Content funnel plan

What a content funnel plan is

A content funnel plan gives every piece of content one job and only one. Getting found, by somebody who has the problem but does not know you. Getting understood, by somebody weighing up whether to solve it and how. Or getting bought, by somebody choosing between you and two others.

The document is a table. Every existing page and every planned piece gets a stage, and then the three columns are counted. The count is the point. Nearly every small business site is heavy at one end and empty at another, and until the piles are lined up nobody can see it.

It is not a ranked list of subjects, which is topic strategy, and it is not a map of what a buyer reads in what order, which is customer journey mapping. This is narrower and more practical: one job per piece, written on the piece.

It is one chapter of the content strategy plan, sold separately for businesses that have plenty of content and no idea what any of it is for.

When you need one

The clearest sign is plenty of visitors and few enquiries. That is almost always a site made entirely of getting-found pieces, with nothing behind them for the person who is now interested and wants to know how it works, what it costs and who else has done it.

The opposite happens too, and it is quieter. A site that is nothing but service pages and a price list converts the few people who arrive and never meets anybody earlier than that.

You do not need this if you have fewer than a dozen pages. With a dozen pages the shape is obvious without a document, and the useful work is writing the missing ones. Start with the questions nothing answers yet instead.

What goes in it

• One stage per piece, assigned and argued. Found, understood or bought. A piece that claims two stages is doing neither well, and that is a finding worth acting on.
• The count. How many pieces sit at each stage, with the empty stage named plainly. This single number changes more plans than anything else in the document.
• The handover on each piece. Where a reader goes next, and whether that link actually exists. Getting-found pieces that end in nothing are the most common waste on a small site.
• What the missing stage needs. Named pieces, with formats, in the order to write them. Usually three to six items, not thirty.
• One measure per stage. What tells you the stage is working. It is a different number at each stage, and confusing them is why content reporting so often says nothing.

What you get

The stage table. Every page and planned piece with its stage, its next step, and whether that next step exists. Sortable, so the gaps are visible at a glance.

A one-page shape summary. The count at each stage, the missing stage, and the short list of pieces that fills it. This is the page that gets shown to whoever approves the work.

A linking sheet. The specific links to add between existing pieces so that the pages you already have start passing readers along instead of ending in nothing.

A worked example

An illustration. A twenty-person industrial cleaning equipment dealer has forty-eight pages. Sorted by stage, thirty-one are getting-found pieces, mostly short articles about maintenance problems. Fourteen are getting-bought pieces: product pages and a contact form. Three sit in the middle, and one of those is a PDF from a supplier.

The dealer had assumed the problem was that the articles were not good enough. They were fine. A reader who arrives on a maintenance article is not ready to request a quotation and has nowhere else to go, so they leave. The plan names five middle pieces: how the machines are actually chosen, what servicing costs over five years, the difference between buying and leasing, two written customer stories, and a comparison of the three machines people ask about most. Those five, plus the links added between existing articles and the new middle pages, were the whole change.

How it runs

1. A half-hour call. What you publish, where enquiries come from now, and where you think the drop happens. No charge.
2. A fixed price in writing. Scope and number agreed before anything starts.
3. The sort. Every page listed and given a stage. This takes a couple of days on a small site and longer on an older one with years of posts behind it.
4. The count and the gap. Read access to your analytics, so the argument about which stage is missing is settled with figures rather than instinct.
5. The plan and a walkthrough call. Five to eight working days in total, delivered as a sheet plus the one-page summary.

A week to ten days from first call to delivery is normal.

What it costs

Quoted after the half-hour call, because the work scales with the number of pages rather than the size of the business. It is a small fixed-price project. The pricing page shows the four published ways of working, so you can see where this sits before we speak, and the number is agreed in writing before anything starts.

If a content audit has already been done, the sort is mostly finished and the quote drops accordingly.

What happens next

Three things usually follow. The missing pieces get written, often as comparison pages or customer proof, since the middle stage is the one most often empty. The order they are written in gets settled through prioritisation. And the one measure per stage becomes the basis of a monthly report that finally says something.

None of that is assumed. The funnel plan is complete on its own: a table, a count and a short list of what is missing, and you can act on all three without buying anything else.