The content funnel is our first foray into when things start getting complicated for the first time in the content marketing education. The reason for that is simple: you can’t truly teach someone how to make content. I have a degree in media creation and I still don’t know how to teach someone how to make a good video, or write a good story.
In the end, it comes with practice. Art has always been that way. A painter needs to paint, a writer needs to write, and a dancer needs to dance. Those are hard skills that you can perceivably practice and improve on. The content funnel– or I suppose even more nitty gritty, the different bits of content that go into the content funnel– is vague. Not by necessity, but by the inherent difficulties that come into creating art. Good art doesn’t come with analytics before you put it out there. You have to fail, look at the numbers that proved that you failed, and then do it different.
How can that be anything but disheartening?
The content funnel is a bit of a “solved” problem. There are board games and such throughout history, for example Checkers, that is “solved”, in that people have figured out what to do in every possible situation. To me, the content funnel feels better when viewed as a process.
In Warhammer 40k you have to roll a six sided dice to hit your target with a shot from your gun. Then, you roll to see if it deals any damage at all. Then, the enemy rolls to see if they are actually hurt by that damage.
That means that if you have 10 soldiers firing once. 8 of them hit. 4 of those wound. 1 of those deals damage.
Viewing the content like that begins to actually piece it together as a process, instead of a mindless mass of “content”. Zooming in on each stage of the content funnel leads to exactly what you should do, ideally. You know what type of content goes there…
And then… you run into creating the actual content. The art. And that can’t be taught.