An Inbound Marketing Agency can help attract new audiences to your website, engage them on your site, and then motivate them to take action and become a lead or make a sale. What’s the secret?
Content.
What does this mean? This article will outline the basics of creating an effective and targeted content strategy.
1) Determine Who You’re Writing For
The more targeted and relevant you make your content, the bigger impact it will have on driving behavior with your audience.
- Who is your target audience? Are they CEOs, sales persons, marketing teams, mothers, teens?
- What appeals to your target audience/s? Determine what their commons needs, concerns, and questions are. To help do this you could:
- Ask your sales teams what are some common items that they discuss with prospects.
- Launch a survey and ask your current customers why they chose to do business with you.
2) Create personas.
Based on your research, lay out your target audience personas. A persona is a fictional character profile that is based on your ideal customers and includes their common concerns, wants and needs.
3) Map Out the Sales Lifecycle and Stages
Before you start diving into developing the content, it’s important for you to understand each stage of the marketing funnel for your personas. Here are the four main buying cycles that most businesses see (yours may be slightly different).
- Awareness: Your audience realizes a problem or need and they start researching solutions. They’re looking to be educated.
- Focus on being the resource they need–answer their questions and concerns with blogs, PRs, tip sheets, whitepapers, how-to guides.
- Education: Your audience is performing research at a higher level to learn how to solve their problems. They may be testing different solutions so they ask more educated questions. They may be trying to implement a strategy themselves.
- Focus on higher-level issues that your audience faces–utilize eBooks, buyers guides, industry whitepapers, webinars, events, Q&As.
- Validation: Your audience is educated and ready to take action, but they’re establishing their “must-haves.” They don’t want to miss anything and make the wrong decision.
- Focus on content that will lead them down the final sales process. Launch webinars, podcasts, outline things you should know, tell them the questions to ask, give them checklists, offer industry info.
- Sales: Your audience is narrowing down vendors to make their decision. They’re looking for trials and demos to be able to test things out. They know they’re going to buy.
- Focus on strong presentations, topic sheets, product whitepapers, case studies, customer testimonials, free trials, free consultations, competitive intelligence.
Utilizing an inbound marketing agency at this stage will greatly help you to determine the best types of content for different stages. Ask their for advice!
4) Develop content ideas
With your target audience and their buying cycles firmly in mind, now comes the content development phase. All of the initial planning will make your life a lot easier.
- Go through each target persona and each buying cycle and start focusing in on the detailed topics and resources that can help lead them from Awareness toSales.
5) Finally, write the content
Writing high-quality content that communicates your message is paramount to success. Hire a writing team, or utilize an Inbound Marketing Agency to help develop not only your content, but also the research and strategy that will make it successful. For more tips on content creation, please contact The Great Online today.
