The best content funnel on earth

Helloooo content connoisseurs.

It’s Perrin from Content Bites.

It easy to talk about content funnels in theory. But what does a truly world-class funnel look like? Today, I’m going to show you what I think might be the best content marketing funnel on earth.

• Appetizers: Links from Ahrefs, Moz, SEM Rush, and more…

• Main Course: Breaking down what I think might be the best content funnel on earth

Let’s dig in.

Quick thanks…

Just wanted to take a second to say thank you. I didn’t know where this newsletter would go when I started it, but it’s been loads of fun so far.

Our community is growing quickly, I’ve made new friends from our readership, and I’m working on some cool stuff for you guys outside of our regular weekly newsletter issues.

I just really appreciate y’all. So thanks. ❤

Back to your regularly scheduled programming.

Appetizers: Content about content 🤯

• How to Run a Marketing Campaign on a Tight Budget (link)

• How to use Instagram for business: a complete guide (link)

• 9 Genius Ideas to Steal for Your Black Friday + Cyber Monday Marketing Campaigns (with Real-life Examples) (link)

• Cornerstone Content: Overview And Step By Step Guide (link)

• The 15 Best Contact Page Designs That Generate Leads 24/7 (link)

Main Course: Breaking down what I think might be the best content funnel on earth

Statista might have the best content marketing funnel on planet earth. 

I don’t think there’s any other company where the top of the funnel leads so directly into the bottom of the funnel – and where the top of the funnel is quite as massive as it is with Statista. 

To show you the brilliance a quick question:

What if every single piece of content you produced, published, and promoted was also a highly tuned conversion point?

And what every single piece of content you published was likely to be cited by journalists, bloggers, news outlets, etc.?

And what if, my friends, what if… 

You could (and were) expanding the top of your content funnel globally?

That’s essentially what Statista does – and more, really.

I’m not lying when I say this is probably the best content funnel I’ve ever seen, and so today, I want to deconstruct it to see what you and I can steal from it.

First, who are they and what do they do?

If you don’t know what Statista is: go check them out real quick. It’s worth looking, if nothing else, for the context.

But basically, they crunch massive amounts of data and publish statistics. That’s their whole thing. 

They have data on literally everything: e-commerce, artificial intelligence, retail shopping, medicine, geopolitics, gaming, fashion, and on and on and on. They even have data on things as granular as Macbook battery life. It’s endless.

They are THE hub for literally any statistic you want. 

Because of that, they’re a go-to source for anyone who needs to cite, well, anything. Journalists, consultancies, schools. Anyone citing anything probably knows about Statista. 

That, in itself, is pretty powerful. 

But the brilliance of Statista is how they treat their content – or, more specifically, in how every shred of research Statista produces contributes to both the top and bottom of the funnel.

So let’s break it down piece by piece. 

The top of the funnel is astonishingly large.

If your product was publishing statistics about the whole universe, you can imagine how much… stuff you’d be producing.

One of the key insights Statista had that makes their content funnel one of the best of all time is that: they use their product (statistics about stuff) as their TOFU content. 

I imagine that if you or I were running that business, it’d be very tempting to put the data behind a paywall. 

Statista gives it away for free. You only pay for access to deeper information about the data (more on this below). 

Then, those free statistics live on a page that people can find, Google can index, journalists can cite, etc. 

So, for example, if you were looking for data on the total number of Netflix subscribers, you might find this page while Googling.

And on that page, you could find all the basic stuff without even logging in:

• The numbers

• A graph you could use

• The date the study was released

• A short description of the data

It’s a unique, valuable page.

But because Statista has data on basically everything, they also have TONS of pages. 

How many? About 450,000 total unique pages (according to Ahrefs). 

And because they have so many valuable, unique pages, they also generate lots AND LOTS of traffic. 

Most of their traffic comes from Google, and Ahrefs estimates they generate about 9.5 million visits per month, or about 114 million visits per year. 

But here’s the thing y’all…

It ‘s not unheard of for a website to generate a bunch of traffic or to have a large audience or whatever.

What IS crazy is generating alllllllll that traffic and then having every piece of content you produce also act as a landing page… 

Every single piece of TOFU content is also a landing page. 

The core data on Statista is free. 

If you’re searching for data on aviation employment (or whatever), and you find Statista in Google, the page you land on on will have good data, a chart, a description etc. 

But some things will be locked:

• The sources

• Information about the entity who published the data

• More detailed info about the data

• The ability to download the data

All of these are things people who use data as part of their profession would want or need.

A journalist, a consultant, an editor, a research firm… people like this need to find the data, sure, but just chart isn’t good enough. You need to properly understand and cite the data, and you need to be able to work with the data yourself. 

And to do that, you need things like (drumroll)... 

• Sources

• Information about the entity who published the data

• Detailed info about the data

• Downloadable the data

So, the data itself acts as the top of the funnel, and every little thing you need to use the data in a professional way is behind a paywall.

But the absolute genius of Statista is that all of these still look like usable links and buttons. 

When you click them, it simply invites you to upgrade using a popup (screenshot)

I put together a screenshot that points out every conversion point above the fold on a standard Statista page (screenshot).

In total, there are nine conversion points that invite free users to buy something. Of those nine, six are native features that are gated behind paywalls.

So, anytime anyone wants to use those features, they’re invited to convert. 

I’m not sure about you, but I can’t think of any other business I’ve ever seen that has as many as nine conversion points above the fold on EVERY SINGLE page of content (1) without feeling spammy or obtrusive and (2) still providing real value to every user.

So what does it work? 

• The baseline content is inherently valuable

• The conversion points are native features people want to click on

• Most of the conversion points are NOT traditional calls to action

In other words, the entire website almost functions in the same way as a free trial version of software. Except it’s wide open and public. 

Those aren’t their only conversion points, by the way… 

For any page of data, you can buy a one-off report for like $500, and there’s a more traditional call to action at the bottom of every page of data. 

Every single piece of content acts as a PR asset. 

As if that weren’t enough, every single page Statista produces acts as a PR asset. 

This is mostly a (major) benefit of the vertical Statista lives in. 

They sell statistics, and statistics are cited more than any other type of content on earth. It’s also one of the only kinds of content you can produce that really and truly does attract natural backlinks. 

On every website I’ve ever built for which I wanted to build an asset that would attract backlinks naturally, I built pages about statistics in the industry. 

And they almost always attract links. The best one I ever produced attracted something like 200 backlinks… on its own… with no real work. 

That’s also true for Statista, except they have 450,000 pages. 

And they ALL attract backlinks, and a good portion of them attract press. 

And that’s why they have truly and absolutely insane domain authority. Their domain authority is 92 (screenshot).

For context that is higher than Wikipedia. 

Because everyone who’s NOT a journalist or consultant or research professional just cites Statista directly. 

And the authority fuels the massive TOFU, creating a virtuous cycle. 

Truly, for my money, it’s the best content funnel on earth. 

How I’d roll this out:

I’d do this in two ways.

Way #1:

• Look for opportunities to publish content that is essentially a free version of your product (or something super valuable that’s related); If you don’t have one or have a physical product, free related tools can work (think, free sizing guide for running shoes)

• Include conversion points on the content that are native to that content

• Include stronger CTAs further down on the page

• Bonus points if you find “buckets” of content for this; if you can produce tons of this kind of content, you’re in business

Way #2:

• Publish “statistics” pages about your vertical

• Use them for PR & backlinks

That’s the issue. If you missed the last issue, you can read it here.

Go forth & conquer.

—Perrin