Use a content strategy to attract and retain customers.
You have an idea, product, or service and you want to put this in front of a buying audience. You can easily just put your entire marketing budget into paid advertising—disrupting a specific target audience with messages when they might not be ready to hear from you. Or, you can provide your target audience with the content they’re looking for.
I’ve harped on my idea that the strongest way to attract visitors is to use Inbound Marketing to let your ideal customer find you online and then nurture them through the flywheel. But what are the steps in order to do this? #TodayILearned ways to attract and retain customers. So let’s run through it, shall we?
Building a content strategy
In order to reach customers and build a company’s brand, a business sets goals according to what they want to accomplish with each marketing strategy:
establish your goals.
define your ideal buyer—their goals and pain points.
establish their buyer’s journey.
decide on what topics you want to be known for.
Establish your goals
I don’t have kids but I have a large number of nieces and nephews. And they all love the movie, Moana… in fact, I could probably recite all the lyrics from every song. In the movie, Maui quotes "In order to know where you're going, you need to know where you come from”. And this quote truly relates to the attainability of your goal. It’s important to take a look at what marketing activities you currently do consume most of your time, and evaluate if they’ve given you the results you’re looking for. Knowing this information is your benchmark for determining the next steps.
So ask yourself:
What’s our website’s current traffic from an organic, referral, etc. point of view?
How many inbound leads am I attracting per month?
How many sales have I or my sales team closed?
Use the answers to those questions to create SMART goals (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, Timely). SMART goals incorporate all of these criteria to help focus your efforts and increase the chances of achieving your goals.
Specific: The more specific you set your goals, the better grip you have of what you’re aiming to get accomplished. A specific goal will motivate you to achieve particular metrics, and give you a reason to celebrate when you hit them.
Not only should you get particular with what results entail success, but also in an outline of what key players will be involved. To help you make your goal specific, answer the six “dubs”:
Who is going to work to achieve the goal?
What are you looking to achieve?
Where, as in what area of your business is this goal taking place?
When will you finish this task?
Which resources are you going to use to get this done?
Why are you trying to complete these goals?
Measurable: The more granular you make a goal, the easier it is to keep track of overtime. Monitor your goals by creating milestones. So in this case, what metrics are the most useful for measuring the success of online marketing? This comes down to trackable metrics on your site’s analytics—page views, time spent on site, inbound links, etc. Measure on a consistent basis, in order for you to see the impact of your particular marketing efforts.
Attainable: Set goals that are challenging, but make sure they’re attainable. This is where self-evaluation of your company’s current metrics will come into play again. Don’t become disheartened by falling short of a goal that was unrealistic from the start. It’s imperative that you set expectations at a level that will push your business to the next level, but is also feasible.
Relevant: Your goals must align with the mission of your business. Make sure that the goals you want to carry out help you achieve what your company needs. Do sales need an easier time selling? Use lead nurturing to bring them warmer leads!
Timely: It’s critical to implement a timeframe of when your marketing efforts will start and finish. A timeline helps you to commit to achieving goals.
Define your ideal buyer
First off, do you even know who your ideal buyer is? And if you do, how much do you know about them?
In The Inbound Lab’s process for creating content, defining the ideal buyer (or buyer persona) is the most critical to driving content creation, product development, sales follow-up… really anything that relates to acquiring customers and retaining them.
The Inbound Marketing methodology starts with going through how this will benefit the marketing team, to the sales team to service. Defining your buyer personas:
Help you focus your time on qualified prospects… your sales teams will love that!
Guide what products or services suit the needs of your target customer… wow, now the research and development or product development team are on your side!
Now align all the marketing materials to work across the entire organization.
The result? BOOM! 💥 You’ll attract high-value website visitors, more qualified leads, and new customers you’ll be more likely to retain over time. 🤯
So how do you create a buyer persona? Well… at a high-level, it’s conducting research, it’s asking people to fill out surveys and it’s interviewing a mix of staff, customers, prospects, and other folks outside of your database that might align with your target audience. And then establish the following:
Basic information
Background - The personal information in regards to career, family life, etc.
Demographics - Gender, Age, Income, Location, etc.
Identifiers - What’s their demeanor? How do they like to communicate?
What motivates them?
During your interviews and research, you should get a sense of their ‘why’. What are their goals? What are their challenges? And what can your business do to help them sleep at night… I guess those were all ‘whats’.
Prep your sales teams
Basically, this is all about figuring out the real quotes or common themes your ideal buyers would use. ie., “we have so many tools, it’s painful to integrate with other departments”, “I can’t figure out how to get the whole company to adapt to the new tech”. Figure out why they wouldn’t purchase your product or service so that your sales teams can be prepped with the right content and the right answers to help them sell.
What messages resonate with your ideal buyer?
Finally, figure out what vernacular you should use. Optimize your positioning statements to resonate with your personal goals or pain points. This will help you ensure everyone in your company (marketing, sales, service) all speak the same language when having conversations with your prospects and customers.
Establish their buyer’s journey
Part of the persona work is also dedicating time to establish what their buyer’s journey is. This will help you generate the right content that speaks to folks at the right time. The Inbound Lab follows the Inbound Marketing’s buyers journey that has utilizes 4 stages:
1) The Awareness Stage - These folks are at a very high-level… the buyer has a problem. That’s it. They Google something to help them define their problem further and how they could solve it. At this stage, they don’t know who you are yet, but the hope is that you’ve created some content that might answer their search queries.
Content types would include:
Blogs (Oh hey you’re reading one)
Social Posts
Videos
2) The Consideration Stage - The buyer defines the problem and researches options on how they should solve it. They’re doing tons of research on the best possible solution for the problem they have. So at this stage, you should probably utilize some of the same channels and try to focus on getting some contact information from your prospects… like gated content where an email address is required to access it. Think webinars, white papers, etc… or if you’re feeling confident in the type of content you’ve provided, just ask them for their email address.
“Was this piece of content valuable to you? Do you want to get more of it? Sign up for more information”
3) The Decision Stage - The buyer has done all of the research, they’ve truly engaged and interacted with your online content… and they may have already spoken to a salesperson. So this is the time where you need to deliver content that helps the buyer choose a solution.
Deliver content such as:
Case Studies and testimonials really show what a future relationship together might look like.
Comparison pieces to show them that your product or service is stronger than your competition’s.
4) The Delight Stage - And of course the stage that focuses on retaining your customers and possibly gaining referral customers. This is a very important stage and focuses on the art of delivering great continuous customer service.
Sales can have continuous check-ins—get a sense of how the product or service is working for them. Focusing on your current customer base also increases that meaningful relationship with them. Ask for Google Reviews. You can ask them to fill out surveys that you can hand off to the service team. And for content, this is a great way to generate some user-generated content (USG). Think more case studies, more testimonial pieces. Maybe they’ll start sharing your content with their contacts!
Once you’ve developed the buyer’s journey, come up with what type of content will help them throughout their buyer’s journey.
Decide on what topics you want to be known for
Everyone wants to be a #ThoughtLeader. But what topics do you want to lead your industry in that you know will resonate with your ideal buyers? At The Inbound Lab, we focus on defining three to four high-level content themes that the rest of your content will fall under.
Content buckets aren’t defined arbitrarily. It starts with going back to your positioning statement or your business’s mission, then looking at your audience personas to find out what content will answer a pain point or help achieve a goal.
Think of it this way. Your mission statement is the hub of your entire content marketing initiative. The content buckets are spokes of the hub—main topics that you want your company to “own” through SEO or just through Thought Leadership. And then the sub-topics represent relevant content within each spoke. Does that make sense? Maybe take a look at my (Powerpoint built) diagram below.
I know what you’re thinking? Wow! Derek is a self-taught designer? Haha… no silly I took like 1 Udemy class.
There you have it. This is only the tip of the iceberg look at my approach to creating a content strategy. A content strategy should focus on growing an audience and moving an audience through the buyer’s journey.
It takes time, organization, and creativity to grow a successful content marketing strategy. From building the foundation of a plan to adding tools to manage your content and then maximizing your content by finding more ways to get more eyes on it. You need to think about the keywords that you’re using in your online content. You need to map out how you can get your content on third-party sites like podcasts or webinars or getting a spot as a guest blogger.
If you have any questions or concerns about your current content marketing initiatives and how a thorough and holistic content strategy might help your business, send me a note. Always happy to chat.
Wanna learn more?