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Whenever we start talking about marketing strategy with people, one of the biggest challenges we hear is figuring out what to write about. They want to create but just aren’t sure where to start or how to craft a sustainable plan.
There are two rules our team follows when creating every piece of content along with steps that will help you execute your own content strategy.
Rule #1: Every interaction must build trust with your audience
This is rule #1 for a reason. Put your audience first and create content that will actually be useful. I have found, that the best way to show your customers you can help them is to actually help them.
We aim to build this bond by understanding the audience’s pain points and creating content around the questions that stem from those concerns. How can you execute this for your audience?
Step 1: Problems list
The first way to be a problem solver is to list out the pain points your customers face within their business. What are the frustrations or struggles they encounter every day that you could help them avoid? Ask your sales and account teams to contribute… typically they have the most hands on experience with the what customers go through and have great ideas to share.
Step 2: Create USEFUL Content
Do your best to put it all out there and give your customers the best answers you can in your content. Think about your target audience and where they go for answers. Are they reading articles? Watching videos? Listening to podcasts?
After you determine a content mix to reach your audience, prioritize your content topics and start creating. Make sure that your customer is the focus of everything you make… not you or your company. Relate to the problems they are facing, validate that they are common issues and provide your proven solutions in step-by-step solutions that are easy to consume. The goal is to create repeated experiences that are actually helpful and don’t feel like a sales pitch.
Step 3: Content Calendar
Create as much useful content as is sustainable for your business. There is absolutely no point in stressing yourself out to meet a content calendar based on a certain magic number of posts or pieces of content. If you’re on your own, do your best to create as much as you can and document the way you help your customers…..The more the better, you can’t over-do high quality useful content.
If you’re ready to invest in growing faster, hiring an agency to help you generate high quality content on a structured calendar is a great way to become known as an expert online and create a stream of high quality leads.
Rule #2: Every piece of content must drive the audience into your sales funnel
Once you’ve created useful, interesting content relevant to your audience, it’s time to make that content work for you! There are several tactics marketers use to achieve sales from content, but my team has found that paid advertising and next-step content offers are the best way to move the audience forward from a lead to a customer.
Here’s how you can execute this push to the sales funnel for your own content strategy.
Step 1: SEO Traffic
Blogs that are constructed properly improve SEO by attracting new viewers with educational content that is highly specific to the problems you help solve. Then technology builds a database of these visitors that can be targeted with paid advertising. This means that you can choose to only pay to show your ads to people who have read your educational blogs or watched your videos.
Paid advertising targeting tools are powerful – you can target specific ads to different audiences based on what pages they viewed. Each paid advertisement can relate to the message the audience was just reading or watching to keep it top of mind.
Step 2: Gated Next Step
Every great piece of digital content gives the audience a next step to get more value. The goal is to offer something that will be extremely helpful, but ask the audience to give up a little bit of information in exchange for the resource. For example, after giving a great free webinar industry about your service you could offer an e-book in exchange for an email address.
Building this list of email addresses gives you an open door to communicate directly with your prospects. They’ve already downloaded a piece of content highly specific to your industry, it’s now time to qualify and nurture the lead through the sales funnel.
In Summary- Two Rules Every B2B Blog Must Follow:
Rule #1: Every blog must create a bond with your audience
Step 1: Problems list
Step 2: Create USEFUL Content
Rule #2: Every blog must drive audience into your sales funnel
Step 1: SEO Traffic
Step 2: Gated Next Step
Overwhelmed? That’s totally okay – this process takes time, effort, and plenty of strategy. Maybe it’s time to think about looking into a creative agency with proven expertise in content marketing?
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