Using Content Marketing to Generate Leads and Customers with the Inbound Marketing Methodology
Comparing Inbound Marketing and Content Marketing
Inbound marketing is mainly concerned with constructing a website and its content in order to entice visitors to take action, such as inquiring, purchasing a product, or filling out a form. Meanwhile, content marketing is only concerned with the exact strategies of generating and publishing information across many media. Mailchimp
Content Marketing Explained
Content marketing is a marketing method that entails developing and delivering useful, pertinent, and uniform content in order to attract and maintain a specific audience and generate lucrative consumer action.
It focuses on developing excellent, highly relevant, and valuable information as well as disseminating it via many channels, which may be online or offline. Blog posts, e-books, infographics, how-to manuals, and videos are just a few types of "content" that organizations develop to add value to their target market's lives and stimulate the creation of interactions with prospective consumers.
Inbound Marketing Explained
Inbound marketing is a deliberate strategy to develop excellent content that meets the demands of your target audience and fosters long-term client connections. Your consumers are your customers because you solve their concerns.
While outbound marketing bombards your audience with stuff they don't necessarily desire, inbound marketing establishes relationships and addresses issues they already have.
Common Features of Content Marketing and Inbound Marketing
Inbound marketing and content marketing strategies are closely related in that they both take a more holistic approach to marketing that centers on meeting the requirements of visitors or customers. Both are non-intrusive and depend on the gradual, steady development of a connection between the brand and the client to achieve a sale.
The Differences Between Content and Inbound Marketing
Inbound marketing focuses on building a website and its content with the goal of encouraging readers to take action such as inquiring, buying a product, or completing a form. Meanwhile, content marketing simply focuses on the specific methods of creation and distribution of content across multiple channels.
Inbound Marketing Incorporates Content Marketing
Content marketing is critical to inbound marketing, but it is not the only one. It may operate independently of inbound-based techniques, but it's difficult to find an effective inbound marketing campaign that doesn't include a content strategy.
HubSpot CEO Brian Halligan is credited with inventing the notion of inbound marketing.
The Four Stages of Inbound Methodology
Attract
Getting the ideal individuals to visit your site is essential. These are the "ideal users," or those with the most potential to convert into leads or future customers. Blogging, SEO, and social network sharing are examples of effective methods of attracting readers to your website.
Convert
By gathering user information, internet visitors who have been drawn to the site may be converted into leads. A common method of obtaining a customer's email address is by providing useful information that they can download, such as e-books or white papers.
Close
Increasing the number of consumers who become leads by using email, CRM, and other marketing technologies, you can ensure that you're closing the correct leads at the right time.
Delight
Visitors, leads, and current clients should be engaged on a continuous basis. You keep track of your clients' satisfaction and devotion to you via surveys, dynamic call-to-actions, and a variety of other methods.
Using Content Marketing in the Inbound Way
Inbound marketing, as opposed to the typical approach of blasting cold emails and calling prospects on the phone to offer your product or service, employs value addition to attract prospects to your brand.
Customers dislike being interrupted by company promotions. Inbound marketing tackles this by considering that consumers are more likely to accept a tailored offer or react to a call to action when they make the choice on their own.
Because you're organically supplying solutions they seek, inbound marketing makes it simpler for consumers to discover you through social media, search engines, promotions, and other relevant material.
Inbound marketing is a "holistic and integrated approach" that is used to bring prospects to your business and nurture them until they are ready to purchase. Some people are unaware of this, but many tactics commonly used today are considered components of inbound marketing. These include writing blogs, marketing thru social media (including SEO), web design (including Pay Per Click advertising), permission-based email campaigns (including opt-in email marketing), and many other tactics.
Creating A Content Marketing Plan
1. Determine Your Objectives
If you want to generate more sales leads or boost traffic to your website, you must define some content marketing goals. These goals should be quantifiable wherever feasible so that you can evaluate the performance of your content marketing effort. It's critical to understand why you're developing content and how you're doing so.
2. Identify Your Target Market
Knowing who your target audience is, is essential for content marketing. The next stage is to create a persona for your average consumer. The age, gender, locality, and income demographics should be included. It would be beneficial if you also considered their problems and what inspires them.
3. Investigate Your Competitors
Investigate your competitors content and see what they are generating. Find out what keywords they're aiming for and what subjects they're addressing.
4. Conduct In-Depth Topic and Keyword Research
You'll need to research the keywords people are typing into Google and other search engines. You might start by researching the search volume for terms that you feel are relevant. Your keyword research will most likely provide some unexpected findings and provide you with fresh content ideas.
5. Examine Your Current Content
You should also look at what sorts of content produce the most traffic on a certain page or subsection of your site. The performance indicators of current content can help you construct a picture of what your target audience is interested in.
6. Plan Your Strategy
After you've defined your target audience, you'll have to consider how you'll approach them. Consider the platforms you will utilize to post your material and how you will market it. In most circumstances, a combination of many media possibilities will be the ideal method.
7. Making Resource Plan
You must select whether to create your own content within the company or outsource it. You will also need to choose someone to oversee your content marketing effort. Because content marketing is potentially a lot of work, you must be realistic about how much time you can dedicate to it.
8. Create a Content Production Schedule
A publication schedule will assist you in releasing material regularly, which is essential in content marketing. The schedule should include a calendar of publishing dates as well as the names of the people responsible for creating each piece of content.
9. Produce, publish, and market
Your content should have a high level of quality. Don't hurry through content creation only to fulfill a deadline on your content publication schedule. After you've published your material, you'll need to advertise. So, publish posts on social media and forward the material to anybody you believe may be interested.
10. Monitor and Improve
The last phase of your strategy is to track the effectiveness of your campaign and, depending on what has worked, tweak your approach as needed. Your content marketing approach will change over time. As a result, you must be adaptable in your approach to content generation.
About the Author
Jimmy Newson is the founder and CEO of Moving Forward Small Business, a membership-based digital publishing company on a mission to save a million small businesses from failure by 2050, leveraging technology, innovation, and business strategy. He is also the senior advisor for the New York Marketing Association. In addition, he presents workshops and training regularly with Start Small Think Big, NY Public Library, SCORE, Digital Marketing World Forum, DC Start-Up Week, and multiple international SaaS companies.