Content Marketing is Useless Without an Inbound Strategy
While content marketing is an important part of your marketing funnel, as far as building trust in your business, it may not accomplish much if it’s not focused on providing educational content that matters to your potential customers.
Creating entertaining blogs posts or videos that attract a lot of attention and engagement doesn’t necessarily lead to more customers and sales.
Content marketing / inbound marketing needs to be carefully planned to ensure it aligns with the needs and profiles of your target customers:
- Challenges, problems, desires
- Which topics actually matter to their careers and lives?
- Where do they get information (books, videos, courses)?
A Strategic Content Marketing Plan is Your Inbound Roadmap
Your content marketing plan needs to consider the entire buying journey(funnel), from initial awareness to purchase.
This means that each segment of your marketing funnel, such as blog posts, free downloads (lead magnet), and email sequences, should contain information that is appropriate for that stage of your purchase path.
A potential customer who has just discovered your business needs more informational content than someone who has already interacted with your articles and email messages a few times.
If a first-time website visitor doesn’t find the information they’re looking for from your blog posts or home page, they will be less willing to provide their contact information to continue interacting with you. Many people will simply leave your website and never come back.
How does a Content Strategy Help?
A well-planned content marketing strategy will allow you to create educational content and materials that attract a lot of quality website traffic.
Adding a free offer within your blogs and articles will encourage potential customers to provide their email addresses in exchange for your downloadable materials.
Building an email list in this manner makes it much easier to continuously promote your products and services to people who have shown an interest in what your have to offer.
What is Included in a Content? Marketing Plan?
- Challenges, problems, desires of your typical customer
- Which topics actually matter to their careers and lives?
- Where do they get information related to your product (books, videos, courses)?
Creating a content marketing plan will give you a clear sense of direction that ensures your free, educational content and materials are actually helping you to attract more customers and clients, instead of just giving away free advice.
Specifically, You Will Discover:
1 Your target audience
The topics you write about or talk about need to be relevant to your most important customer segments.
This means staying focused on topics that are directly related to the problems your products and services solve.
Your potential customers will be more receptive to your sales offers if your free content has done its job of building up your authority and trust factor within your industry.
2 What is unique about your business?
The internet has made it easier for competitors to offer the same features, discounts, and guarantees as everyone else.
That’s why it’s important to position yourself as a trustworthy consultant who actually wants to help his /her customers succeed.
Your articles, blog posts, or videos should give potential customers a glimpse of your business methods, your personality, and opinions.
3 Which Content formats do your customers prefer?
Depending on the age and education levels of your typical customers, it may be preferable to create mostly written content, instead of videos or podcasts.
This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t offer content in other formats. The idea is to spend most of your marketing budget on educational materials that will actually be consumed by your target audience.
4 Which channels /media to focus on
Today, there is a variety of places where you can publish your educational marketing content:
- Websites
- Traditional brochures
- Email messages
Just like the formats you focus on, the choice of publishing channels depends on the characteristics of your target customers.
You may decide to focus on one main marketing channel, and share one piece of content (blog post, article) on different platforms in order to attract a larger number of readers or viewers.
5 The best way to schedule and manage your content marketing pieces
Your content marketing plan should also include a calendar detailing:
- Content marketing topics
- Where the content will be posted
- The date and time when it will be posted online
A simple Excel or Google spreadsheet will help you to create simple content calendar.
6 The most effective ways to link educational content to the other segments of your marketing funnel (pipeline / sequence)
A well-planned content strategy should be designed to ultimately convince website / blog visitors to enter the sales component of your marketing funnel by providing their contact information.
In order to persuade content readers to enter your sales funnel, you need to continually ask them to sign up for a free download, free consultation, or other valuable offer.
An easy way to promote email sign-ups is to include links at the bottom of every article, blog post, or social media post.
These links ask people to provide their email addresses in exchange for your free offer.
Your free offers and email marketing messages should be related to the topics of your blog posts and other content, in order to stay aligned with your overall inbound strategy.
A Content Plan Simplifies Your Marketing
A marketing funnel, combining both educational content and promotional messages, offers many advantages over using disconnected platforms and messages:
- Create free content that is relevant to your potential customers
- Easily discover new content marketing topics to write about
- Continuously repeat your most important messages and brand positioning to potential customers
- Automate the process of converting prospects into customers
- Focus your marketing budget on proven techniques, formats, and channels
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Create Your Own Content Marketing Plan!
If you would like to create online content that attracts more qualified website visitors, please contact us today