subject: Stages Of Creating Marketing Content [print this page] Content marketing helps marketers to smoothly transition a website visitor into a prospect and then into a sales-ready lead. The different stages of creating marketing content are discussed below.
Determine Target Audience
This phase involves analyzing the segment that marketers want to target, and assessing their problem areas so that relevant content can be created and shared.
Determine Topics for Content Marketing
In this phase, marketers need to segregate topics based on prospect transition stages. For each stage, i.e. awareness, evaluation and buying, create content that is product specific or industry specific. Content topics can also be deduced from social media campaigns (from conversations and responses to shared links).
Determine Marketing Channel
The method of marketing is a deciding factor in content creation because content should be made available for users to easily find and share, as well. Content formats such as whitepapers or eBooks can be placed in the website resource link while infographics or slides can be shared as blog posts or in social media sites. ROI calculators, survey results and newsletters can be shared via email. Articles can be posted in networked groups for a wider reach to prospective clients, while videos can be uploaded in YouTube.
Create Valuable Content
Content should be created for the purpose of educating prospects. Therefore, content should be mapped to specific buyer stages and all stakeholders at this stage need to be involved. This way, it can be assured that prospects are able to get relevant information from the content shared. Since content marketing is an inbound strategy, relevant content plays a key role. Therefore, thought leadership pieces or guest blogging are rated high here.
Plan for Content Marketing
B2B content marketing program is not a one-time exercise. Timely updates, monthly newsletters, weekly or bi-weekly sharing of best practices aids in keeping prospects engaged on a continuous basis. Apart from this, timely responses to social media questions will not only engage existing clients, create awareness in new prospects as well.
QC Content
Every B2B content marketing team should necessarily have a QC team that helps marketers to edit the content piece to create a highly relevant and quality output for inbound lead generation.
Keep Budget in Mind
Assessing how well a specific content marketing piece was accepted, how much traffic it was able to generate and how many warm leads it was able to attract, is the best way to draw correlation between content and ROI. Using B2B marketing automation tools can help marketers to generate analytics on content marketing and determine its usefulness in the marketing funnel.
