Planning Your Long-Term Content Strategy
Why is content important for inbound marketing?
Content is the media and messaging a business creates for its consumers and it’s the bread and butter of an inbound marketing strategy! It’s how businesses draw in their desired audience and keep them engaged. If your organization has already tried posting on social media or blogging, you know that success takes more than churning out as much content as possible. Achieving your goals requires a solid strategy with effective distribution that reaches the right people at the right time.
A strong content strategy is especially crucial for B2B marketing, where credibility can be the difference between a successful or unsuccessful conversion. But even B2C businesses need to keep up, as the benefits of content marketing are numerous. If you desire improved search rankings, increased website traffic, and higher brand recognition, keep reading! We’ll explain how to put together all the puzzle pieces involved in a long-term content strategy.
Creating a Roadmap for Your Content Strategy
Without a clear plan, creating content is about as accurate as throwing darts at a dartboard — with a blindfold on. Unsurprisingly, it’s crucial to develop a plan that outlines all aspects of your content strategy. Your plan should identify:
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Target audience: Who is most likely to buy from your business? Tailor your content to their specific needs and interests. Before that, you must figure out who that audience is. We’ll talk about that more in the next section.
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Channels of communication: How will you disseminate your content and connect with your audience? The goal is to maximize the reach of your business’s target audience. Channels like emails, blogs, and telephone help to drive web traffic, generate leads, and ultimately drive conversions. Be careful, though, not all channels are the same, so be prepared to experiment to determine which options work best for you.
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Performance indicators: How will you measure the success of your inbound marketing? Every campaign should have a method to answer this question. Evaluation is essential to make tweaks to your content strategy for better results.
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Resources necessary: Money is typically limited, so resource allocation of funds and/or employees is inevitable.
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Timeframe: A projected timeline can provide concrete action items to keep your business on track to ensure you don’t waste resources
Understanding Your Target Audience: A Guide to Your Buyer’s Journey
Now that we’ve discussed knowing your target audience, what’s the best way to do that? Introducing the buyer’s journey. It represents the route taken from prospect to customer. Like the stages of inbound marketing, each phase has its own needs and specific problems. Content ought to address the unique requirements of each phase.
The buyer journey consists of Awareness, Lead, Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL), Sales Qualified Lead (SQL), and Customer.
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Awareness: This stage is when someone initially hears about your business. It might be through your diligent marketing work or organic word-of-mouth.
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Lead: A prospect, a person becomes a lead when they become more interested in what solutions your business can offer them. The Engage phase works within this step of the buyer’s journey to build a relationship with the lead and move them toward a possible sale.
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Marketing Qualified Lead: This type of lead is a customer who has already interacted with marketing efforts but isn’t ready to commit to a sale. They are closer to the top of the beginning of the buyer’s journey.
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Sales Qualified Lead: This type of lead is a marketing qualified lead now entering the decision-making phase. These people are closer to the end of the buyer’s journey. Now would be the time to get the sales team involved to begin the sales process.
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Customer: A customer is someone who has decided to purchase. Remember that though the buyer’s journey ends here, the relationship should not. Put effort into retaining customers and keeping them satisfied.
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