Your content marketing efforts may be the most important part of your inbound marketing strategy. You need to have a compelling piece of inbound marketing content that resonates with your audience. You also need to have a great landing page that highlights the benefits of downloading your content.
If you have read and followed the first blogs about inbound you have already completed steps that will make this easier for you when creating the content.
You already have your buyer personae from the first step. You know who our audience is and to whom we are talking.
In the first post, we used “Whole Life Wally” for our financial services example. However for this one, just for fun, let’s say we are a construction company that wants to market to an audience interested in playgrounds for towns.
So our target is probably the head of the recreation department, Recreation Ron.
The first question is, what type of content to build? There is a huge variety of content that might be useful to your audience.
Our most downloaded types of content are e-books. We condense a lot of valuable marketing information for our visitors. The key is that they get the value before they become customers. In fact out of 100 people that download our information, only a few become customers.
For the purpose of this example let’s say we will build an e-book for Ron. However, you can also create video, checklist, infographics, pretty much anything. Don’t forget about recycling printed information if it has value and would speak to your audience.
But back to Ron.
What would Ron be searching for when finding a construction company to install his playground?
Perhaps cost-efficiency? He works for a city, so he will probably be budget conscious. How about a “Guide to Budget Playground Equipment.”
Or maybe the real question is child safety? So that would be a different e-book. I would suggest you make your e-book at least eight pages long with a lot of images or illustrations that make it an easy read.
Ok done with the content?
Now you need to create your landing page. I would suggest taking all of the usual steps that you do before creating a page. Do some keyword research around your content marketing. You can use Google Keyword tool to find keywords with good traffic.
Then make sure you describe your offer well. Having an image of what your visitors will receive can help. But it all comes back to the question; Will your audience perceive this as valuable?
Make sure that you talk about the benefits of downloading your content. What will your visitors gain? Why should they take the final step and “pay” with their contact information?
As far as your form for contact information ask for the bare minimum that you can is one technique. The value and scarcity of your content will dictate what information you can get from your prospects.
Want to learn more about inbound marketing? Download our Guide to Inbound Marketing.