On a fundamental level, content marketing is a form of promotion that utilizes digital content to achieve goals. These objectives center around your target online audiences and getting them to take a desired action, whether that’s to learn more about you, download your ebook, or make a purchase.
As effective content strategy requires a delicate balance of excitement, expertise, quality, and intrigue, however. It’s all about knowing your audience and what makes them tick, creating the right mix of content, and understanding where the heck to share it.
Fear not: Content marketing is what ContentBacon does best! Here is your guide to all the basics involved in creating a winning content strategy.
Content marketing focuses on producing the materials online that excite audiences and deliver value. It’s comprised of items on different outlets – social platforms, email, websites, blogs, and more – and may involve copy, images, video, graphics, or all of the above.
Content marketing succeeds when it’s consistent and tailored to a specific audience. This way, you can deliver more personalized information that will attract the right kind of customers. Consumers go online to find pretty much everything now. A solid content strategy thus helps you:
Having the right content strategy is crucial in our digital world. You just can’t build up the following you want without great content.
Businesses of all sizes and across all industries should have a content strategy. You need to reach customers where they are, and they are online more than ever. People also want to feel connected to the brands they support. They’re looking for personalized content, to feel understood, to have their problems resolved, and to see their questions answered quickly.
Content marketing helps you do all of that by delivering well-researched and valuable information that is relevant to your target audience. No matter which industry you’re in, you need digital content – now!
So, what does a solid content strategy look like? It starts with a strategy document that outlines your approach, outlining why your brand exists, the channels you’re using for content, the channels you’re using to share that content, and all your tactics. It explains the how and what behind your strategy.
Included in this document should be:
Think of your content strategy as the plot of your story, with you and your customers as the protagonists and your competitors as the antagonists. Then come the components that will help you put everything into action. These include:
Another element to explore is user-generated content. This is content that was created by users and not brands, but sharing it with your channels allows you to interact with your audiences in exciting and engaging ways. It brings opportunities like boosting lead generation and social media interactions and helps you establish thought leadership.
First, we know it may be tempting to want to stick with the traditional lead generation methods. Sales funnels have been a staple of inbound marketing frameworks since their inception in 2005, and they’ve been a sales concept for well over 100 years! We can’t deny that the it is an incredibly useful concept, but it’s not the only way to move prospects closer to an eventual purchase. Enter: the flywheel.
Engineer James Watts originally designed the industrial flywheel to store rotational energy, which must otherwise be used as it’s produced. When the wheel loses momentum and reaches inertia, the kinetic energy is gone. This is a great metaphor for the process of growing a business by maintaining customer satisfaction, turning happy customers into word-of-mouth marketing machines. You attract prospects, engage with them in authentic ways to convert them to customers, and delight them at every touchpoint to turn them into tireless promoters of your brand.
HubSpot is one example of success with the flywheel model. They shifted their business to it when they realized two fundamental incompatibilities between their growth process and traditional sales funnels:
Sales funnels require you to spend energy to acquire each customer, then sacrifice that expenditure after getting the sale. The model does nothing to keep the momentum after landing a customer because it’s not focused on an ongoing relationship. But what about all the resources you pour into every sale, never to be replenished again?
This is where a flywheel approach makes a huge difference. All your content strategy components work together to get your flywheel turning. Once you’ve got everything in place, you translate that strategy into a content calendar you can use to engage with current and future customers for years to come.
Your team comes together to turn your flywheel and keep your strategy working. One group generates customer-focused content to boost retention, while another thinks through content to support new customers and improve sales. Yet another helps with team cohesion and recruitment. This keeps everyone on the same page and moving toward the same goal: happy customers who sing your praises.
Getting a customer is the beginning of the flywheel, definitely not a stopping point. The framework is structured around growth as the primary force that drives a three-stage cycle: attract, engage, and delight.
A sales funnel moves your prospect through the stages awareness, interest, decision, and action. that customer is gone from the funnel after action, though – and so is the energy you spent to acquire them. There’s no room for a promoter or analogous role in this framework. It moves in just one direction and stops following the customer after they convert.
That’s the problem with sales funnels. While the model still has its applications, there are a few gaps that the flywheel steps in to fill. For instance:
Growth is the axle that the flywheel turns around, and promoters are the driving force that keeps it moving. The first thing you’ll notice about a flywheel is that it’s circular, not linear like most sales frameworks. It keeps moving instead of coming to a stop when the prospect becomes a customer. Delighted customers become promoters, and promoters bring in fresh potential prospects.
A “promoter” is a thrilled customer who wants to tell the world how great their experience was, and there is no more powerful force on earth than a loyal customer’s word-of-mouth. Recent research has found that 69% of consumers seek out opinions before making a buying decision. Promoters are vocal about their experiences, and hopefully loud enough for those searchers to find their opinions on social media and review sites first.
Retaining customers is critically important. This is because:
Obviously, to promote a customer, you have to retain them. Every single time a prospect becomes a customer, the focus becomes delighting them with the hopes of upgrading them to a promoter. And delighting the customer makes them want to stick around. You can delight customers by anticipating their needs and overdelivering the experience they want. Finding points of friction and sanding them down is an indirect way to delight and retain as well, since every customer wants a seamless experience.
The flywheel reveres the customer, as it should be. The customer is the lifeblood of your company, the only path to business success, and the driving force behind the flywheel, after all. Who deserves more respect than them?
While the sales funnel writes the customer off once they’re acquired, the flywheel treats each like the person that they are. Instead of invoking awareness, interest, and decision, the flywheel attracts, engages, and delights prospects and customers. The language itself is telling, since it focuses entirely on the customer experience. Who doesn’t want to be delighted or engaged?
Plus, the customer has the promoter’s role to ascend to once you’ve sufficiently delighted them. That means every customer has an active role in growing your company.
So, now you know why content marketing is important and the basics of your content strategy. But why do all the heavy lifting yourself? At ContentBacon, we’ll help you nail your content strategy with a well-defined audience and brand voice. We make sure your content delivers the results you want on each channel that’s important for your business.
Contact ContentBacon to learn about our content subscription services.
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