Many businesses and marketers believe they’re doing content marketing successfully, but is it securing conversions? While you may be publishing regular blogs, if the content isn’t relevant to your business and valuable to your potential customers, it will hinder, not help your marketing efforts. And without the right content creation, you can’t implement an effective inbound marketing strategy.
Inbound marketing uses content to organically attract customers who are interested in what you offer. Using content marketing, SEO, social media, and more, the inbound methodology doesn’t interrupt people with the information they don’t want, it helps them find solutions to their problems. It requires more brains than budget and attracts 100% organic leads. This is why if you’re not creating relevant, high-quality content, the inbound marketing strategy won’t secure any conversions.
Your Content Marketing Strategy
Content marketing is all about content creation and how you’re going to promote the content. While it’s an important approach in itself, it forms a crucial element of your inbound marketing strategy too, as inbound focuses on how to create a website and its content.
All website features should have the aim to encourage users to perform a specific action, which could be making an enquiry, completing a purchase, or signing up for a newsletter. To achieve the best results, both approaches should work in collaboration to provide the best user experience.
The Benefits of Content Marketing
Content is about creating customers. This is the end goal. In this year’s HubSpot’s State of Marketing Report, 82% of marketers reported actively using content marketing compared to 70% in 2020. And it’s easy to see why when content has been shown to increase 3 times as many leads as other marketing methods while costing 62% less. On the journey towards a conversion, however, engaging and relevant content has many unique benefits beyond increasing sales.
- Build Trust – Content allows you to showcase value, and knowledge, and helps you to solve users’ pain points. Doing so builds trust between the people viewing your content and your company.
- Generate Leads – Through content marketing, you can publish content that generates high-quality, relevant leads.
- Increase Brand Visibility – Publishing great content means relevant people share it and more people find and view it. More eyes mean more visibility and leads to increased conversions.
- Influence Decision Making – Content helps users navigate their buyer’s journey so they find their way towards completing an action. This doesn’t have to be making a purchase, it could be any goal you’ve set as part of your inbound marketing strategy.
- Ensure Brand Consistency – There are multiple customer touchpoints across the buyer’s journey. An aligned content marketing approach ensures brand consistency across all channels and creates a better user experience.
Content Creation Research Process
You’re probably asking yourself how do you create high-quality content? You may have a YouTube channel, a regularly updated blog, and a series of webinars, but you’re not seeing the results you want. However, the key to creating content that drives conversions begins in your research. Establish clear buyer personas and uncover the keywords they’re using to search.
Buyer personas are fictional representations of your target consumers. They help you create an inbound marketing strategy tailored to meet their needs, so you can secure their conversions. Once you know who your personas are, you can conduct keyword research to discover the search terms they’re using. This helps you create relevant content your target audience is interested in, making it more likely the strategy will be effective.
Choosing The Right Format For Your Content
During your research stage, when you’re creating buyer personas and conducting keyword research, find out what content your ideal customer is searching for. For example, you’ve got a clear buyer persona that you know is searching for a specific query. While this tells you a topic you should be covering, you need to review SERPs to know which format of the content is the most relevant to produce.
For some terms, the highest-ranking content will be YouTube videos. If this is the case, a 1000+ word blog isn’t the right content format. You need to check out another search term or create a video that’s more relevant, informative, and engaging than the current #1 ranking link. There is other clues competitor analysis uncovers as well. When you search for a keyword, all the links that appear could be listicles. If this is the case, you know how to format your blog post to give it the best chance of matching your persona’s search intent.
The Buyer’s Journey & Content
Where many marketers go wrong in the content creation process is promoting content at the wrong stage of the buyer’s journey. Users transition through awareness, consideration, and decision stages on the way to a conversion. How you can encourage them to take the next step on the journey is by showing them the right content at the right time.
The earliest stage is awareness. This is when the user is becoming aware they have a problem. Your content resources should nurture them towards considering the solution at this point. At this point, you should aim to build trust and authority, to show your company can offer an effective solution to their pain point or problem.
During the consideration stage, your content should define the options available. The aim needs to be to help users solve their pain points. This isn’t the time for a call to action that leads to making a purchase; the user isn’t ready to commit to buying anything. Your content should help them solve their problem even if the solution isn’t your business.
At the decision stage, the customer has assessed their options and is ready to make a decision. The information they’re looking for is why they should choose a brand. This is where your content should demonstrate why you’re the right company for them.
Summary
Your inbound marketing strategy should publish content for the sake of it. The content needs to be relevant, engaging, and help your target personas. You also need to show users the right content at the right time, guiding them through the buyer’s journey towards making a decision. Through research, your content creation process can drive results as part of your inbound marketing strategy. More importantly than money, you just need to invest time.
Content Marketing at Loop Digital
At Loop Digital, we support you by leveraging a multitude of unique marketing tactics within our wider inbound marketing strategies. Our team understands the importance of content and the results it can drive. Discover how a targeted content plan can transform your inbound marketing strategy to increase organic traffic, build brand visibility, and increase conversions, get in touch with our team today.
