Creating a content strategy for inbound marketing campaigns requires 5 things:
- Audience
- Channels
- Content
- Timing
- Goals
Read on to find out how to maximise your content strategy for inbound marketing.
What is inbound marketing?
Inbound marketing is a set of marketing activities that encourages prospects in an audience to contact you after consuming high-value content or attending events. Put simply, it is providing content and experiences to bring inquiries into the top of the sales funnel.
Inbound marketing is important because it is something that marketing can do to bring inbound contacts so that the sales team can focus on farming rather than hunting.
What is a content strategy?
Content strategy is the planning, creation and use of content to achieve a set of inbound marketing or demand generation goals. Typically, this means production of content that is published so that prospective audiences are ‘pulled in’ and contact you.
Content strategy is important to properly manage your content and because content creation for the sake of it is unlikely to achieve your goals. For example, publishing hundreds of short blogs is unlikely to lead to an inquiry for a service with a high average order value. Similarly, issuing poor quality content or irrelevant content to an audience at the wrong time will fail. It is always a case of right audience, right time, right message.
What examples of inbound marketing are there?
Here are 10 examples of inbound marketing:
- Blogs
- Case studies
- eBooks
- Events (e.g. webinars)
- Factsheets
- Flip books
- Infographics
- Social media posts
- Videos (interviews, product demos etc)
- Whitepapers
Not all of these are applicable to every channel and every audience. It is the planning, creation and use of these with the right message at the right time to the right audience that counts.
What do you need when creating a content strategy?
Remember these two phrases and you won’t go far wrong. These are: “You get what you put in” and “Inbound marketing is a marathon, not a sprint”.
There is no set definition of what works for a type of business. What we do know is that properly planned and executed inbound marketing is a good start. The opposite, also known as ‘untargeted demand generation’, is outbound and volume-based with lower returns.
A good content strategy should start with a clearly defined audience. That might be a persona or a firmographic fit. Once you have that, how are you going to get it to them? The most common channel in B2B marketing is email but this is outbound. Ideally, you would bring them onto your website or social channels to consume content. This requires content that is relevant so you know what you are going to say to them. Next, you decide on the timing that works best and when you will follow up. Then, you need some goals that you want to achieve.
Finally, you need the plan including detail of the content that is required for campaigns and how to measure success.
What is the objective of your content strategy?
No content strategy is complete without a goal or set of objectives. If you are providing a service that almost any business buys, your approach is less targeted. However, if your service has a high order value and long contracts, your content creation must be very high-quality. Low quality content that is not of direct relevance gets a lower response.
The majority of B2B decision-makers want content that speaks to them and that is authoritative. As society grows to become more individualistic, people want personalised experiences. For example, ABM requires consistent, high-value and useful content for the prospect that is also personalised to them.
Why do I need an inbound content strategy?
You need an inbound content strategy so that you are not just “doing stuff”. Great content that brings inquiries needs effort and cost. If you consider that prospects can be up to 80% down a sales funnel before speaking to a sales representative, what is taking us from 0-80%?
Making sure that your lead generation is supported by marketing means that sales are more effective. Yes, that’s right. Where the sales team may occasionally land a deal from a cold call, wouldn’t it be more rewarding to have fewer calls, more conversions and larger orders?
Once you get practiced at it, you can evaluate what works and what doesn’t. As the inquiries start to fill the top of the funnel, you will increase your planning and content management efforts. Ultimately, when inbound marketing reaches the point where you need additional people to do it, you have to call for help. Whether you are using Oracle Eloqua, HubSpot or Marketo, your campaigns are only scalable with the help of automation for inbound campaigns.
A final word on creating a content strategy
In the spirit of our founding philosophy, we will leave you with this quote from Aristotle, a student of the Greek philosopher, Plato. He said, “Excellence is never an accident”. In summary, inbound marketing needs a content strategy to manage your content marketing. Furthermore, inbound marketing at scale requires some automation and not all content is suitable for all purposes.
If you would like to know more about our inbound services, simply call 01565 632206.
Alternatively, why not email sales@think-beyond.co.uk or fill-in a quick contact form for a call back.
Finally, we have some further articles about innovation in inbound if you wish to read more.