The real reason why people confuse sales funnels with content funnels is because of terminology. “Sales funnel”
can apply to mailing lists. It can apply to social media. It can apply to paid campaigns and many other content channels that have trust building capabilities.
Unfortunately, it’s too easy to confuse form with function and end up with a hazy view of what kind of outcome to shoot for.
Get back to basics
You have to understand the idea behind sales funnels is to turn traffic and plug it into a system to separate people who are not interested from people who are. And when you identify people who are interested, you push them into a lower level that increases their demand or willingness to buy.
Sounds pretty simple and basic, no?
The problem is that when marketers come across this form of sales funnel, they automatically assume that publishing content that filters people work exactly the same way. Content funnels are different from sales funnels.
Content funnels can be plugged into sales funnels but content funnels need and demand attention by themselves. When you are setting up a content funnel for your dog breed website, remember what your end goal is.
Your goal isn’t to set up an online home for people looking for anything and everything related to dog breeds. That’s nice to achieve but you have to go several levels deeper. Your goal is to sell dog supplies. This is what gives you your bread and butter.
You have to set up your content in such a way that you can eventually get people to buy those dog supplies. Otherwise, you’re just wasting lots of time posting content that has no chance of turning your site’s traffic into revenue.
Using the right content structure is the key to success
So you start off with questions that are going to be asked by people who are looking for dog supplies and then you lead them into a comparison page of many different options available so you can make the product category you are actually promoting stand out. From there, you can then start zeroing in on specific products.
You have to build trust. When was the last time you bought something from a complete stranger? I will guess that the answer would be never. If that is your answer, you are absolutely normal and average because most people would not spend their hard earned money on somebody they do not know.
It's all about building trust and you have to set up your content funnel in such a way that you build heavier and heavier trust until finally, they're ready to trust you with their hard earned money. This can take the form of review page, you can plug in your content funnel into a sales page.
There are so many ways you can do this. Unfortunately, people confuse these two so instead of building trust, they're basically just repeating the same information. The more you repeat information, the less effective your messaging becomes. Don’t confuse the two types of funnels.