This is the first of a six-part series we’re providing for those who are planning to get started with inbound marketing. Enjoy this first article.
Marketing has changed a lot in the past few years. Today’s marketers need to product a constant flow of new content, from blog posts and social media updates, to videos, ebooks, and webinars. This content will serve you in many ways:
- Improves search engine rankings
- Drives traffic to your website
- Helps nurture existing leads
But it can’t be just any content. . . it has to be relevant, remarkable content.
Content plays a critical role in every stage of the inbound marketing process, from generating awareness about your company to helping convert leads into customers. But the types of content you should use to achieve each of these goals are often very different from each other, which means you need to ensure that you’re creating content for every stage of the buying cycle.
Examples of compelling marketing content
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Here’s your goal: In marketing, offers are the gateways to lead generation. Without them, site visitors have no way of getting converted into leads. They are also a critical tool for nurturing existing leads to help them become sales-ready. Remember that compelling content educates your audience in industry-specific topics and helps you convert your web visitors into leads.
The goods new is that you have quite a few great options at your disposal in terms of the types of offers you can make: ebooks, FAQs, guides, slideshows, kits, case studies, new industry research, templates, free tools, consultations, etc.
How to create compelling marketing content
Like publishers, inbound marketers must have a detailed picture of the target audience in order to create optimal content for them.
Who are your ideal customers and prospects? What are their biggest concerns, needs, interest, and challenges? Where can you reach them — on search engines, social media or blogs — and what kinds of content do they prefer? These questions will help you develop buyer personas.
If you use simple lead management software, you can easily collect key pieces of information (lead intelligence) about your prospects that will help you segment your leads into nurturing campaigns based on their buyer persona, their point in the sales process, and what you can determine their interests are, based on their activity in your website.
Sending them offers that appeal to those interests as well as how close they are to making a buying decision can help you better qualify your leads before they get handed off to sales.
Want to learn more?
Join us on December 13th for our end-of-year webinar on lead generation for 2013. We’re including a unique fast-start program for inbound marketing that we’ve developed. Don’t miss this 45-minute free webinar!
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