Are your blog posts going unremarked? Social posts remaining bare of meaningful engagement? Landing pages un-visited?
There’s hope for your content marketing efforts yet. Use these five tips to create original, engaging content that actually helps your lead generation, nurturing, and conversion efforts without breaking the bank or diverting resources from other core business processes.
1:- Create Separate Content Plans for Each Buyer’s Journey Stage
The buyer’s journey has three stages: awareness, consideration, decision.
You’ve stood in your buyers’ shoes before, so you intuitively understand your prospects’ thought processes at each stage. You probably have some ideas about how you can turn your intuition into actionable, conversion-oriented content, too.
Keep your stage-specific ideas from bleeding over by setting up three separate content plans, one for each step of the buyer’s journey.
2- Write to Specific Buyer Personas
Buyer’s journey stages are just one piece of the content marketing puzzle. Don’t neglect your core buyer personas, either. This company’s LinkedIn profile offers a literal example, with promoted blog posts written to discrete buyer groups: automotive businesses, acupuncturists, retailers.
3:- Lean on Testimonials from Current or Past (Happy) Clients
Abstract buyer personas only get you so far. Tap real live customers — current and former — to help close the deal. Ask them to write up (or convey verbally, for your team to polish later) honest assessments of your work. It should go without saying that you’ll want to select customers with whom you’ve had positive interactions. Bonus points for current customers who’ve been with your company for a while; you’ll want to tout those “customer since year x” notes.
4:- Personalize Buying Decisions With Narrative-Driven Case Studies
What’s better than a heartfelt customer testimonial? A narrative-driven case study supported by detailed customer interviews or polls, relationship analysis using sanitized metrics, and input from third-party experts. From start to finish, tell the story of a particularly interesting client relationship: where they were when they first engaged your company, how you developed a solution for their problem, what you actually did for them, and where they ended up after the fact.
5:- Poll Your Customer Base Regularly (& Write Up the Results)
Case studies are resource-intensive. Grab a global view of your customer base with periodic voluntary polls. These polls can cover matters directly pertinent to the products and services you provide or focus on client businesses themselves. Don’t underestimate the value of an informational poll revealing that, say, your average client business has between 10 and 20 employees and between $2M and $4M ARR.
Your Prospects Want to Be Sold
Sales isn’t rocket science. Never mind that you’re not a born salesman and you don’t yet have the capacity to bring one on board. Whether you know it or not, you have the tools to turn up a respectable lead generation operation. Never forget that your prospects want to be sold, provided you give them a reason to bite. When you deploy these five content marketing best practices, they’ll be sorely tempted.
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