The biggest reason that potential leads respond to Inbound Marketing strategies and tactics is it uses valuable and relevant content to draw them in instead of trying to push them in with sales tactics. To successfully use an Inbound Marketing strategy for your company, you must have this relevant and valuable content to gain new leads. So, how do you create this content? And what do you do with old content that may not be optimized for Inbound Marketing?
The first thing to keep in mind when creating content for your Inbound Marketing strategy is where this content will fall in the four steps of the Inbound Marketing Methodology:
Each step requires different content to reach potential visitors, leads, and customers right where they are in their buyer’s journey. This content could include e-books, blogs, landing pages, social media posts, and more.
To learn more about how to tailor the content to reach potential leads for each stage, take a look at our blog posts for the four steps of the Inbound Marketing methodology.
How to Create Inbound Marketing Worthy Content
However, no matter what kind of content you are creating, there are four things to keep in mind that will keep your content on track to be Inbound Marketing worthy no matter what stage of the methodology you are targeting:
1. Buyer Persona
Every good Inbound Marketing strategy should start off with a buyer persona. This persona will allow you to determine your target audience and figure out who your ideal customer is in that particular audience.
Without determining who this person is, you will not be able to figure out what questions they are asking and how you can be the solution to their problems.
Once you have determined who your buyer persona is and what they are searching for, you will be able to create content that answers questions they have at every stage of their buyer’s journey.
You can also use it to determine the best place to reach your ideal customers. If you know they frequent certain areas online more than others, you can tailor your marketing strategy to post your content in places where it will have maximum visibility.
2. Create Content That Answers Commonly Asked Sales Questions
If you have created a buyer persona for your ideal customer, but are still struggling to come up with content topics, consider teaming up with your salespeople to find out what commonly asked questions they hear.
While it is the marketing team’s job to generate leads for the sales team, the marketing team might not know all of the commonly asked questions. If you learn what your current leads are asking, you can create content around these questions since you already know they are topics your potential leads are interested in.
This is beneficial to your sales team as well! Once you have built content around their common questions, the team can use this content in their sales prospecting.
If a lead wants more information on a topic you already have content for, your sales team can send them the link and use the content as a sales tool to further engage with the lead. Win win for everyone!
3. Produce Quality Content Constantly
One of the best ways to see results from your Inbound Marketing strategy is to post often. This will help drive traffic to your site and generate more leads.
For example, studies show that companies who blog 2-3 times a week see 2.5 times more site traffic than companies who blog 1 time per week. Also, these same companies saw 3 times the amount of new leads by posting 2-3 times a week as opposed to companies who post once a week.
While this is great, you still need to consider that the content you are producing must be QUALITY content. If you are posting just to post, your content will not be considered valuable and may not answer the questions your ideal customers are searching for.
One of the best ways to ensure you are consistently posting quality content is to organize your posts with a content calendar.
This will allow you to plan out your topics, who will create the posts, who the posts will target, and where they will be published in advance. By doing so, you will know that the content you are producing is valuable and will be consistent.
Download our free Content Calendar template to plan and organize topics that will reach your Buyer Persona at every stage in their journey!
4. Continually Update Old Content
If you are switching over to an Inbound Marketing strategy or even if you have been using one for a while, you probably have some old content posted. You may not be sure if this content is Inbound Marketing worthy and may even be considering deleting it.
However, before you delete it, see if you can instead revise it to be Inbound Marketing worthy. The more content you have, the better your SEO ranking will be, so if you can repurpose old content to match your current strategy instead of deleting it and starting over, it will be better for your overall goals.
Some ways to repurpose old content include:
- Reviewing it to see if it still is relevant to your buyer persona
- Linking to other content and posts to include the old post in your topic clusters
- Updating the post with current information
- Revising the content to meet current goals and standards
Conclusion
Although creating Inbound Marketing worthy content may seem overwhelming at first, it will seem less overwhelming if you take it one step at a time. By creating a buyer persona and discovering what topics they are interested in and the questions they need answered, you are already creating a list of content topics for yourself.
Once you have your list of topics, all you have to do is organize them into a calendar and be sure you are consistently producing quality content that stays current with your marketing strategy. By doing so, you will have Inbound Marketing worthy content that will be beneficial to not only your lead generation, but also your SEO ranking and site traffic.
Get the most out of your Inbound Marketing strategy by tracking and measuring the correct metrics. Download our Marketing Metics calculator to get started!
