5 Steps To Creating An
Inbound Marketing
Content Strategy

Many businesses take a shot in the dark in today's marketing world when it comes to their content. Rapidly publishing blogs without much thought into the persona and planning leads to mediocre content that doesn’t address the user's needs. Such content causes more harm than good, causing your brand to build an image that doesn’t serve the target audience.

A well-planned content strategy is one of the essential elements of your inbound marketing plan. And only when you do it well can you achieve success with your inbound marketing strategy. 

How then do you go about it?

But before you delve deeper into this question, let’s first answer a rather basic one. 

 What is a Good Content Strategy? 

A good content strategy is one that starts with an answer to the following questions:

• “What is the purpose of your content?” 
• “Who is the target audience for your content?”
• “How does your content stand out from the rest?” 
• “What type of content do you plan to provide to your audience?”

Answering these can form the basis of your inbound marketing strategy for B2B as well as a B2C business. 

You can also try this simple formula, which will also form the foundation for your content marketing strategy template: 

“Our business helps (your target audience) achieve (purpose/goal) through (types of content).” 

Once you fill these gaps in the sentence, try finding a unique voice for your content. Conduct extensive research about the content produced by your competitors and try coming up with something different and fresh. 

The next and more important question is the steps to creating an inbound marketing content strategy.

 How to Create a Content Strategy?

   Step-1 Define your Goals

Once you have a rough idea about the purpose of your content, it is time to dig a bit deeper and look for your specific content marketing goals. This could be anything around: 

• Improving revenue 
• Generating sales 
• Getting traffic to your website 
• Getting high-quality leads
• Creating brand awareness on social media 
• Reducing marketing costs by optimizing content strategy 

Based on whatever your marketing objective is, try to set some key performance indicators (KPIs) which help you gauge how your content is performing. 

These KPIs must also have a number associated with them. For instance, reaching your sales target within a month, quarter, or year. Putting that number helps you measure your performance and keeps track of how you are progressing.

   Step-2 Build your Buyer Persona 

Creating a research-based representation of your buyers would give a direction to your content strategy. Make an exhaustive list of who your potential customers are, their likes, dislikes, and their buying journey. This will help you develop a more personalized and humane approach to reaching out to your audience. And with targeted content, you are bound to have better conversion rates! 

There are two different ways to get data for defining your buyer persona:

• Collect demographic data: Your web analytics, social media analytics, and email analytics can help you collect data on your visitors’ demographics and interests. Once you know their age, gender, education, location, and income, it is easier to build their persona. 
• Get customer feedback: Try to analyze what your customers like about your content, what it is that they dislike, what are their pain points and how your content can solve their problems. 

Next up, you need to focus on creating content that your target audience would like to read and convert upon.

    Step-3 Create a Content Strategy that Aligns to your Goals

Once you have your goals and persona in place, you need to figure out the type of content you plan to create. 

• What will be the voice and tone of your content pieces?
• What is the visual identity you will maintain?
• What are the criteria each of your content pieces will have before they get published?

Using all these questions, you will be able to abide by the principles of inbound marketing and use them in the creation of all popular content formats. These include a range from blog posts, ebooks, case studies, infographics, videos, and podcasts to social media. 

Try to experiment with different types of content and assess which ones suit your niche the best. You’ll have a better idea of what is worth spending your time and efforts upon. Once you figure this out, the road ahead will be smooth. 

   Step-4 Content Management and Distribution 

The next step is to effectively manage your content assets, its cadence, teams that are responsible, scheduling, publishing, and its promotion to reach the right audience.

Defining your team's roles and responsibilities and setting an editorial calendar for the content publishing schedule can be of huge help going forward. You may also use a content management system (CMS) like HubSpot to create, manage and track your content.  

For each content in the pipeline, figure out the promotion strategy – what are the channels where you can share a content piece. This could be anything from social media posts, to paid ad campaigns, to newsletters or PR publishing sites. Whatever you decide must be based on the understanding of where your target audience is available. And will be able to access the content you publish.

   Step-5 Review your Content Marketing Efforts 

None of what you do in any of the above steps will be effective if you do not continuously monitor and review your content marketing efforts. So set up a measurement framework in place. Based on the KPIs you decided in the first step, come up with the metrics you will be tracking at regular intervals and how.

Figure out the analytics tools you will use to keep track and set them up. Have a weekly or monthly review to check on how your content is performing. Here are a few methods you can try out: 

• Conduct research on the keywords the search engine is ranking your content for. Also, try to find out whether your content is widely shared and if there are multiple inbound links in your content.
• Identify gaps in content and try to answer the unanswered questions, the keywords related to your niche but not being targeted currently. 
• Maintain an account of the number of backlinks generated, content title and description, number of social shares, and length of your content

Practicing all this and a number of other inbound marketing ideas can help you in effectively creating an inbound marketing content strategy for your business. 

Niswey can aid you right from the planning to execution and management of your content marketing efforts. Take a look at how our inbound marketing services can help!