So many online marketers leave a lot to be desired as far as designing an inbound marketing content strategy is concerned. Perhaps they fail to understand how big a role it plays in making a campaign successful. This ineffectiveness causes annoyance, ineffeciency in marketing, which also leads to the abandonment of the project as a whole.
Looking to drive targeted prospects to your website with an effective and targeted content strategy. Looking to convert the visitors into quality leads and boost the morale of your sales team with higher conversion rates? Read on…
Begin With Your Personas:
Regardless of what activity you do to boost your business, it should always start with your personas. The campaign’s personas should be at the center of everything that you do in your inbound marketing strategy including content.
A persona is a comprehensive character profile based on your target prospects who need information, products, or services pertaining to you. They are researched just like you research the profile of a real person, which includes both personal information and business related information.
In order to get the necessary input, you will need input from various departments of your organization including the sales team. This enables accuracy in the creation of an in-depth persona profile. Your research should include persona problems, general background, objections, challenges faced by them and the business, elevator pitch, marketing messages, etc.
This works in making your content targeted and relevant, which will have a higher impact in driving the readers to your content.
Drive Visitors By Realizing Their Needs:
At the very top of the pyramid, is the goal of driving prospects to your website. There are a number of tactics ranging from e-mail to social media. However, in this post we will discuss on blogging.
At the very top of the inbound marketing funnel your goal is to drive prospects to your website. There are many different parts to this from social, email, etc., but the one we are interested in for this discussion is blogging.
The blog could serve as a fuel for your content. It could be used to stimulate all the other marketing channels including social, e-mail or SEO. Continual development will ensure that it becomes the biggest traffic generator for your website, and prove to be a huge digital asset for you.
The blogs that you create should be concise and engaging. It should strive to solve and answer all the concerns that your personas may have. Tie up your blogs with some bigger content such as a webinar or an e-book, that gives valuable insights into a topic.
Perform Research:
Your leads, at this stage, have already identified that they want some information and are now performing research to check out the solutions. They are looking for exceptional quality, something that is not promotional in nature but informative. It should have a global appeal, successful in answering most of the questions your leads may have.
The types of content which work efficiently here are e-books, research guides, webinars, survey reports, etc. All the content created should not be biased or non-promotional, and should concentrate on providing a wonderful content.
Establish Purchasing Criteria:
Now it’s your time to provide something valuable to the prospects to make them come to your desired place – the conversion spot. Your leads have come to your site in search of something valuable. Your aim in this stage should be to educate your leads on what they should be looking for and what is an ideal solution for them. The trick is to keep all the information purely educational with little to no mention of sales messages.
In this stage there are a few more styles of content that work especially well in bringing across the feeling and messages you want at this stage. These include white papers, webinars, comparison guides, detailed guides, etc.
Evaluating Vendors (Bottom Funnel):
The final stage in the inbound marketing funnel is the decisive stage where the lead has zeroed on you and one or two of your competitors. At this time, almost 60% of the purchasing decisions have been made. Remember, the lead hasn’t spoken with anyone at your company yet.
If you have done your inbound marketing right, the lead would definitely be interested in your solutions. Demos, free consultations, free trials, detailed product information, to name a few, are the content which are expected to work at this level.
The lead will be marked as a marketing qualifed lead (MQL), once they convert on the offer on the bottom funnel. The sales team at this stage, will take a close look to see if they truly are sales qualifed lead (SQL).
In order to ensure a better performance and higher quality leads, you need to keep the persona and the lifecycle stage in the center of your inbound marketing content strategy.
Think about SEO:
Once the inbound marketing content strategy map has been created, you can start thinking how SEO could be included into it. With the use of keyword research tools and other tools available, you could find the best titles for your content to ensure that it is found online searching for those particular keywords.
The reason why this point has come down in the list is because the main goal of the content is to provide information to the prospects and putting too much efforts into SEO early in the stage will suppress the importance of the goal. Don’t ever lose sight on the goal of your content strategy.
Reviews and Updates:
It is vital to consider revisiting both the content strategy map and the personas frequently. With the evolution of new ideas, it will be very important to include all the updates into your content and your personal profile.
Everyone in your organization should participate to help by giving their own feedback and ideas which could be incorporated into your strategy. It is very important that everyone stays updated with all you are doing.
We are just giving an overview of what should be considered, however, this would serve the purpose of creating an intelligent smart inbound marketing strategy.
