How to Build an Inbound Content Marketing Strategy from Scratch
Table of contents Introduction Step 1. Content audit and inventory Step 2. Content planning and production Step 3. Content translation and localization Step 4. Content technology and analytics Step 5. Content promotion and distribution
How to Build an Inbound Content Marketing Strategy
Introduction Global digital trends have completely changed how buyers behave. The customer journey is now a series of multiscreen, multichannel, and potentially multilingual interactions with your brand that requires content-centric and digital-centric approaches to engagement. Gone are the event-driven days of lead generation, selling and engagement. The marketing world has caught on with “customer experience” becoming the technology and marketing buzzword for 2014. But, while data-driven tools and insights are key variables in the customer experience equation, they’re not the only ones. Enabling sales and your customers requires implementing a proper and cohesive content marketing strategy.
To win at marketing and customer experience, you need the best marketing technology combined with a smart content strategy. If you work in a progressive marketing organization, you may already be getting ahead on your learning curve with marketing technologies.
Your marketing success now depends on the quality of your content strategy.
But for most of the marketing world, it will likely be a couple of years before the majority are up to speed on more modern marketing skills like automation, lead scoring, SEO, PPC, ad retargeting, predictive analytics and real-time digital advertising. In the meantime, marketers still have to up their game and start delivering better customer experiences across all stages of the customer lifecycle. And the key to doing that is content. Customer experience, the bottom line and your marketing success now depend on the quality of your content strategy.
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How to Build an Inbound Content Marketing Strategy
Let’s get started Content strategy is much bigger than content marketing. In addition to high-quality content, there is strategy, logic and process behind it that aligns with business goals and other marketing activities. Content strategy is the smartest first step on the journey of digital transformation, because it serves as the backbone infrastructure for a digital marketing strategy. You have to walk (learn content strategy) before you can run (achieve integrated digital marketing). Let’s explore the five key steps you have to take to build a content strategy.
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*1
Content audit and inventory
How to Build an Inbound Content Marketing Strategy
1. Content audit and inventory Spreadsheet time. Create a catalog of all the content you have. If this is too unwieldy, limit it to any content you’ve created in the past two to three years. Still account for any pages that do well from an SEO perspective regardless of their age. Create filterable columns for each of the fields below and fill them in for each content item you put in your inventory. Comments have been added to help provide some context and guidance: Content Creation/Publish Date. Month and year are fine. Title of Asset. No explanation needed, I hope. Meta Description. This could just be called short description, but it makes me feel better to know that I’ve now made you think about always needing to write a good meta description. After all, it’s likely going to be the first call-to-action someone sees for your content. Language. If you are in global marketing or do multilingual marketing, make sure you are keeping track of what languages your content assets are in. This is a helpful exercise to understand where you have gaps in your content quantity and quality by region. Don’t be surprised if this exercise is eye opening. For example, you may discover content-starved countries in which you hope to grow sales of “X” product, yet there is virtually no local-language content available to support a customer journey that relates to that product. Marketing fail. Discover where you need to fill mission-critical global content gaps that are damaging for brand and sales goals. File Type. PDF, WMV, MP4, DOC, JPEG, PPT, etc.
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How to Build an Inbound Content Marketing Strategy
Content Type. As you create your content inventory spreadsheet, make sure you note what content type the item is – video, ebook, white paper, podcast, FAQ, solution brief, checklist, etc. The file type will provide a clue, but what you have labeled it for end users is important to know. This will also give you visibility into what kind of mix of content types you currently have and whether you provide enough content variety to customers. Internal Content Link. Once this content audit and inventory is complete, this spreadsheet will become a living, breathing document that will become a core part of your ongoing marketing, content and editorial processes. Share with sales as well for better enablement and communication. Use clickable links that point to SharePoint, Box, Dropbox, or whatever you use for group file sharing. Public Content Link. For lead generation assets, this would point to the landing page for the asset. For others, it might be a standard web page link or to a Resources section on a website.
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How to Build an Inbound Content Marketing Strategy
Now comes the hard part The rest of your content inventory and audit spreadsheet will surely require some thinking and discussing before you’ll have all the answers.
Horizontals/Titles/Personas. As a marketing organization and business overall, who are your target audiences? If you’re a B2B technology company, for example, what departments and titles do you want to be speaking to within a target organization? If your target buyer is in marketing, who are secondary stakeholders and approvers? You need to identify who your primary and secondary audiences are and make sure you are creating content that will resonate with them and speaks to their perspective on the world. Vertical / Industry. What vertical/industry segments is your company interested in doing business with over the next 2-3 years? Prioritize this list and then figure out where you have gaps in industrytailored messaging and content. Build content into an editorial calendar over a planned amount of time to fill the gaps. Figure out a timeframe for backfilling the key industry-specific content you need. For example, you may identify that you need at least 10 additional content pieces and you will create those over a 12 or 24 month time period. Be realistic based on resources and budget, but set goals or you will never get there. That last point really goes for all your content gaps in the customer journey for each type of customer you may have.
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How to Build an Inbound Content Marketing Strategy
Products/Services/Solutions. For the content that you inventory and any future content you plan to create, make sure you understand how topics map to your own products, services and solutions. If you are in business, you clearly care about lead generation, pipeline opportunities and sales. Make sure you understand how to map relevant offers and calls-to-action to customers at the right stages in their content-centric customer journey.
Company Revenue/Household Income. Whatever your company sells, there is a specific demographic that is in the sweet spot to afford and want your products or services. Make sure you’ve identified what that is for each of your horizontal and vertical segments to further refine to make sure you’re delivering the right content, offers, and experiences to the right audiences. If you’re a B2B company, that means understanding as a marketer who the buyers, influencers and approvers are that could use your products, services or solutions and would want helpful, relevant content on topics you understand.
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How to Build an Inbound Content Marketing Strategy
Lifecycle Stage. As you’re hunting around and cataloging your content, you’ll also need to think about what stages of the customer journey the content speaks to. For now, bucket the customer experience into four stages:
1
Awareness Education
4
Selection Decision
2
3
Consideration Evaluation
Post-Purchase Support Engagement
We could probably have an interesting discussion with varying opinions on how to identify and name the stages of the customer journey. But the above segmentation will serve our purposes for developing a strong content strategy and likely get you a lot more organized to do marketing better than you have done in a long time. Believe it or not, content strategy really is the basis for strong SEO, digital marketing, content marketing, inbound marketing, lead generation, and social media – all of them depend on it in some fashion.
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How to Build an Inbound Content Marketing Strategy
You’ll also need to read, watch, and listen to every piece of content and in every format you have to qualitatively evaluate:
What is good What could be repurposed/repackaged in its entirety or in pieces What simply doesn’t pass the sniff test and needs to go You can come up with a different rating system that makes sense for you. But you’ll need to figure out a way to sort your assets to see what you’ve got that’s salvageable and what probably needs to get culled. Also consider whether content is still relevant and usable based on current market trends, company trends, design or branding.
Calls-to-Action You should always have a call-to-action on everything you create as a marketer. But you do not have to be obnoxious in your lead generation efforts. If you have a strong content strategy, your CTAS are for relevant, useful, high-quality, and interesting content that matches the end user’s interest and where they are in their customer journey. That’s good customer experience.
+
call to action
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How to Build an Inbound Content Marketing Strategy
You’re almost done! I know, this is a lot of work. But it’s important. This project will
Important note:
seem tedious and brain-draining at times, but it’s well worth
Because of the analysis that
the effort. You absolutely need this to build your content
has to go into this audit and
strategy. There is no loophole – make it happen for your own marketing success.
inventory, this should not be given to a junior employee or an intern. Make sure someone senior enough to do this well owns it! It may need to be a team effort. Also, make sure you set this your spreadsheet up properly so you can filter on any column and have all clickable links so it’s truly a usable content inventory and repository.
Fair warning: Don’t be surprised if this exercise unveils a massive lack of alignment and agreement between executive management, sales and marketing on your go-to-market strategy and priorities. I can almost guarantee this will happen. It’s okay. Start where you are. But commit to collaborating crossfunctionally on your content strategy, ironing out any disagreements, and getting buy-in from the start.
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*2
Content planning and production
How to Build an Inbound Content Marketing Strategy
2. Content planning and production Now that you know what you’ve got, take a good look at what you have for content for each type of customer or prospective audience you have. Do you have enough content for each audience you want to be engaging with? Do you have content that speaks to each stage of their customer journey? Do you offer enough variety in content types and multimedia? Is there any content that has been underutilized that you can repackage/repromote by cycling back into a campaign/content calendar?
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How to Build an Inbound Content Marketing Strategy
Content planning – build an editorial calendar Once your content audit and inventory and your subsequent analysis is complete, you’ll need to commit to filling the gaps. Build out an editorial calendar that includes all the same fields you included in your content audit. Because this will now be forward-looking, you’ll also need to account for the following: Planned publish date Working title (these things always change during editing) Writer/content producer Byline (if writer is ghost writing)
Filling in your customer journey content gaps by audience segment is an important exercise. However, how you prioritize this backfill content creation in your editorial calendar will have to be balanced against budget and resource considerations -- as well as priorities related to other marketing activities.
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How to Build an Inbound Content Marketing Strategy
Budgeting and staffing for content marketing Speaking of budget and resource considerations, you need to figure out how you’re going to realistically resource content creation based on your existing resources. Companies that are still predominantly reliant on traditional marketing approaches may not have the in-house content strategy or editorial expertise to properly execute a content strategy without additional support. At the simplest level, there are three options for integrating more content marketing into your overall mix:
1
Outsource to freelancers or an agency: Outsourcing to freelancers or an agency is the quickest way to amplify your content creation. The benefits of outsourcing include the ability to quickly and easily scale up or down based on your needs. Hiring freelancers is often a process of trial and error. If you’re going the freelancer route, test out several different freelancers on similar type content. Writers and multimedia content producers have different styles and tones to what they do. Make sure you understand your options so you can make an outsourcing investment that is the right fit for your organization for budget, brand and subject matter expertise. You’ll potentially need to build relationships with several freelancers to meet your content volume and content type requirements. This is the downside to managing your own outsourced freelancers – you need someone internally senior enough to with strong editing skills (all freelancer writers need editing) and project management oversight. So make sure you have someone on the team that can own this and has the proper skillset to be successful.
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How to Build an Inbound Content Marketing Strategy
Hiring an agency to manage your content marketing for you has the same benefits as freelancers with the added benefit of strong strategic consulting capabilities (hopefully), content marketing production capabilities, easy scalability, and project management. The same advice goes here as with freelancers – make sure you find subject matter experts who are a good personality fit for your brand, culture, products and services.
2
Really consider whether you need someone to help you build your content strategy or if you feel comfortable driving this yourself based on bandwidth and knowledge. If you are a Director, VP or higher in a marketing organization, your success really depends
Adopt a hybrid in-sourced/outsourced model:
on this content strategy
If you’re just getting started with a content strategy and
piece being addressed.
content marketing, you could potentially solve for resourcing a
Digital marketing and
few different ways. You have to figure out yourself what’s going
inbound marketing don’t
to be the best approach for your organization. These are a few
work without it.
ways to slice it: Defining your own content strategy and outsourcing the content marketing to freelancers or agencies Hire a digital consulting agency to build your content strategy as well as execute content marketing for you Hire a digital consulting agency to build your content strategy and then in-source or outsource content creation (could potentially be a bit of both)
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How to Build an Inbound Content Marketing Strategy
If the goal is to ultimately get to full self-sufficiency with content creation, you could use an agency to either help you map out a content strategy and editorial calendar and then do the content creation in-house with your own copywriters, content marketing managers, and/or editors. If you have the talent in-house or can bring it on board, another option is to have someone internally drive and manage content strategy, but you outsource just the content marketing/content creation piece of it.
3
Build a full-fledged in-house content marketing team: This requires the most commitment of time and will take time to build. Depending on the size of your organization, however, you may want to seriously consider this as a longer term goal and start thinking now about how you can achieve a fully functioning in-house content team and what kind of timeframe it would take to get there. Realistically, this would take at least a year to make happen and have running smoothly as part of the rest of your marketing organization.
Content quality Whatever content type you’re creating, never EVER lose sight of quality and creativity. A consistent publishing volume and schedule is important, but never think that more content is better than great content. You’d be better off lowering volume and focusing on developing high-quality content that factors in: Tone and voice Quality (content subject matter, grammar and punctuation) Readability, design and layout Search engine optimization Calls-to-action to additional relevant content
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*3
Content translation and localization
How to Build an Inbound Content Marketing Strategy
3. Content translation and localization Whether you’re a global company or a local U.S. business, you need to consider content language requirements up front as part of a cohesive content strategy. Even the most sophisticated global enterprises often think of globalization or language requirements as an afterthought or as a standard operational cost. Globalization is no longer an option. The majority of the world’s
In a fast-moving digital
Internet users do not speak English as their first language. Consider
economy, content
these globalization trends:
globalization and the associated opportunities, costs and processes require
20
executive-level attention, strategy and
languages are required to reach 80% of online population
72% of Internet users spend all or most of their time on sites in their own language
planning.
70% of internet traffic comes from non-English native countries
There are
6.8 Billion mobile subscriptions worldwide
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How to Build an Inbound Content Marketing Strategy
Going global or multilingual with your content strategy Your content drives the customer experience in any language. If you’re a global business, then you already know that you need multiple languages to operate internationally. But a lot has changed and trends are moving rapidly. To thrive globally and digitally, it’s worth taking a fresh look at language as part of your macro-level content strategy. If you’re not a global business, you should still ask yourself if multilingual content marketing makes sense for you.
Global enterprises If your company is currently operating under an extremely siloed or regionalized model without an overarching global content strategy, consider doing some strategic evaluation and planning in this area. To ultimately succeed in improving website traffic, SEO, social media presence and engagement, customer acquisition and retention, you have to apply content strategy on a global scale. Regional field marketing teams are often starved for content and don’t have the bandwidth, content marketing skills or budget to satisfy their own content requirements for regional success. To help, consider executing global, content-driven, multi-touch email nurturing campaigns and a regular editorial calendar of content that field teams can translate, localize if needed, and repurpose.
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How to Build an Inbound Content Marketing Strategy
Map and create all the content needed to build nurturing content that satisfyies the entire customer journey for a specific audience in English first. Then translate all that content into other target languages to replicate the campaign regionally. Only modify content if needed based on cultural considerations.
If you can’t afford to translate and localize all the content you created in English for the entire customer journey, try to have at least one asset each for top-of-funnel, mid-funnel and bottom-of-funnel -- and strong supporting content on landing pages and in email copy.
Lost customers: 53% of online buyers are more likely to buy when content is in their native
Small businesses
language – Common
If you’re a local business, consider whether there are untapped markets
Sense Advisory
for your business in other languages or cultures. Is there another “audience” that would be interested in what you have to offer? Is
Missed deals:
reaching them as simple as translating your content into their local
49% of executives say
language so they can more easily do business with you? Should you be
that a language barrier
considering Spanish, Portuguese, French, Chinese, etc. to open up new
has stood in the way of
revenue streams for your business?
a major international business deal – The Economist Intelligence Unit Competitive disadvantage: 64% of executives say language barriers are making it difficult to gain competitive foothold in international markets – The Economist Intelligence Unit
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How to Build an Inbound Content Marketing Strategy
Managing translation costs by content type One more note before we move on to the next topic. When considering translation as part of your global content strategy, you’ll need to prioritize your content translation budget based on what languages are most important to your go-to-market strategy… which, of course, needs to balance with your customer growth and retention objectives.
Tip: For content that you found as part of your audit that was rated “good,” can any of that be translated into other languages for expanded For each content type you are developing, consider the different
awareness and lead gen-
options available to deliver that content in multiple languages. For
eration opportunities?
video content, for example, consider whether subtitling, voiceover narration, or completely localized videos are your best option.
It’s okay to start where you are and work with the budget you have today. Always be realistic and practical about what you can do now and how you can gradually but purposefully expand in the right direction. That’s why you need to incorporate this into a larger, longer-term content plan with documented goals to fill gaps in the customer experience. The final takeaway: Factor language into your overall content strategy up front, not as an afterthought. You’ll save money and be more effective in your global content marketing results.
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*4
Content technology and analytics
How to Build an Inbound Content Marketing Strategy
4. Content technology and analytics This is perhaps one of the most neglected aspects of content strategy, because it delves into the realm of technology and data – a hitherto unfamiliar territory for many marketers just now segueing into newer, digital territory. To execute a successful content strategy and digital marketing, you’re going to have to get your marketing geek on. Just consider the new technologies with which marketers must have familiarity and expertise: Content management systems (Custom, Drupal, Joomla, WordPress, SDL Tridion, Alfresco, etc.) Marketing automation platforms and lead scoring (Eloqua, Marketo, Hubspot, Pardot, etc.) Customer relationship management databases (Salesforce, SalesLogix, SugarCRM, etc.) Search engine optimization tools (Moz, Google Webmaster Tools, Raven, Spyfu) Google AdWords/Bing (pay-per-click campaigns) Online advertising/ad retargeting (Google AdSense, Adroll, Simpli.fi, DemandBase) Social media platforms and tools (Hubspot, HootSuite, Sprout, Bitly) Web analytics tools (Omniture, Google Analytics)
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How to Build an Inbound Content Marketing Strategy
Invest in a content strategy that incorporates the right technology, processes and people for success in a digital arena. If your marketing organization is not well-served from a technology stack, process or skills perspective, focus on it. Figure out a plan for addressing any marketing technology, data analytics, reporting or core competency limitations. All of these are integral to being able to execute and demonstrate successful marketing ROI. This is no small task and maybe it’s a two-year roadmap. But to do the work in Chapter 5, Content Promotion and Distribution, you first have to identify the systems, processes and staff you have in place to support execution and measurement.
Digital marketing should be data-driven In a digital world, marketing’s goal should be to generate measurable lead generation and marketing revenue contribution by content, campaign and channel. However, as already discussed, the right technology, processes and people are needed to get there.
There is an integral relationship between content, technology, and data that marketers must get comfortable navigating to be successful in the digital world.
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How to Build an Inbound Content Marketing Strategy
Ideally, you want to be able to track a customer from first top-of-funnel interaction all the way down to purchase and post-purchase activities – and be able to tie that back to content, campaign and channel. You’ll need to rethink how you structure your campaigns in your CRM to account for each of these ways of reporting metrics.
Being data-driven requires sales and marketing alignment Marketing cannot prove ROI without sales following through on funnel reporting. Make it a priority to get buy-in, commitment and support from sales not only on your content strategy, but on the processes required to track a customer from top-offunnel all the way through their journey. If this means sales has to fill in appropriate fields in your CRM to tie opportunities and closed deals back to your marketing, make sure you educate them on that process and hold them accountable for doing it. Really. You need to hold them to it. Sales and marketing cannot be successful without each other. For anyone on the sales side reading this: If you want marketing to generate more leads, sales has to help support its part in the customer journey and close the loop on understanding how someone becomes a customer for your company. The whole story needs to be tied back into your CRM. That is the only way marketing can accurately know how content, campaigns and channels are performing to understand what’s working and what’s not.
“
“
Marketing can’t help sales without a full feedback loop – metrics matter.
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How to Build an Inbound Content Marketing Strategy
A word on your CMS Your content management system is critical to the success of your content strategy and digital marketing efforts. Make sure you feel good about the one you have. Evangelize and ask for improvements (loudly if necessary) to fix any user experience issues you have with your CMS that make it hard to do marketing online. Bugginess, slow staging servers, bad backend layout of fields or functionality, poor SEO practices, or anything else should be given greater visibility. For inbound marketing and content marketing, give content landing pages, your blog and social features the greatest priority for UX improvements. Don’t suffer in the mentality of “this is just how it is and I just have to deal with it.” Don’t handicap your web marketing capabilities. Advocate for what you need to be successful in terms of your technical foundation.
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*5
Content promotion and distribution
How to Build an Inbound Content Marketing Strategy
5. Content promotion and distribution Now that you’ve figured out what you already had for content, filled the gaps, optimized your content for the web and other languages, and modernized your content technology and processes, it’s time to talk about promotion and reach. This is where all that audit, inventory and content planning is put to work and proves its worth, because now you’ll be able to conduct proper segmentation for your promotional efforts. There are several ways you can promote your content to its intended audience: Existing email database. This is your lowest hanging fruit for lead generation if you have a decent-sized, current and clean database. Just make sure that you’re using marketing automation properly to set up nurturing campaigns in advance with all the content created, mapped to a journey and set up in your marketing automation system up front. Your campaigns will run much more effectively this way. Keep in mind that marketing automation and its benefits -- such
Tip: Be careful about running more than one email nurturing campaign at a time on the same segment of contacts - you could create disjointed campaigns and customer experiences. This will dilute conversion.
as automated lead nurturing, lead scoring, and progressive profiling/registration -- only work if you have clean data with proper segmentation capabilities in your CRM.
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How to Build an Inbound Content Marketing Strategy
Purchased lists, list rentals If you do not have an existing database, you may want to consider purchasing contact data from a credible vendor to give you some email marketing capabilities in house. Just don’t expect your conversion rates to be high on purchased lists. A/B test subject lines and messaging on small samples of your total purchased list to try to optimize for open rates, click through rates and conversions to get maximum ROI. I if you go this route, expect conversions to be lower than on your existing database (typically).
Consider whether leveraging your purchased lists for an inside sales calling campaign later in the year could also improve ROI on a purchased data investment. For list rentals, identify any publications, organizations or third parties that engage with your target audience to see if they sell dedicated emails to their subscribers or members, what their reach is, and the cost.
$
Send an email that promotes high-quality and valuable thought leadership content to get the most bang for your buck. Make sure you have a thank-you page set up with a secondary content offer and an automated drip email campaign built off of that secondary page that maps to a customer journey for that persona.
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How to Build an Inbound Content Marketing Strategy
As a longer-term goal, you’ll need to come up with an audience
Benchmarks typically put
development/subscription strategy to help you build your email
email database atrophy
database. If you are offering strong content and genuinely serving
year over year at about
your target audience as a community, this is doable.
25%. That means you need to refill the email marketing till on a regular basis to
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
maintain reach through this channel.
We live in a world now where 90% of purchasing research starts with a search engine and 70% of a buyer’s purchasing cycle is self-driven through online research. The highest priority for content promotion should be understanding search engine optimization and how it relates to your website, content and digital footprint.
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How to Build an Inbound Content Marketing Strategy
$
At the most basic level, make sure you’re writing good meta titles and meta descriptions that have target keyword phrases in them. While meta descriptions are no longer weighted algorithmically as part of rankings for search engine results pages (SERPs), they will likely be the first call to action anyone ever sees from your company. Use 156 characters or less, including spaces, to explain what someone should expect to find when they click on your search result. Meta titles should be 70 characters or less including spaces. Anything outside of those character counts truncates with a “…” Additionally, identify your “keyword universe” of phrases and vocabulary that are important to use in order to reach your target audience. These keywords can be applied to organic and paid search efforts so this keyword research exercise is important. Use Google AdWords, Google Trends, Trellian, WordTracker or other keyword research tools to get an understanding of how you should be optimizing your content for organic discoverability. SEO is important, but make sure that you don’t create content with SEO as the starting point. SEO should be at the tail-end of the content creation process. Start by creating content with helpfulness, relevance and quality in mind for an intended target audience. Apply SEO best practices to that content to increase your ability to organically reach your target audiences. Make sure your web team is following SEO technical best practices for your company website as well. Don’t let SEO be a handicap for your company!
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How to Build an Inbound Content Marketing Strategy
Search PPC (Google, Bing) If you aren’t doing so great in the organic search department, you’ll need to supplement with some PPC where it makes sense. Since the cost of keyword phrases varies wildly, you’ll have to do some upfront research on your “keyword universe” to strategically decide based on budget, target audience priorities, and potential ROI what keywords are your best bet from a paid search perspective. Monitor conversion rates on different keyword phrases promoting the same content asset to identify where you should turn up the dials and where it’s better to pull the plug. This is both art and science. Work with an agency while you’re getting your digital marketing sea legs if you are not familiar with PPC or hire a full-time resource with proven experience running PPC campaigns. For your PPC landing pages, focus on offering great content and present it in an easy-to-understand, credible, and genuine way with clear CTAs, simple forms and good visuals. If you rank high on a given keyword phrase already from an organic search perspective, you may also want to play with purchasing the paid phrase to see if you can improve conversion overall while still maintaining a good cost per lead (CPL). This also allows you to drive to a PPC landing page where you can more tightly control the experience coming in, versus an organically high-ranking web page on your site that is ranking well but perhaps isn’t optimized well on-page for creating conversion opportunities.
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How to Build an Inbound Content Marketing Strategy
Social media promotion (organic and paid)
Content, search and social media are the grand trine of inbound marketing.
Content, search and social media are the grand trine of inbound marketing. Build a social media calendar to promote your content. Make sure you are using trackable links that tie back to campaign IDs in your CRM and your web analytics tool (Google Analytics, etc.). Google URL builder is one option for learning how to build UTM codes into your URLs before feeding them through a URL shortener like Bitly, Owly or Hubspot so you can track content and campaign performance by channel. Create supporting visual content for your social media posts. Stats or quotes from ebooks, white papers, videos, infographics, etc. can be turned into memes that capture the attention of your social networks and engage them more easily. Supplement your organic social activity with paid social promotions for strong lead conversion assets. Just make sure you are segmenting and targeting well when selecting your demographic and firmagraphic criteria so that promoted content is reaching the audience it is intended for. Don’t forget to also identify key communities, forums and groups in which your target audiences participate. Prioritize your ongoing and genuine presence in a chosen few of those to build and foster social relationships and share your best content.
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How to Build an Inbound Content Marketing Strategy
The social SEO factor. Social media is not only important for awareness, engagement and promotion, it is also a critical aspect of improving your search engine rankings. “Social signals” are becoming an increasingly important factor in how websites are ranked in search engine results. They are like backlinks to your site that increase its perceived relevance to search engine algorithms. For this reason alone, do not neglect your social presence and ensure commitment to regular social media activity. Just like inbound marketing as a whole, it takes a while to build up momentum in the social sphere. It’s a marathon, not a sprint. But it’s a journey worth taking. Content marketing and inbound marketing will naturally (and less expensively) drive more organic traffic and leads to your website.
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How to Build an Inbound Content Marketing Strategy
Display advertising and ad retargeting If you can afford it, take a look at display ads and ad retargeting as part of your promotional mix. For many marketers, this delves a bit too far onto the media side of the house. If you are uncomfortable with this channel, seek help from an agency with expertise. However, keep in mind that your success via this channel, just like the others, requires you to have a buttoned up content strategy and clear understanding of your segmentation goals. This isn’t something an agency can define for you without your involvement and input.
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www.euxmedia.com | May 2014
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So are you ready to create your inbound content marketing strategy and begin your digital transformation? Start by thinking about how your content should map to each stage of the customer journey. Identify where you have gaps. General goals should be focused on building your content quantity and quality, digital presence, brand awareness, and lead generation. If you commit to delivering quality and value in all of your content and creating a logical, helpful and pleasant experience for your customers through the optimized delivery of content, you will gain business and please your customers.
About The Author
Keith Laska Co-Founder / CEO EUXmedia Keith Laska is CEO and Co-Founder of EUXmedia, an award-winning provider of strategic content marketing and new media solutions for business and entertainment. Keith actively advises organizations worldwide on marketing strategies, and is a member of the International Executive Council of the Internet Marketing Association. Keith is an experienced international executive, entrepreneur and passionate inbound content marketing evangelist.
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