Creating Content Strategy

As an inbound marketer, you make meaningful connections by creating a systematic publishing calendar, producing content designed to attract and engage. This is your content strategy, and it includes the following:

• A formal documented content process
• The profile personas you’ll target
• Product pyramids for which you’ll create content
• A CTA Map populated with content designed for SEO and conversion
• Content campaigns
• Content asset gaps and recommended list of content to be produced for each step of the purchase path
• Purposeful blog page structure encouraging interactivity
• Publishing calendar

Improving your content strategy starts with creating purposeful content that is measurable. Figure 12-1 displays the top objectives for business-to-business content marketers, providing insight into some objectives for your own content strategy. Great inbound marketing content:

• Resonates with each of your target persona customers because it “speaks” to them in their language
• Displays over multiple formats
• Provides value to an individual
• Is shareable
• Builds meaningful relationships beyond a mere transaction
• Encourages a natural progression from a stranger who is having first contact with your company through a trusted product advocate (or Lifestyler) who lives for your brand.
• Offers opportunity for further connections

Pardot published a helpful white paper about content creation. Use it as a guide when creating your content strategy. You can download it here: http://www.pardot.com/whitepapers/content-creation-guide/.

Knowing your content

Content is anything your target market finds engaging, relevant, entertaining, or informative. Delivered as text, video, audio, or imagery, content addresses the particular needs, pain points, or interests of your visitor. It should be engaging, useful, relevant, easily consumed, and contextually accessible across multiple device platforms.

Creating content that educates researchers

Think of your educational content as a visitor’s introduction to your company and the products and services you deliver. When you direct researchers to that educational content, you’ve begun the inbound-content marketing process.

A person who begins research into a product purchase needs a reliable, trustworthy source from which he or she can form an opinion. This is the stage in which you serve up educational content. Educational content may be any of the following:

• Blog posts
• FAQs
• “How To” Tips sheets
• Product Spec sheets
• Infographics
• Informational videos
• Resources
• Social media posts
• Industry overview reports

Creating content that engages shoppers

A stranger becomes a visitor upon being attracted to and landing at your website. Initially you won’t know much about these visitors except what you can learn from Google Analytics. Reviewing your Google Analytics uncovers aggregate visitor trend information but displays nothing about your visitors as individuals. So, you’re limited to some basic demographics as well as to some limited geographic and lifestyle information and an ISP address (which you may use to retarget and reengage).

Your engagement content is usually the point of first conversion. The customer lead information you request should be proportionate to your target persona’s perceived value. You wouldn’t ask someone for their credit card number for downloading a basic e-book. Engagement content is designed for lead interaction for your visitors and data collection for you, the marketer. Engagement content may include any of the following:

• E-books
• White papers
• Interactive tools
• Research
• Buying guides
• Webinars
• Podcasts
• Newsletters
• Workflow emails

Creating landing pages (for more on this, see Chapter 22) specifically for each of your engagement content pieces provides a gateway through which visitors interact and you collect customer information relevant to your chosen persona’s buying qualifications.

After you’ve collected lead data, you can begin to communicate with your leads, offering reengagement opportunities and directing the prospect toward the encouragement stage. Communicating on a personal level with your prospects requires data collection through engagement. Ideally, your engagement content:

• Provides user value
• Captures lead data
• Creates interaction with your visitors
• Nurtures a prospect closer to the next desired set of conversions

Creating content that encourages an action

After visitors exchange data for your content, they are now a contact or a lead. By knowing your ideal target customer personas, you can segment leads, allowing you to direct relevant content their way, paving the path towards further action. Encouragement content includes assets that help persuade your leads to take action. Serve encouragement content to those leads who have expressed a demonstrated interest. Encouragement content may include any of the following:

• Onsite incentives
• Product demos
• Free trials
• Custom presentations
• Coupons
• Pricing estimates
• Customer reviews
• Onsite live chat
• Workflow emails
• Prewritten emails from the sales department

Your bottom-of-the-funnel encouragement content facilitates sales and therefore often requires involvement from your sales team. Ideally, your encouragement content achieves the following objectives:

• Positions your brand/products above competitors
• Shortens the purchase cycle
• Causes an action like a sale or donation

Often encouragement content features a Contact Us form as the CTA, but this doesn’t always have to be the case. Allowing purchases online makes it easy for people to take action on their terms. Creating a customer sign-up process with little to no human interaction is sometime preferred by your customers and often makes things easier for you. Just be sure to provide human engagement when it’s needed, particularly if there is a long sale cycle, a complex buying process, or the need for product demonstration or training.

Creating content that embraces repeat customers

It’s probably clear to you by now how challenging it is to generate relationships that attract strangers to your website, and to nurture them into customers. Reengaging customers with content is a great way to maintain customer communication, and it lowers your cost-per-acquisition of additional sales. After a lead becomes a customer, inbound marketing uses content like a great big “thank you” hug. This is the embrace stage. Embracing content is delivered to customers directly after a purchase and periodically thereafter, for four reasons:

• To cement and reinforce the customer relationship
• To provoke reengagement
• To provide opportunity for customer feedback
• To deliver rewards for your best customers, especially your Lifestylers

Here are some forms of embracing content:

• Automated “Thank You” emails sent immediately after purchase
• Product shipment notifications
• Private sales
• Rewards/loyalty points
• Customer feedback surveys/reviews
• Onsite live customer support
• Workflow emails

Blogs

Blogs are designed as educational attraction content. Writing relevant blog articles and posting often is a proven inbound attraction factor. Categorizing your blog posts makes it easy for you to assign those posts to product campaigns. Optimizing your blog content increases your ranking on SERPs so your content can be found online. Publishing often (three-to-five times a week) and posting in multiple digital media creates traffic traction. You can read more about blog posting in Chapter 13.

E-books

Posting e-books as engagement content is an effective conversion tool. Because this is often the first conversion point in an inbound marketing campaign, it’s a good idea to start your content production with an e-book. Take care to structure your e-book to clearly identify the problems you’re helping a target persona solve and break those down into manageable, digestible sections. Later, you can use these sections as fodder for your blog posts, essentially republishing parts without giving away all the content inside.

Branding your e-books with a common layout and an unobtrusive logo creates a consistency that’s important to your inbound marketing efforts. Just don’t overdo it. It’s okay to have hyperlinks in your text, and even a CTA; however, be sure to let your content do the work. Don’t interrupt the reader with a huge logo or with continual “Contact Us” messages. Remember, this is the engagement phase, so your content is designed to answer questions that help your reader. This works best when you create e-books that:

• Make readers realize they have a business problem or a pain point that you’re addressing
• Provide some ideas as to how to address this problem
• Position your company as the expert (not by literally telling the reader you’re an expert, but by sharing enlightening information with thoughtful solutions that make sense)
• Do not contain pushy or sales-oriented language
• Talk more (way more) about the reader’s needs than about your company
• Provide readers an opportunity to take the next step in the purchase path

Consider listing a highly visible “total reading time” in the introduction so your reader knows what to expect. You can break each section into a reading time so your readers can either skim what’s important to them or consume your e-book in chunks.

Whitepapers

Publishing white papers positions your company as an expert in your field. The term “white paper” has been a bit diluted from the times when it referred only to collegiate professor’s published papers. Generally, these days, white papers are:

• Written more formally
• Feature a longer format than an e-book
• Appear more scholarly
• Are research-oriented and contain data, facts, and figures
• Dive deeply into the subject matter

So, what’s the difference between an e-book and a whitepaper? Check out Table 12-1 to compare these two engagement content pieces.

Videos

Videos are a great way to capture the attention of buyers during the education phase. Lately, many companies specializing in custom video creation have sprung up as an affordable alternative to written content. Business-to-business companies can also use video content during the post-sale embrace stage as training videos or product information videos. Take the following into consideration when including video as part of your content strategy for your inbound marketing campaigns:

• Brand your videos without being interruptive.
• Use your videos to educate, rather than selling product.
• Keep educational videos to under two minutes. Often, only one minute is enough time.
• If you have complex educational messaging due to a sophisticated product or a systemized procedure, break videos into short, manageable chunks. In other words, using ten one-minute videos is usually better than using one ten-minute video.
• For training after a sale, it’s fine to have longer format videos

Posting your videos on your website and on YouTube broadens your content’s reach. Make sure you optimize your video content for both.

Webinars

Webinars are a fantastic way to engage prospects, especially for business-to-business companies. Webinars can feature content for each of the 4 E’s of Content Marketing. Often, creating a webinar from an e-book makes sense either as a free engagement tool or as a paid means of diving deeper into a topic. You can even create a webinar series for regular customers to subscribe to and to watch. However, it’s easy to mess up a webinar, especially a live one, so before creating one consider the following tips:

• Start with a small group for your first webinar.
• Seek questions from attendees ahead of time so there are no surprises.
• Test the webinar software several times before you go live.
• Start the log-in time for your webinar at least five minutes before the official start time.
• Record the webinar so those who don’t attend may view it later and so that future visitors to your website can engage by downloading and viewing the webinar.
• Keep the material concise. Don’t try to cover too much information.
• Ideally, keep your webinar to at least 20 minutes but no more than 30. Even if you allot a follow-up period for questions and answers, stick to your total time limit.
• Consider prerecording your webinar, allowing questions and comments only at the end.
• Use simple graphics and bullet points. Keep one thought per slide. Don’t feature every word you say onscreen.

You can create an automated email workflow for each webinar in the following manner:

1. Send an immediate thank you upon signing up.
2. Email a 24-hour webinar time reminder.
3. Email again with a one-hour webinar time reminder.
4. Send a post-webinar thank you with next CTA for attendees OR
5. Also, send a post-webinar “Sorry You Couldn’t Attend” email with link to recorded webinar.

There is a huge selection of webinar-hosting software in the marketplace. Among the hundreds available are the following:

• Adobe Connect
• Citrix GoToWebinar
• ClickWebinar
• WebEx

The most important features of any webinar-hosting software are dependability (that is, that it doesn’t crash during your live webinar) and ease of access for attendees. Test drive a few before you commit to any software choice.

If you plan on regularly hosting webinars with fewer than ten people, several free options are available. You can even host a Google+ hangout. These programs are really more geared toward online meeting facilitation rather than webinar hosting.

Infographics

Consumers are visual creatures. As such, creating an infographic is one of the most powerful, yet often overlooked, content type. Infographics simplify complex information by visually telling a story. Your infographics will have more impact if you keep the following tips in mind:

• Keep them as simple as possible.
• Tell a story.
• Design compelling (sometimes interactive) graphics aligned with your brand standards.
• Create a CTA inside your infographic.
• Make it sharable on social media.

Use infographics to create interest and onsite interactivity. You can hire a professional to design your infographics or check out these free tools:

• Piktochart
• Easel.ly
• Visual.ly
• Venngage

Online tools

There may be no more powerful form of educational and engagement content than the well-built, intuitive tool that solves a specific problem for your target persona. Tools encourage interactive problem-solving for dynamic situations — think mortgage calculators for home buyers.

Thoughtfully designed online tools:

• Are interactive
• Illuminate problem areas for prospects
• Help solve problems, even problems with multiple factors
• May feature engagement opportunities by offering prospects additional information/solutions if they engage with your company consultant or if they try a paid version of your product.

One of the most-used tools in the inbound marketing industry is HubSpot’s Marketing Grader (formerly Website Grader) (www.marketing.grader.com), which crawls your website, accesses a variety of APIs for your website metrics, and then provides very detailed first-step solutions to fix the problems it identified.