Content Strategy

Geared to a clearly defined audience, we will be planning a timeline of delivering valuable and relevant content to our clearly defined ideal audience. This is the implementation and strengthening of our positioning throughout the stages in the buying process. maintaining a consistent schedule of high quality content is also our highest recommended method of bolstering your search engine standing. The content creation schedule will be recommended with high emphasis on the results of our competitor research and keyword analysis contained in the SEO audit report.

Click here to read our article on competitor research.

If the expertise our clients are relying upon is largely technical, it is likely that customers will go though a buying process that could last weeks, months, or even longer. Buyers gather information online, on their own, and all throughout the buying process. They are looking for information that will aid them in their comparison and evaluation.

We must establish a connection with our ideal customer that conveys confidence in that you’ve seen and understood the problems they are facing and that you’ve solved these problems for other companies or individuals like them. This will be a head cornerstone of our brand message and the website is by far the #1 place that information needs to be available since it is likely our website will be the definitive source of all content and information concerning your company and brand.

Click here to read our article on laying the foundation for the website.

Our #1 goal is not, as much, talking about ourselves but talking about the problems our ideal customers face, displaying deep knowledge of those problems, and providing examples of how your business has solved those problems. The people reading your website have and agenda that led them to your website in the first place. They need to be given the value they seek and offered relief to their challenges before they even talk to you. Content that serves this purpose can exist in the form of:

Articles or Blog Posts
Downloadable Printables
Buyer’s Guides
Case Studies
Videos
Webinars
Podcasts
ROI Calculators

Your content also plays a variety of roles throughout the Marketing and Sales process. It will help you achieve:

Generate awareness for your ideal customers and educate your staff and sales team
Answer frequently asked questions as they gather information around the tasks they have set out to accomplish.
Establish credibility of your organization before you have had the privilege of a real conversation
The value gathering process of visitors prompts micro-conversions that generate leads with phone numbers and email addresses.
Builds trust with your company before and after the live interaction with your sales reps.
Speeds up the buying process and better your team’s close rate by reinforcing the message put across by interactions with staff and sales reps.
It helps get you found on search engines by providing descriptive language the algorithms like to see.

Publishing content with these principles in mind will strengthen every step of your business development process. It will bring you deep into the expertise your customers should justifiably rely on you for. It will also be instrumental in making just the right kind of impact you want to make on the people, in the companies, you are forming relationships with.

Lead Nurturing Through Content

Newsletters

Regularly scheduled emails to defined segments of our audience should be used to proactively and consistently deliver thought-leadership-establishing content to your database of contacts.

Automated Campaigns

A series of emails get triggered by some predefined action or event that a specific lead takes on your website. For example:

A printable file download about X topic might trigger a 3 to 4 email drip campaign that delivers some related articles and case studies over the course of the next two weeks.
When a when a sales-qualified lead hasn’t returned to your site in over a month, he or she is automatically thrown into a reengagement email campaign.

Lead nurturing emails, again, should be focused exclusively on creating value for who receives them. They are part of the longer game of building trust and establishing your expertise and positioning with ideal clients.

Content as an instrumental tool of Sales Efforts

Your content should serve to educate and reinforce the message of your sales team. Quality content is precious in helping your sales team move leads forward in the buying process. We must also enable and educate the sales team on how to physically use content in their communications. Marketers are communicators and it is their job to help the sales reps communicate better.

For instance, after a phone call, the sales rep can send a short followup email such as this:

“Hi Susan, I enjoyed talking today. I would like to send this link to an article we recently published that offers a very in depth explanation of the subject matter we discussed. I think it’ll help clarify some points. Let me know If you have any questions."

It wouldn't be as good if we said something like this:

‘Hey Rudy, I'm just checking in to see if you’ve decided on what solution to go with.”

It would be better to say something like this, (right?):

“Rudy, I was thinking about your challenge today and wanted to share these two case studies. They provide insight into the process we used for customers that had similar issues. I thought they might help put the solution we discussed into focus a little bit more. Would it be valuable to you to quickly talk through the parallels I see with your situation and how we might apply some of our learnings from these experiences?”

Conclusion

As the work pipeline fills up, pertinent tasks of your company are to:

Remain at the forefront of the minds among current and past customers and leads
Incrementally build trust and in your company’s expertise
Consistently maintain the status of the clear first choice when it is time for a buying decision.

Your content creation strategy will ensure these tasks successful.