Why Inbound Organizations Must Be Great at Producing and Publishing Content

Because 97% of consumers now use online media when researching products and services in their local market¹ and 93% of all B2B purchases start with an Internet search,² inbound marketing should be a priority if organizations want to reach consumers.

Content is the tangible output of the information defined in your inbound strategy, translated into a format buyers find, consume, and review—like an e-book, white paper, checklist, video, podcast, SlideShare, social media post, or blog article. Content should contain your experience and expertise packaged in a digestible format, available throughout your website and designed to help anyone who is interested. Prospects consume this material as they research, understand, frame, and move toward a solution to their problem. Inbound marketing is the strategy your organization employs to get your content found and to engage with buyers at each stage of the funnel.

It is vital for business leaders to understand the role content plays in this process. Content should be consistent with the company mission and vision and reflective of organizational values. Paying attention to content is as important as the overall company brand.

Adam Robinson, marketing director of Cerasis, puts the connection between leaders, leadership, and content this way: “Content leadership typically builds trust and extends to being seen as a leader in other aspects of your business. If we're seen as a leader in content, the perception is most likely that we're a leader in the services and the technology that we provide.”³

What Is the Source of Great Content?

Great content comes from an organization thinking about things deeply and clearly. “Writing is thinking. To write well is to think clearly. That's why it's so hard.”⁴

“The value people get from your content is related to the amount of thought you put into it. People are busy, we don't always have time to think deeply about our work and how to be better—that's what great content does, it does the hard work of thinking for us,” says Janessa Lantz, a HubSpot senior marketing manager.⁵

What should your organization be thinking about? The primary focus should be on the issues that cause the ideal buyer persona to struggle. It may not be a specific, narrow technical problem, but you should be thinking about the buyer in the context of their world, the strategic issues, and barriers to success that they face on a daily basis. Great content comes from taking a specific subject, making it easy to digest and understand, communicating your ideas to the audience, and providing a guide that directs them to take some form of action that can help.

Why do you need to define the problems buyers want to solve, rather than describe the products that you want to sell? Because buyers want a solution, an answer; they want the feeling that comes with addressing the issue and getting a good outcome. They don't care about your product. Buyers need to know you offer something more than the products and services in your product catalog or rate card. Content is a way to share this knowledge in a form that is helpful to them. Great buyer-focused content means eliminating self-serving, vacuous, marketing-speak like “We have excellent customer service,” or “We are consultative.” It involves creating content with industry vocabulary that makes it easy to understand.

Content is strategic because it affects nearly every aspect of the buyer journey. There are no shortcuts to building great content.

Inbound marketing strategy is built on a series of plays and tactics including SEO, social media, email, analytics, inbound links, comments, landing pages, workflows, and other mechanisms for making your expertise expressed in content findable by your buyer.

A core principle of inbound content is to attract instead of to interrupt, strategically placing content where your best prospects are looking for information as they educate themselves about their situations and possible paths to improvement. Search engines favor actual experts and expertise over generic bulk-produced content.

Andrew Quinn talks about the sources of content:

The first thing is to start looking at your customers and your prospects and who they are and what do they care about. Why do they choose us? What are the choices they can make? What decisions are they making? And why do they make them? With this understanding, you can create highly valuable answers that they will then find. And that's an incredibly effective use of your business's time and your money.⁶

What Are the Most Important Types of Content to Produce?

Content is the essence of your expertise, communicated in a way that your audience understands and absorbs the message. It helps them improve their situation by moving them to their desired end state.

• Application Content—describes how, when, and where a product or service is used, including industry or user-focused information. Application content shows how to use the product in a particular circumstance and the outcomes that will result from that use.
• Solution Content—describes why this solution is the best way to address the problem, frequently in Q&A form. It is easy to understand, shows mastery of the problem, and makes it easy for prospects to see different options.
• Outcome Content—shows the specific path from problem identification to goal achievement, starting with the goal and working backward, while outlining a complete way to get there.
• Persona Content—provides information focused on a particular personality, role, or position and how to make their life better, more comfortable, or faster. Also gives any other details on outcomes they wish to achieve.
• Insight Content—delivers actionable intelligence derived from research that helps the reader make sense of their world. Analysis of industries, strategy, data, or technology trends.
• Product/Service Content—includes features, specifications, and technical details. This is often the first thing organizations work on when it comes to content and, in most cases, this is the least relevant and exciting content to the buyer.

Even if you choose to outsource content creation, your top subject matter experts need to be involved.

Janessa Lantz says this about creating content:

You can't expect to bring in a young, inexperienced recent college graduate and expect them to be good at creating content. That person, or someone like them, can create a blog schedule and create low-value content to check the box for meeting a schedule, but that is not how successful content works anymore. If you create one great piece of content, you get a hundred times the results, as measured in engagement and interest, than if you create one hundred pieces of mediocre content.⁷

Inbound organizations understand how important content is to communicate the mission, culture, and strategies for both internal and external consumption.

The Secret of a Successful Inbound Marketing and Content Strategy

A recent Content Marketing Institute survey⁸ found the following:

• 88% of B2B respondents say their organization uses content marketing.
• Only 30% say their organization's content is effective or accomplishes their overall objectives.
• Only 44% said their organization is clear on what an effective content marketing program even looks like.
• 32% said they had a documented content marketing strategy.

If almost 9 out of 10 companies use content, why are so few successful at it?

The most significant barrier to a successful inbound marketing and content strategy is the disconnect between the buyer's interest and the marketer's offering. Organizations that take a strategic approach create content that starts with the buyer and works backward. Organizations that produce product- and feature-focused content are less successful.

The buyer must be front and center in all inbound marketing content efforts. If you develop the ideal buyer persona and use it to guide inbound marketing and content development, you will get better results. If you are not helping your persona, but are pitching and selling products, then your inbound marketing efforts will fail.

Buyers smell insincerity a mile away. A recent study by Google showed that visitors make first impressions of your website in as little as half a second and it takes 2.6 seconds to find the most critical elements on a site that focus their attention. The research further showed that websites with simple designs or low complexity as well as a familiar layout were highly preferred by visitors. Being straightforward in your messaging and presenting your content in ways familiar to your persona leads to trust.

Buyers focus on content that is engaging. Engaging means they are paying attention to the content and learning from it. Content that is boring, uninteresting, or hard to navigate will lose the reader and might very well create a negative impression of your brand. Great content flows from effective persona work, the questions the buyers ask, and your honesty and expertise in answering them.

Once you create great content, you still need to present it in a way that is interesting. Great content is different from writing an academic or technical paper. The presentation of content needs to assist in driving deeper engagement by informing, educating, and even entertaining your ideal buyer persona.

Today's buyer wants the relationship to be personal, so content must be personalized. Content is the link, the glue, the connection between you and your potential customer. Even when your sales team or service people are engaging with customers, content will be a large part of the ongoing experience.

Personalization is an excellent place to start. Emails with the recipient's name, web pages that recognize your IP address, appropriate call-to-action graphics, and customized landing pages help build a better relationship. Using common vocabulary, determining communication preferences (text, email, or phone), and figuring out optimal frequency impact your message.

Combining personalization with the appropriate content for each phase of the buying journey enhances the relationship. Delivering customized experiences (HubSpot calls this smart content) allows companies to be more helpful. This method of producing unique content will become the standard as new technologies emerge.

An excellent example of personalization is the music provider Spotify. The more you use the product, the more personal the music becomes. Spotify uses your listening behavior to serve you even more great content. No one can listen to every artist, so Spotify uses your stated preferences as well as what you listen to and makes recommendations. Spotify uses data to make your relationship more personal by sending weekly favorites to your playlists. Your Spotify playlist is like no one else's. It is very individual and personalized.

Content must be layered across the buyer journey and used by the people on your team who are communicating with the buyer. Marketing departments should be able to see statistics about which content gets opened the most frequently and when. Aggregating the results allows marketing and sales people to understand the best material to deploy at the best time and match the stage of the buyer with the right content via a content library with modularity, sorted based on the persona, industry, specific buyer stage, topic, and business outcome.

For example, creating a video that addresses the multiple types of competitive solution categories used by your three personas gives you maximum flexibility. This video could appear in blog posts, site pages, and emails to different target personas along with text that describes the outcome of using your solution in a particular application.

Building a matrix of content gives you the flexibility to apply the right material to the proper situation, delivering a personal experience for your buyer. The goal of strategic content is to provide buyers and influencers the ammunition they need to advance their decision making. Content fills the gaps between the personal interactions with your company.

Inbound organizations use content strategically and match the right content to the right persona at the right time in the proper stage. If the content is product focused, generalized, laden with marketing jargon, dull, or dated, buyers will ignore it. In today's buying environment, that means they ignore you too.

What You Get from Inbound Marketing and Content

Inbound marketing drives measurable results:

• Target prospects find your content online.
• Prospects engage earlier in buyer journey via education offers.
• Relationships become focused on helping, which builds trust.
• Better engagement with buyers improves the buying process.
• A better customer experience is delivered.
• Your reputation as a thought leader improves.
• More leads are generated, lowering acquisition costs.
• Net new customers and revenue growth increase.

Content and content marketing evolve all the time. Technology is moving fast, and buyers are moving even quicker because they rely on content to stay up to date. Every day more content is consumed using mobile devices. AI is starting to drive content creation, distribution, and personalization. These trends are vital reasons businesses need to think of content as a strategic question.

Chatbots, influencer marketing, even paid ads and sponsored promotion depend on great content. The trends point to persona-based, helpful content as being necessary for any new promotion and distribution channels for inbound marketing in the future.

The concepts defined in this chapter regarding external content hold true for content created for internal uses as well. One of the critical characteristics of the organizations we studied is that they use the same approach internally to educate and inform employees, partners, and suppliers. Content supports every educational initiative both internally and externally in the organization's ecosystem. An inbound organization leans on strategic content as the foundation for helping first.

The most important part of creating strategic content is that you must have something important to share, something to contribute to the conversation in your world, something that is worthwhile to read. Organizations that fail to see the connection between their thinking and the buyer's problems frequently struggle. Inbound organizations should be great content producers and promoters to everyone in their ecosystem.

Justin Champion, author of Inbound Content: A Step-by-Step Guide to Doing Content Marketing the Inbound Way, puts it this way, “If your goal is to create content that attracts, converts, closes, and delights your ideal customers, then you need the commitment, excitement, and dedication of your entire company to make it happen.”⁹

Inbound marketing is not a short-term play or quick fix. You can't start it one week and pause it the next. Success depends on a long-term commitment to inbound marketing as a core organizational strategy with the appropriate focus, resources, and patience required of any other sizeable strategic initiative.