How to create inbound marketing content

It is time consuming – and you have to keep coming up with new ideas to keep your content fresh and engaging.  So you must invest the right level of resource and commitment into generating content.

Here are a few tips on how to manage this effectively:

• It’s important to review your persona stories every 3 months to ensure they are still relevant. Are there any significant new challenges to the sector? Have their business needs changed? Are they still a relevant target audience for your business?
• Look out for current news items you can use as the subject of a blog.  Newsworthy content is likely to gain more immediate interest and give the impression that you’re in tune with world events and current affairs.  It could be humorous – or it may be an observation on new legislation that may affect your industry.

But you need to be quick – preferably publishing on the same day – and you need to take the post down as events supersede your comments.

Create different types of content to achieve different outcomes.  Every company will be different with regards to the amount of content they produce – either for budgetary reasons, resource availability or audience requirements.  But it’s important to kick-start any campaign with enough momentum to get it off the ground.  

We suggest:

• 4 monthly keyword heavy posts on your website and social channels. Every piece of content should be written using your keywords and phrases – produce at least 4 posts every month that focus on a specific key phrase that you want to rank for. The aim is to encourage Google to trust your website as a knowledgeable authority for that particular keyphrase. And the more you write about it, the higher Google will rank you for it. 
• 1 monthly News post. This is a fun and compelling post designed to encourage sharing.  It could be ’The 10 best social media campaigns’ or ’100 most influential people on Twitter in education’.  It’s designed to be shared predominantly across social media platforms. Quizzes also work particularly well on social media, which can be used to drive traffic to a relevant blog on your web page. 
• 1 monthly Buyer Question post. Every month focus at least one blog on answering a buyer’s question.   Ask your sales team for a list of the typical questions they get asked the most.  They could be questions relevant to the ‘Discovery’ stage of the sales funnel when prospects are asking generic questions.  Or it may be a product specific question further down the sales funnel.
• 1 monthly PR article or link building off-site blog.  Offer to submit a column or monthly opinion piece to an online trade publication or approach industry bloggers and offer to contribute a well-written thought-leadership blog.  Mix it up and get networking to discover new opportunities - Google will begin to increase your site ranking thereby improving your entire inbound content marketing effort. 
• 1 quarterly market report download.  This is an in-depth piece of content, which addresses many of your buyers’ challenges or question. Blogs and awareness content pieces do the work of attracting people to your website – but once there you need to persuade them to give you their details.  You can do this through a competition – but we’ve found the best way of gaining good quality leads, rather than just numbers, is to offer a piece of intelligence that they can’t do without.

There is no single perfect solution to content marketing – what works for one company may not work as well for another.  So, you need to track and monitor all content to ensure it’s working – if it’s not delivering the audience traffic, or the leads you’re generating aren’t converting, you need to reassess, identify the problem area and put it right. 

The simple fact is that Content Marketing will give you a complete view of everything.  You know the customer journey your customers have taken before they converted – but more importantly you also know the precise moment a prospect chose not to buy - and of this happens often, you know exactly where improvements need to be made.