 years. For consumers, it’s sometimes as short as 2 seconds.

Most websites focus on “bottom-of-the-funnel” (BOFU) content. In other words, this is the content customers consume right before they call, email, or click and order. There’s nothing wrong with this, but you leave a ton of sales on the table if that’s all you do. You can typically think of your product or service pages as “BOFU” content your customers will read through immediately before taking action.

How Focusing on Additional Sales Cycle Steps Wins You More Sales

Long before your customers actually act, they are already unwittingly engaged in the sales cycle. It all starts with a problem, right?

Perhaps a business is facing a large issue such as not getting enough leads. Or maybe your customers are encountering a difficulty of some sort in their personal life: for example, a home that seems too cold in winter and too hot in summer even though they just installed a new HVAC system.

So, if you run an HVAC company, you can engage them right at this point with content. They might search something like, “Why is my house so cold?” Then, you create a blog post that answers this very question. Perhaps they installed an incorrectly sized HVAC system or didn’t properly insulate their crawl space. At the end of the post, you conclude it’s impossible to know for sure without a firsthand inspection.

Upon first reading the post, customers occupy the beginning of the sales cycle. For all you acronym lovers out there, this is referred to as “TOFU” or “top-of-the-funnel.” Customers are aware of the problem and beginning to understand it.

Reaching the meat of the post, they’ve moved to “middle-of-the-funnel” (or “MOFU”) wherein they have a solid understanding of their problem and now need to research other HVAC companies who do the same thing.

Yet, as you’ve educated them on the problem in your blog unlike other HVAC companies, they’re much more likely to bookmark your website and remember you—and they’re much more likely to give you a call because they know you understand the problem and solution. Other HVAC companies might too but don’t necessarily demonstrate this in their blog: thus leaving consumers in doubt.

That’s How Content Marketing Works

This is a simple example of content marketing in action. You can quickly push customers along the sales cycle, and they’re happy to walk right beside you because you’re solving their problems.

This is precisely why you need to care about the sales cycle, and since many other small and local businesses don’t, you’ll uncover a gold mine of customers they wish they had.