Episode 4 - Tools for Creating Inbound Marketing Content

Today I want to share with you some of the tools I use to create marketing and educational content for our company.     I’m going to do this as a two-part series, so today i will focus on the tools I use to produce our digital content and next time I will share with you the tools I use to publish, repurpose and monitor what we publish on the Internet.

You have probably produced some content for the Internet.  As a company, we have dabbled in content production for many years.   Like many businesses we made a half ass attempt to publish a blog, produce some videos and stay relevant on social media,  but last year we made a significant investment in what is called inbound marketing.  We signed up and started using a service called HubSpot.  If you haven’t heard of Hubspot, Hubspot is sales and marketing automation platform to help b2b or b2c companies attract visitors to your website and turn them into buyers.   If you are looking for how you can get more out of your internet marketing I would encourage you to take a few hours and go through their Inbound Marketing Certification Training.    Even if you aren’t interested in investing in the Hubspot platform, It’s free, quick and easy to do and will set you up with a good foundation that you need to start taking advantage of inbound marketing with or without an automation platform.

If you would prefer reading a book,   a quick and easy read is, “They Ask, You Answer” by Marcus Sheridan.  Marcus was a pool installer in Virginia and one of the first big inbound marketing and Hubspot success stories.

So lets get into content production and start with a couple of definitions, the first is “content marketing”  so we are on the same page.

Content Marketing

Content marketing is defined as a strategic marketing approach focused on continually creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content that is designed to attract and retain a clearly-defined audience — and, ultimately, to produce a sale.

When they say “clearly defined audience” you will often hear this referred to as a buyer persona or buyer avatar.      Buyer persona’s or avatars are fictional representations of people that you believe would buy from you.   So, for example in our company, we have defined some buyer’s persona’s that represent the types of buyers we typically deal with.  We have defined “Ian the IT Guy”, “Fran in Finance”, and “Charles the CEO”.   Each of these personas help us create content that is directed to and will resonate with that type of buyer.

The personas are specific.  For example, our persona for “Ian the IT Guy” is made up of his Roles (Ian is an evaluator, decision maker, techie, Caretaker, Introvert, Knowledge Seeker, Troubleshooter), Goals (Ian needs to keep infrastructure running, preserve his job, work over vendors, make himself look good in the eyes of his boss, and advance his career).   He also has specific Challenges (too much to do, not enough time, no real decision making power, no peers to work with, limited budgets and a fear of losing his job).

If you keep a specific persona or avatar in your mind while you are creating content you will have a much better chance of making something that will resonate with the potential client.

Inbound Marketing

The next term I want to define is, Inbound Marketing. I threw out the term Inbound Marketing when we were talking about HubSpot.    Inbound marketing is a marketing system that is designed to address problems and needs of a clearly defined audience by building trust and credibility.   Content produced for an inbound marketing pro...