Inbound Marketing Content Strategy for Startups and B2B

CONTENT MARKETING – EDUCATE YOUR CUSTOMERS

“Content Marketing” is a type of marketing where companies produce and publish valuable information to attract potential customers. Content marketing helps businesses build their brand and increase sales.

A content marketing strategy is a plan for producing and publishing valuable, relevant information that educates readers about your company and its offerings. It’s also a plan for measuring success.

The goal of a content marketing strategy is to drive profitable customer action. This could mean anything from increasing website traffic or boosting social media followers.

The best content marketing strategies are based on providing useful, valuable information that leads to an improved experience for both visitors and customers.

If you want to learn more about how to create a successful content marketing strategy, keep reading! Here are some tips:

1 – Know Your Audience

Before you can start writing any content, it’s important to understand who your audience is. What do they care about? Why would they read your blog post?

2 – Create Relevant Content

Once you have identified your target audience, you need to make sure your content aligns with what they care about. You might find that certain types of posts perform well, while others don’t generate much interest.

3 – Focus On Quality Over Quantity

You may think that quantity is key when trying to get people interested in your content, but this isn’t always true. In fact, quality is often the most effective way to engage your audience. If you’re not confident in your skills, then focus on creating high-quality content over time.

4 – Use Social Media To Get The Word Out

Social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram and Pinterest help you reach out to your current and prospective customers. These sites allow you to share links to blogs, articles, videos and other forms of content.

5 – Measure Success

When you launch your content marketing campaign, you’ll want to measure its success. How many shares did you receive? How many comments did you receive? Did your site get more visits than usual?

6 – Keep Improving

As you continue to grow your content marketing efforts, you’ll notice that your performance will improve. Once you’ve mastered one topic, you can move onto another.

7 – Be Creative

Creativity is the lifeblood of good content marketing. Don’t just write about the same topics every day. Try new things, experiment with different formats and styles, and use images and graphics to convey your message.

8 – Stay Organized

It’s easy to lose track of all the content you’ve created. Make sure you stay organized so you can easily access everything you’ve written.

9 – Share Your Work With Others

Sharing your work with others is a great way to gain exposure. When you collaborate with other bloggers, you can promote each other’s content.

10 – Have Fun

Content marketing shouldn’t feel like hard work. If you enjoy what you’re doing, you’ll be motivated to produce more.

Example of a Successful Content Marketing Strategy.

There are many examples of successful content marketing strategies on the web. However, we really admire Mike Stelzner. He is perhaps one of the most successful content marketers on the web. He has built a multi-million dollar business through Social Media Examiner by unleashing useful tons of free content and just educating and helping people. I think you’ll enjoy this short video interview that Mark Schaefer conducted with Mike Stelzner about Content Marketing and the strategies that he has applied at the Social Media Examiner.

DIFFERENCE BETWEEN INBOUND MARKETING AND CONTENT MARKETING

“Inbound Marketing” typically refers to marketing activities that bring visitors in, rather than marketers having to go out to get prospects’ attention. Further, marketers typically think of content marketing as a subset of inbound marketing. That’s because inbound marketing MarTech platforms often include functionality for marketing automation and email marketing within their core platforms. “Content Marketing” on the other hand, is the process of developing and sharing relevant, valuable, and engaging content to a target audience with the goal of acquiring new customers or increasing business from existing customers.

At Connected Markets, perhaps the most significant value we provide clients is to help them develop and apply an effective combined inbound/content marketing strategy for their business. A strategy that outlines the critical tactical steps for the creation of useful interesting content that is needed for lead generation, sales, and the ongoing development of their brand. Our services include audience research to help determine what content types and tactics will be most effective for your brand, the development and tracking of content marketing tactics, content creation and editorial plans, outsourced content creation, and ongoing competitive, keyword research and tracking help to decipher what content is working best, and what content is most effective for your market and brand.

Inbound marketing is a type of marketing that focuses on attracting customers by offering them free information. This type of marketing is also known as lead generation or lead nurturing.

There are several ways to implement inbound marketing tactics into your business. Some examples include:

Blogging – By regularly blogging, you create an online hub where customers can go for helpful tips and advice.
Guest posting – By inviting guest authors to publish their own content on your website, you give readers something interesting to read.
Podcasting – By recording audio interviews with industry experts, you become a thought leader in your niche.
Infographics – By creating visual representations of data, you increase engagement and cut through the clutter.
Case studies – By sharing real stories from satisfied customers, you show how your product works.
Email newsletters – By sending regular emails filled with useful information, you keep customers up-to-date.
Online courses – By providing educational resources for free, you attract new students who may have never considered working with you before.
Lead magnets – By giving away useful files such as white papers, cheat sheets, checklists, etc., you encourage leads to sign up for your email list.
Social media ads – By running social media campaigns, you target specific audiences and generate interest in your company.
Websites – By building high-quality websites, you establish yourself as an authority in your field.
Search engine optimization (SEO) – By optimizing your website to rank higher in search engines, you increase traffic and make it easier for visitors to find you.
Website design and Accessibility – By designing attractive accessible websites, you offer a better user experience.
Video production – By making videos that explain your services, you engage viewers and build trust.
Webinars – By hosting informative webinars, you share knowledge with your audience.
Repurposing & Cross-promotion – By repurposing old materials, you save time and money while increasing your brand awareness. By promoting your partners’ businesses, you expand your customer base.

HUBSPOT – OUR RECOMMENDED INBOUND MARKETING PLATFORM

The HubSpot Flywheel

A successful content marketing program requires significant investment in content creation and content promotion. Inbound Marketing platforms such as our top recommended platform, HubSpot, can often simplify efforts and improve online marketing ROI by automating several aspects of content creation, content distribution, content promotion, SEO, advertising, lead capture, relationship building, selling, landing pages, and analytics/reporting.

Connected Markets is a HubSpot Certified Solutions Partner.

In addition to assisting clients with best-practice content marketing strategy, we often assist clients with HubSpot platform implementations, including the HubSpot Marketing Hub, Sales Hub, Service Hub, and CMS Hub, and Operations Hub. Additionally, we have technical resources to assist with the integration of HubSpot-supported apps like SalesForce, LinkedIn Sales Navigator, Google Ads, Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Search Console, LinkedIn Ads, Facebook Ads, Drift, and LuckyOrange.

Additional Inbound Marketing platforms we have experience with include Eloqua, Pardot, ActiveCamapign, Marketo, Optify, and Ontraport.

FAQs – INBOUND MARKETING CONTENT STRATEGY AND THE FUTURE

The future of inbound marketing content strategy is here. Below are some of the biggest opportunities/challenges facing content marketers today. We help clients with these evolving technologies so they can stay ahead of the curve.

What Is Topic Visibility, Topic Coverage, and Topic Clustering?
Connected Markets recommends the SEO methodology outlined in the Future of Content Strategy by Matthew Howells-Barby VP of Marketing at HubSpot. We use and recommend website topic clusters and we use Friase.io for content optimization for SEO, topic research, and topic coverage analysis.
What Is Google E-A-T?
E-A-T stands for Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. The concept comes from Google’s Search Quality Rater guidelines and it became well known after the infamous Medic Update in August 2018. E-A-T is one factor that Google uses to evaluate the overall quality of a web page.
Authority: A web page with high authority will be more likely to rank higher than a low authority web page. Authority is based on many factors including domain age, backlinks, social media shares, etc.
Expertise: A web page with expert information will be ranked higher than a web page without expertise. This includes things like having an expert author or editor, using authoritative links, and having relevant keywords.
Trustworthy: A web page with trustworthy information will be ranked higher. This includes things like not being spammy, having no malware, having good contact info, and having a clean site design.
What Is Google MUM?
Google MUM is an AI model that has the ability to understand language, generate language, and understand information across multiple modalities. It’s 1,000 times more accurate than BERT. It’s been trained across 75 different languages, and it can learn new languages quickly. It’s capable of developing a more complete understanding of information and the world than previous models. And it’s multimodal, so MUM can understand information across text and images as well as other modalities like video and sound.
MUM is also able to make inferences about relationships between entities and events. For example, if you ask it “Who was born in April?” it can tell you that Barack Obama was born in April. You could then ask it “What year did he graduate from college?” and it would know that he graduated in 2004.
In the context of content marketing, this means that MUM can understand what your audience wants, and give it to them. As an example, let’s say I wanted to write a blog post about how to get started in content marketing. If my audience had already read similar content, MUM might suggest related articles. Or maybe it would suggest topics that are most popular among my audience.
What About AI-powered Content Writing Tools
Content marketing is a great way to get your brand out into the world, but if you don’t have any content to share, then what’s the point? Luckily, there are some amazing AI-powered content writing platforms that can help you research topics for an article and even create a draft copy. For example, our favorites are Frase, Jasper, and SurferSEO. These tools allow you to type in the main topic and get lists of related subtopic keywords to include in your articles. They also allow you to get questions and answers from the SERPs, People Also Ask, Quora, and Reddit which you can then choose from and edit before publishing.
Social Media Automation and Content Distribution Tools
Social media automation content distribution platforms can automatically distribute your content to the right audiences, helping you grow your audience and reach new people.
The best part is that these platforms are completely automated, so you don’t need to do anything but upload your content. They will handle everything else for you.
There are many different types of social media automation tools available today, each with its own unique features. We’ve put together this list of the top 5 social media automation tools on the market today:

Buffer – Buffer is one of the most popular social media automation tools out there.
Hootsuite – Hootsuite is another very popular tool that helps you manage your social media accounts at once.
Sprout Social – Sprout Social is a powerful platform that lets you schedule posts, track engagement, and measure results.
TweetDeck – TweetDeck is a free app that makes it easy to view and manage Twitter feeds.
Dlvrit- Dlvrit.com is a simple yet cost-effective social media automation software.

In conclusion, we hope that this article helped you to think about why it’s important to invest your time in content marketing. If you have any questions about the process of creating or optimizing content for your website or blog, feel free to reach out to us.