Inbound Content

A Step-by-Step Guide To Doing Content Marketing the Inbound Way

Justin Champion

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781119488958
• eBook ISBN: 9781119488972
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Digital Marketing
• Index: Business

Develop and implement an effective content strategy tailored to your business ' s needs

Inbound Content is a step-by-step manual for attracting the right people, turning them into leads, and closing them into customers. Today, everyone knows that content is king. It's how we engage, how we inform, and how we pass the time; content is everywhere, and if you're not leveraging its power to promote your business, you've already been left behind. Having a website and social media is not enough; if you truly want to take advantage of unprecedented levels of connectedness, you have to create content that draws customers in. It's not about blindly expanding reach, it's about reaching out to the right audience. Today's marketplace is no longer about chasing the sale—with the right approach to content, your customers will come to you.

Your content must be valuable, relevant, and consistent—but how should it be implemented at the actual content-creation level? This book shows you how to develop a unified strategy, create compelling content tailored to your needs, and utilize that content to its greatest advantage in order to build your brand.

• Discover the power of storytelling and generate effective content ideas
• Plan a long-term content strategy and a content creation framework
• Create great content, promote it, measure it, and analyze its performance
• Extend your content's value, become a more effective writer, and develop a growth mentality

Effective content is worth its weight in marketing gold. It stands out from the noise, and to the customer, looks like an oasis in a desert of clickbait and paid reviews. Inbound Content shows you how to plan, build, and implement your content strategy for unprecedented engagement and sales.

Chapter 1
Building a Content Creation Framework

Why Does Your Business Need a Framework for Creating Content?

Content marketing, like project or product management, can take a lot of work and time to do right. From creating long-term content plans to analyzing the results, it can be challenging to keep track of all the moving pieces and make sure your work is driving you toward your team and company's goals.

Going through those steps—from the first long-term plan to analyzing the results—can feel laborious and complicated, but it doesn't have to. Having a framework in place that's repeatable, organized, and agile can make the process of creating content much smoother and more rewarding.

When you're creating content on a large scale, you shouldn't have to reinvent the wheel with each piece. Instead, have a clear and repeatable process in place that allows you to produce blog posts, e-books, webinars, and more, all in an efficient manner.

Most content marketers wear a lot of hats, leaving them strapped for time. Having a clear action plan that can be reused saves time and keeps you and your initiatives moving forward.

A major component of any action plan is organization.

When looking at your long-term content plan, it's important to break up the large goals into digestible chunks that can be completed on a short-term basis. This way, you can make more sense of your content creation needs by listing out the details of what goes into them. For example, if your goal is to create an ebook, focus on the content needed to bring it to life. This can paint a better picture of your weekly content tasks (i.e., blogging, posting on your social channels, etc.).

In addition to being repeatable and organized, your framework should be agile. Business needs and context change over time. When you're planning your initiatives up to a year in advance, it's important to remain flexible to account for the changes that will inevitably arise during the coming months. Sometimes campaigns, timelines, and goals will need to be adjusted.

Now that we've talked about the value of having a content creation framework, let's move on to building that framework.

How Do You Build a Framework for Creating Content?

Here are eight steps to building a content creation framework of your own.

1. Conceptualize your content.
2. Plan and set timelines.
3. Create a content workflow.
4. Review and edit your content.
5. Publish and promote.
6. Organize your content internally.
7. Analyze the results.
8. Evolve your process.

Start by Conceptualizing Your Content

Coming up with ideas may sound like an easy task. But turning an idea into a piece of content is a different story.

The first step your framework should include is the process of coming up with appropriate ideas. If you're struggling to generate content ideas, check out online resources like the HubSpot Blog Ideas Generator and publications related to your industry.¹

Some other options include writing down frequently asked sales questions or important industry knowledge that might be helpful for your target market to know, or performing keyword research to identify top terms used by people searching for content relevant to your industry. These are topics we'll dig into deeper in Chapter 3.

When creating content, it's important to keep two things in mind:

1. 
   Your buyer personas
2. 
   The buyer's journey

Buyer personas are semifictional representations of your ideal customer based on quantitative and qualitative analysis. What that means is you have a business you work for, and that business has products and services it's trying to sell, and those products and services are meant to attract a specific audience (also known as your buyer personas).

Each buyer persona will experience the buyer's journey, which is the active research process a potential buyer goes through leading up to making a buying decision.

The buyer's journey is made up of three stages:

1. Awareness stage: The buyer identifies there's a problem that's happening. This person is performing research to learn more and find a possible solution.
2. Consideration stage: This person has found one or more solutions to their problem. Now they're looking for the solution that best meets their needs.
3. Decision stage: This person is ready to make a well-informed decision, which is usually purchasing a specific product or service.

Following is an example of how a buyer persona might progress through the buyer's journey:

1. Awareness stage: I have a lot of unstructured text data and need to make sense of it. What should I do?
2. Consideration stage: Aha! There's an automated solution to categorize comments and detect emotions in real time in multiple languages.
3. Decision stage: I can receive a free consultation of my business's customer feedback data.

We'll review buyer personas and the buyer's journey in more detail in Chapter 4. For now, keep in mind that content should always support both. If it doesn't, you need to ask yourself why you're creating it in the first place.

Next, Plan and Set Timelines for Content Creation

Once you've established some ideas for content offers, start planning your timeline, which shouldn't extend more than three months out. By not planning more than one quarter ahead, you'll be able to maintain agility—things may change over time—while still having time to execute on your initiatives. We'll discuss content frequency and how extensive your timeline should be in Chapter 4.

When planning short-term content tasks over the span of a quarter, try to have at least two or three major content offers you want to create, and organize them by stage of the buyer's journey. Knowing which content offers to focus on each month will help you organize your weekly content tasks in support of your overall plan. For example, is this offer going to be a webinar or an ebook, and will it be targeted toward the Awareness or Decision stage?

In addition to the process of planning your content offers, you'll want to identify...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author
• Introduction: Your Content Marketing Transformation
• Chapter 1: Building a Content Creation Framework
• Chapter 2: The Power of Storytelling
• Chapter 3: Generating Content Ideas
• Chapter 4: Planning a Long-Term Content Strategy
• Chapter 5: Becoming an Effective Writer
• Chapter 6: Creating a Blog Post
• Chapter 7: Extending the Value of Your Content through Repurposing
• Chapter 8: How to Effectively Promote Content
• Chapter 9: Measuring and Analyzing Content
• Chapter 10: Developing a Growth Marketing Mentality
• Chapter 11: Creating Topic Clusters and Pillar Pages
• Chapter 12: The Results
• Glossary
• Index
• End User License Agreement