Life Cycle
Next, you need to map out each step for your potential leads. Once you know the personas, you need to start thinking how they would progress through solving their problem. You need to “Walk a mile in their shoes” and start thinking of how to lead your potential client to the conclusion that they need your product or service. Yes, we want to increase leads but they need to be good leads and not just anybody. So you need to be able to gain awareness through blogs or ads and then start educating your leads with valuable content like: eBooks, buyer guides, industry whitepapers, etc. These are created to help your client understand the solutions. Lastly, you need to create a validation piece like a webinar, seminar, or free trial which will prioritize what the most important solution is. That way you can move these marketing qualified leads to sales qualified leads.
Research
Researching the correct questions and potential answers are vital to creating great content for each stage of the funnel. Technically you would already have the lead information from them downloading your first piece of content, but that doesn’t mean you are any closer to making a sell. You not only want to collect leads but you want to collect qualified leads. That’s when creating well researched content plays a vital role in moving your lead farther down the sales funnel. You have them interested but now you have to keep them engaged. This is when great research and knowing your buyer persona will improve your quality of leads. Industry trends and timing can also play a key part of when you release your data. You want your content to be original or at least more informational than other content already out there. Think about it this way, nobody would download any content for fantasy football after the football season is over. Also if you create your own research and provide facts or statistics that are original, you will add a level of credibility to your company. If you are struggling to create new, enticing content then think about possibly recreating an old piece of information by adding new relevant information. Just plan out each piece of content and know where it will fall within the funnel.
Conclusion
Creating great content really boils down to a few different aspects. Like I said before, the content needs to be positioned correctly and targeted towards the right crowd in order to make an impact which is why I feel like knowing your buyer persona is the most important part. You must make it all about them. They will be more willing to read the information if it is focused on them, gives them tips/answers to their questions and in some way improves their life. Once this is in place then you need to map out each step along the process. Once you have created the strategy you just need to do the correct research to uncover what information your crowd is looking for each step of the way.
Photo Credit: thinkmedialabs via Flickr
Inbound marketing is a process. Each step in the process has its own importance but they all have one ultimate goal. At the end of the day, that goal is increasing leads; the only way to collect leads is by creating content that prospects are willing to offer their information for. So this content must be intriguing, beneficial and insightful. If it’s not, you could do all the other parts of the process perfect, but never collect any good leads because of your premium content. In this article we will show you how to increase inbound leads through content creation.
Know your Audience
This step could single handedly be the most important part of creating premium content. The reason I say this is because if you don’t tailor your content to your correct audience and their needs, then the rest of the content creation is pointless because you will not attract the appropriate leads. First off make sure your content is relevant to your buyer personas. Creating buyer personas will become the blueprint to your marketing campaign. Before anything is created, you need to research who your interested audience would be. So when you start, you need to identify their needs. What are their problems and how would your consumers go about solving them? This will give you a little map of the consumers wants, needs and goals to solving the problem. A great way to identify your consumer’s problems and questions is to go directly to your sales team. Your sales team deals with your current consumers, so they are on the frontline of current relevant questions. Take these questions and create content from that. This content should inform them and answer any questions that are common to your service or product. Your buyer persona will also affect the tone in which you create the content.
