If you’re like most businesses with a website and social media hopes, you know you’re supposed to being creating bucket loads of online content. And if you’re like just about every other business, that probably seems as daunting as climbing Mount Everest in shorts and shirtsleeves.
Consider that the Content Marketing Institute, in one of its recent highly respected annual reported that even at business to business organizations, 33 percent on average of marketing budgets goes to online content, and nearly half plan to increase that percentage.
A 2012 study by Social Media Examiner found that 58 percent of marketers are already blogging and 62 percent want to know more about it. And nearly two thirds said they want to do more with video.
If you’re reading this and thinking how far behind you might be, fear not. Content marketing doesn’t have to be that hard. Even if you’re mentally checking off all the great content marketing you’re doing, you’re probably wondering what might make it even better.
Here are the five easy steps to content marketing that we share with our inbound marketing clients at WordWrite. These steps will have you creating meaningful content fairly quickly. And more important, this content will be uniquely yours. Content marketing experts agree, that’s the kind of content most lacking online — content that brings a fresh perspective to the conversation rather than repeating what others are sharing.
Here’s how to begin the most valuable of all Internet journeys, the one that makes your organization a recognized expert because of your online content marketing.
1. Start with what works for you in the real world
Unless your business is an online start-up with no track record, you are already doing business successfully “in the real world.” What is it that you say and do to engage prospects and clients in the real world that works?
Step one is to take a high-level view of how you successfully engage prospects and clients. On a sheet of paper, outline the major steps in your sales process. For example, if you usually begin with an analysis or evaluation of a prospect’s need, creating a blog and downloadable offer from what you already say and do in that real-world conversation can be fairly easy. What are the three things you tell a prospect that he or she must absolutely consider before hiring somebody like you? What five steps do you take to determine the scope of a prospect’s needs? These can be great online content for you.
2. Get tangible: Put those brochures, collateral and other papers to use!
You’re not done just yet with great offline content ideas. Remember that dated but excellent brochure that you used to give to prospects before it became outdated? Well, what if you updated and put it online as a blog and offer? How about that proposal you wrote that got you that big contract? The only person who really saw it was the client who signed the deal. What if you revisited that distillation of your great business knowledge and turned that into a blog and offer?
In essence, what you’re doing here is creating an inventory of already successful content that you can freshen or simply move online. The focus is on what has worked for you in the past. It’s uniquely yours and it’s worked – two great characteristics that we all want to repeat over and over again in business, right?
3. X-ray your sales process and make that the framework for your online content
There are a few businesses in the world that enjoy a one-step process to close a sale. Most of us work in businesses where more consideration is appropriate. In fact, in the online world, I like the three-step process that HubSpot uses: Awareness, Consideration, Decision. In other words, your content online needs to help make prospects aware of the problem you solve through useful education; it needs to then entice prospects to consider you; and finally, engage with you in a way that prospects buy from you.
Figuring out how this works for you doesn’t have to be huge research project. Go back to your sheet of paper listing the major steps in how you sell in the real world. Now align those steps with the Awareness/Consideration/Decision categories and pathway.
How well does your content track? Are there gaps? Are your real-world sales materials heavy on Decision content and light in the other two categories?
4. Fill in the content gaps
If you’ve followed the process this far, you’ve realized that a lot of the initial content you need to provide online is already in your head, in a desk drawer or buried in a folder on your laptop. You’re not going to have to reinvent the wheel.
You will need to fill in some gaps, probably. Most of the clients we work with go through this process and realize that they’ve not been educating enough, or that they’ve not shared enough about what makes them unique to get them hired at the decision stage. Mapping out content for the gaps will complete the initial steps in identifying what you need to get started in content marketing.
5. Put it all together in a plan and be consistent
If you’re just getting started in content marketing, you probably shouldn’t be blogging every business day of the month and you shouldn’t be kicking out 20 downloadable offers a month.
What you should be doing is translating your real world business success to your online content marketing on a consistent schedule, probably blogging once or twice a week, with one offer a month. In the previous four steps, you should have identified about 5-10 content opportunities that you could move online quickly. This is a great start for your content marketing.
What’s important is to be consistent. With 5-10 content marketing opportunities, you ought to be able to put together anywhere from a month to three months of initial content to help you score great opportunities for your business online.
Best of all this will be content that is uniquely yours, and content that has proven itself by creating sales success for you in the real world. What could be better for any business than taking what’s worked in the real world and creating an entirely new pathway to success by turning your website into a digital storefront?
Content marketing truly is for anyone. Anyone, that is, who is willing to take five easy steps to translate their existing success to the online world.
Getting started in content marketing is hardly the same as mastering it. But any businessperson who’s honest will readily acknowledge that hanging a shingle and opening the doors in the real world is hardly the same as mastering the business, right? So consistent application of good practices such as these, combined with continued learning and expansion of content marketing, will lead to even greater success.
HubSpot co-founders Brian Halligan & Dharmesh Shah have just released their new book, Inbound Marketing: Attract, Engage, and Delight Customers Online. The book is a comprehensive guide on how to provide the best digital experience for prospects, leads, and customers.
Below, you can download a free chapter of the book. Halligan and Shah will walk you through best practices for creating remarkable content, one of the most important steps in an inbound marketing strategy. The authors discuss how to develop eBooks, videos and blog articles and provide tips for sharing your content with your ideal audience.
Best of luck on your content marketing journey!