Content Marketing 101
A Guide for Generating Quality Leads
This easy-to-follow guide outlines current issues and provides actionable solutions to help you kickstart your marketing strategy.
In this guide, you’ll learn:
- What content marketing is
- Tactics for reaching your audience
- Ways to track your success
Let’s get started
Content Marketing 101
What is content marketing?
Content marketing is the art of creating valuable online materials (blogs, social posts, videos, etc.) for a specific group of people. It is absolutely essential for your SEO strategy to have a content marketing strategy in place.
DO NOT mistake content marketing as just another way to get leads that are ready to buy.
It’s all about providing information to customers and prospects to help them solve a problem. This is an important distinction.
Content marketing brings in leads of a different kind. They’re not sales-qualified leads, and they’re not quite ready to buy from you. They are, however, looking for help.
And YOU can provide that help by creating content that connects, educates, and creates awareness of your solution. Just be sure to do your keyword research to understand what the user is looking for.
If your content helps in this way, the reader will be more likely to buy from you in the future.
The content marketing funnel
In traditional marketing, the funnel is a visualization of your target audience’s journey, starting from the awareness of their problem to the moment they are ready to make a purchase and solve the problem.
Like a funnel, you’ll have a lot more people at the top of your funnel. These people have just heard about your business and are exploring options. As you go down the funnel, it will start to get smaller. This means that fewer people are in your funnel, but they become more interested in your product. At the bottom of the funnel, you have the least amount of people, but they are the most likely to buy.
Content marketing can be used for any stage of the funnel, but it might take a different form.
At the top of your funnel, you’ll see content like eBooks and infographics. These are generally for a broader audience to help introduce your brand.
Closer to the bottom of the funnel, you’ll see content like case studies and testimonial videos. These are designed to help convince your audience that your solution is right for them.
Begin by mapping out your funnels to know who you’re trying to get in front of before you create specific content.
What about the flywheel?
You may have heard about HubSpot’s shift away from the funnel and towards the flywheel.
The flywheel is centered around the entire experience of your customers. Once you obtain new customers, the experience doesn’t end. You need to continue delighting them by providing a great experience.
With a traditional funnel, you begin by attracting them (top of the funnel), engaging them (middle of the funnel), and then delighting them when they leave through the bottom of the funnel. That’s the issue with the traditional funnel idea; they leave your funnel.
With the flywheel method, customers stay on your radar as you continue to delight them. This tactic keeps them engaged and spins the flywheel. Every customer that has a good experience with your company will spin the wheel. However, if they have a terrible experience, this causes friction which slows down the wheel.
You want your content marketing to help keep the momentum going in your flywheel. This means that the customer journey doesn’t end just because they became a customer. Content that you might distribute to people in the middle of the funnel could still be helpful to someone who is already at the bottom of your funnel.
Keep both of these ideas in mind as you create content.
Inbound vs. Outbound
Most companies are familiar with outbound marketing. They want results fast, so they start blasting out automated emails and running bottom-funnel ads that talk about their services.
Outbound marketing creates a one-way conversation where the company is telling the prospect how they can help.
Inbound marketing, on the other hand, creates a two-way conversation where the prospect is the one who initiates the conversation. While inbound brings in a higher volume of opportunities, these prospects aren’t the ones who are adding to your bottom line just yet.
The methodology and language you use for inbound vs. outbound will vary.
Talking to outbound leads
Outbound marketing involves reaching out to prospects who are in the market for your services and making a purchasing decision. These users may have just heard about your company and are deciding if it’s the right one to choose. They may have already checked out a few other companies who offer the same service as you do. Your goal is to convince them that your company is the right one they should choose.
How inbound marketing can help outbound
While this more traditional method of increasing sales for your business still works, it can vastly improve by using inbound.
If someone conducts a Google search, finds your website, and fills out the contact form, you want to make sure you have automation in place to continue following up. You can send these bottom-funnel leads email correspondence that sends them to the helpful content you’ve created.
Perhaps the prospect is looking to create a software system that will cost $200,000 or more. This is a big decision. You’re very unlikely to have someone who just heard about your company commit to such a significant investment without at least getting to know your company.
That’s where inbound is needed!
After the lead fills out your contact form, you should have an email workflow in place that tells them more about how you can help and offers helpful advice about the software they were looking to create. This content can discuss what goes into software development costs, why it’s ultimately going to save them money, and how other customers have benefited from creating such a product.
If you send this content in a format that requires an opt-in, you’ll be able to see which of your prospects have now not only filled out a bottom funnel form to talk to you but also opted into a higher funnel content piece. This shows a higher level of intent, and you can score your contacts within your CRM with lead scoring so you know who is leading the most engagement.
It also helps better inform your prospects about their situation. They may not choose your company for that high ticket software product, but they will remember that you helped in making a decision. You showed that you know what you’re talking about and understand the problem. Maybe their relationship with another vendor goes south, and they start looking for another vendor in the future. They will remember your brand and how you helped them.
It might take a more extended period, but it’s certainly worth investing time and resources.
Types of Content
The types of content you can create are vast. And because every person consumes content differently, you’ll want to create variations. For example, when you create a blog post, consider repurposing that content into a downloadable ebook.
There are so many types of content that your business can begin creating. Let’s look at some of the main ways.
Blogs
The most basic form of content marketing comes with having a blog. In 2021, every business must have a blog. You might be thinking that you don’t have anything to say or that you won’t rank high in Google with a blog because it’s too late to get started.
You can write about what makes your business unique and how you help customers. How do you approach the company that makes you unique? Do you have a ton of questions your customers ask every day? Turn these into an FAQ and post them on your blog. If these questions are being asked by others in Google every day, why not capture this traffic? Even if you don’t rank high in Google right away, thanks to posting to your blog, you will still give Google many cues as to what your website is about.
Consistency with posting quality content will ultimately help you improve your rankings in the long run.
Infographics
Infographics are visualizations that tell a story. Often, brands will use these to display statistics more engagingly. You can take industry reports and transform them from boring tables into a highly engaging infographic.
People love sharing these types of infographics, particularly on Pinterest. You can get a ton of organic reach by building links with this type of content.
eGuides
eGuides are a great form of content to use for content marketing. They are usually downloadable assets, such as an ebook, that can be in PDF format, so it’s easy for prospects to read on the go.
Just like infographics, eGuides can be blogs that are repurposed into a downloadable PDF. We like to transform multiple blog posts that work well together into an eBook that is multiple chapters long and goes deeper than one blog can. This helps give more power to your content marketing and provides a purpose for someone to download the asset. Sure, they can go to your blog and read all of the blogs covered in the eBook, but they’d need to know where to look.
Excellent content marketing involves not only creating great content but organizing it so that it’s easy for your prospects to consume that information.
Whitepapers
Whitepapers are in-depth reports written by subject matter experts that discuss a specific topic and problems around it.
If you are an authority in your field, you’ll benefit from using whitepapers to prove it. Pick a topic that might not be well known and go deep in answering any questions or problems associated with this topic. Then, turn these thoughts into a PDF that you can distribute to your industry.
Whitepapers are a great way to show you are indeed a master of your subject matter.
Case Studies
Case studies are a great piece of content to provide to prospects who might be in the middle or bottom of your funnel. They can show how you specifically helped a customer solve a problem with your product or service.
Whenever a prospect is considering using a company, viewing a well-thought-out case study can be the tipping point that results in choosing to do business with your company. People want to know that you have the experience to help them. If they can see their specific problem in your case study and how you solved it, this can help overcome one of their main objections.
Try to make your case study-specific. Many companies don’t like to divulge business information or exact data, so they use vague stats. Try to be as authentic as possible while still being specific so you can convince your prospects why they should use your company.
How-Tos
Tons of people are searching for help to do something every day on Google and YouTube. If you can show them how to do something, they will remember you for it. Many businesses don’t want to create videos or how-to documents for fear that they are giving away too much for free.
Let’s think about a mechanic, for example, who might show you how to change a tire. By creating helpful content that shows how to change a tire, there is a chance that a lot of do-it-yourselfers will just buy a cheap tire and change it themselves. However, there are a lot more people who won’t. They may see this video, see how simple it looks, and try it themselves. While it might seem simple, they may think it’s a little more complicated than it looks in practice. It might be easier to hire a mechanic to change the tire for them. Sure it will cost them a little bit more for the labor, but they won’t break their back from injury trying it themselves.
This happens all the time in other situations. It’s better to put out that content to increase your brand recognition than to try to hoard trade secrets to yourself. Who knows, that prospect might end up using you to change their tire.
Podcasts
Podcasts are a great way to talk about your subject matter for hours and hours.
Some of the most successful podcasts are just a few people sitting in a room talking about random topics. Tons of businesses use podcasts to show their expertise. They might do deep dives on topics to educate their audience or invite industry experts to talk about their experiences.
Each podcast is a little bit different, and you want to make sure yours is unique before you dive into making one. You can repurpose content from blogs or videos, but be sure to offer something that the user can’t get from these types of content.
The main reason podcasts work so well is because they can be listened to on the go. Many people who drive a half hour or more to their job listen to podcasts. With more people working remotely in 2020 and beyond, the audience has dipped slightly, but that doesn’t mean podcasting isn’t a medium you shouldn’t explore, especially if you’re great in front of a microphone.
Video Content
There’s no doubt that the amount of video content that is consumed daily has skyrocketed. Video is such an accessible medium of content to absorb because you can do so passively. It’s also beneficial for people trying to solve a problem (which how-to content helps solve). Sometimes people get frustrated that articles that appear in Google search results don’t answer their problem. When this happens, they click the video tab and look for someone to show them how to solve their problem.
Video is great because it allows you to see things from a new perspective.
Creating a Strategy
Content marketing comes in all different formats. What matters is that you always plan to continue providing content to retain both prospects and customers. Every business helps people solve more than one problem, and you’ll want to provide unique content for each of these problems.
What is the best way to do content marketing?
The more specific you can get with your content, the greater chance you will have to resonate with your audience. If you’re a plumber, you might be able to help someone fix a leaky pipe, or you might be able to help them completely install a new faucet. Both problems could be unique, and you’d need a strategy to help. Once this person becomes a customer, your strategy of content delivery should change. You’ll want to engage them with helpful content that helps them take another step. This person has already bought from you to fix their problem. Now you’ll want to use content to continue to educate and delight them.
Remember: Customers don’t know what they don’t know. And they certainly won’t know everything about your product or service. You may even have answers to problems they don’t realize they have yet. That’s where content comes into play.
Perhaps you have a weekly or monthly newsletter that talks about a new tip each week. In this newsletter, you also highlight how you helped a particular customer with a case study. Your customer might read this newsletter and see how you helped build a brand new bathroom for a different customer. This can put the idea in your customer’s head that this is something you can help with.
Imagine that the customer is thinking about redoing their entire bathroom but didn’t know that you offer that service. By creating helpful content and distributing it to your audience of engaged customers, you are now part of the conversation. This customer will now consider your plumbing business when they redo their bathroom because they already had a great experience with you.
Getting users to opt-In to your email marketing
You may have heard that email marketing is dead, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. Email is the most common form of content distribution and the highest converting.
Let’s first distinguish between cold and warm emails.
Cold emails involve buying a list to send frequent blasts to. However, due to the unexpected nature of these emails (people did not sign up for these), it’s a tactic that is tough to get a high conversion rate from. If this tactic suits you, check out our guide on cold email marketing.
Warm emails leverage an engaged list of people who have opted in to receive marketing from you. This could be from a newsletter sign-up on your website or a downloadable asset they asked for. An essential part of email marketing is to make sure that your audience wants to receive emails from you.
GDPR has made it more difficult for businesses to email people without their permission. This isn’t a bad thing. After all, wouldn’t you instead send emails to people interested and might buy rather than people who aren’t sure why you’re emailing them in the first place?
To ensure that your lists are full of engaged users, you should set up a double opt-in. This means that someone who signs up for your newsletter needs to verify their email address. Not only does this reduce your bounce rate, but the recipient of your emails has gone out of their way to let you know they want to receive your emails.
Creating an editorial calendar
Every business has many topics to talk about, but it can be hard to organize it all. That’s where having an editorial calendar can be a massive benefit for your organization.
An editorial calendar is a roadmap of the content you will dedicate to creating over a specific amount of time. If you don’t have one in place, your organization might generate content at the moment rather than sticking to a theme. This can cause your content to become unorganized. You can start by committing to a shorter time, so the content you create doesn’t seem too daunting. Try mapping out a three-month calendar of the content your team will commit to creating.
The easiest way to start is to pick a central topic. An editorial calendar will help you see at a glance what subtopics you plan to write about. You’ll also see what forms this content will need to be created, like eBooks and Infographics.
A general process to follow would be to create a pillar page that goes in-depth on a topic. Then you would write out 3-4 articles that stem from the main issue you discussed on your pillar page. Next, you would transform these articles into eBooks and Infographics.
Don’t forget to map out how you plan to distribute this content. You’ll want to map out what email workflows should be in place and what content should be in these emails.
Best Platform for Content Marketing
As we’ve mentioned, content marketing takes many forms.
Because there are so many ways you can venture forward, it’s crucial to centralize where your content will live. You’ll want to start by ensuring that your website is built in a friendly way that makes it easy for your team to update content quickly.
What is the best platform to manage your content marketing?
At Miles, we prefer WordPress because it’s such a versatile CMS.
Your website will be the best place to house all of your content marketing efforts. Your long articles will live on your blog, and your eBooks and infographics will live in the media manager. While your website will maintain the content itself, you’ll want to invest in a perfect CRM to help distribute all of the content you create.
What are the best CRMs for content marketing?
CRMs are extremely important when it comes to content marketing because they help with organization and automation. The problem is that there are hundreds to choose from, and they all have different features and pricing.
We’ve found that any CRM can get the job done, but a tool is only as good as the team that uses it. As long as you focus on your primary goals, you can make any of these CRMs work for you. Some may just be easier and harder, or cheaper and more expensive than others.
HubSpot
HubSpot is hands down the most user-friendly CRM out there. It’s a great resource to manage all of your content marketing initiatives, from creation to distribution.
If you don’t have an easy way to store content, you can use HubSpot’s file management system to house your PDFs and Infographics. You’re also able to automate the distribution of these assets through workflows.
The main drawback that may be a barrier for companies is the high price point. To get the most out of HubSpot, you really should be using the professional marketing hub, which starts at $800 per month.
While this is a significant investment to make, it’s worth it with the time it will save your business. If you’re not at the point where you’re generating enough revenue to justify HubSpot’s professional plan, you can start with the free plan to see how it works and start managing your contacts.
The best part about HubSpot is that you can track user activity and actions based on what pages they go to on your website, which emails they interact with, and more. This powers your content marketing because you can deliver the right content at the right time to your audience.
You can even separate your most engaged users (those who download the most resources) and have your sales team follow up with them more aggressively since they are the most interested in your product.
Enterprise CRMs (Pardot, Marketo, and Salesforce)
Many companies will opt for a more robust CRM to manage their content marketing and automation efforts. For the most part, these companies might be drawn to Pardot, Marketo, and Salesforce. In our experience, these software products can get the job done at the end of the day, but compared to HubSpot, it takes a much longer time. The main reason for this is the amount of support and less intuitive UX of these platforms.
Other CRM Options
Just in case you’re not ready to spend hundreds of dollars a month, there are smaller, more affordable CRMs.
Zoho One and Benchmark One (formerly Hatchbuck) are two more affordable options with much of the same features as Hubspot.
One of the sacrifices you may run into with these and other cheaper CRMs is integration and support. Since you pay less for these CRMs, they won’t have as many help articles or live support as the more prominent names. You’ll also find yourself using Zapier or creating custom integrations to get multiple systems to talk to each other.
Using Email Marketing Software to manage your Content Marketing
We’ve mentioned a few CRMs you can use, but you might not need to make the jump into a complete CRM just yet. If that’s the case, you can utilize email marketing software instead to distribute your content.
Mailchimp, Active Campaign, and Benchmark Email are great EMSs that can help you accomplish this goal. You’ll still want to make sure that you’re able to automate the delivery of your content. For that reason, you want to choose the right plan that offers email automation rather than just one-off email sending.
What information should you capture in content marketing?
When it comes to asking people to give their private data for your content, you should be conscious of what information you’re asking for. If you’re giving away a free eBook, don’t ask for their street address and social security number (not that you’d ever ask for that last one).
The goal is to capture your prospect’s information using progressive profiling. This means that you ask for a little bit of information, like name and email and slowly ask for additional information later after they’ve shown other intent. You might ask for information like “what is your company name” after they’ve asked to download a second eBook, for example. Having a good CRM in place will help you to know when to not ask for information that you already have in place. Even better, CRMs like HubSpot have progressive profiling built in so that the form will automatically ask for a new field of information if another one is known.
Be sure to keep your forms short. Even if you know, you’ll need more information to better segment your audience. It’s better to get users into your CRM and funnel first to reduce the friction of entry. You can always ask for more information later when they show other engagement and intent.
Always be sure that you’re presenting your privacy policy to your users, that you’re complying with GDPR, and that you offer a double opt-in to ensure your audience wants to receive communication from you.
Advertising Content Marketing Initiatives
Content advertising works well when you promote to a broader audience that is interested in your topic. This means that you want to build your audience over time rather than buying a list of people who might be interested in your content.
Lead Generation Ads
One of our favorite techniques for creating an audience is through lead generation ads on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Google. These advertisements make it very easy for the end-user to submit their information to receive your content since it pulls them from their social profile. This means they don’t have to type in any information.
This is great in theory, but it does make it a little too easy to opt-in. Sometimes users will sign up and not remember they did because it was so easy. As always, be sure you have your double opt-in ready so you don’t come off as spam in their inbox.
Using your website to display content
Your website is the center of your content marketing initiatives because it helps guide users to the right place.
All businesses have different amounts of traffic they’re driving to their website. If you don’t have a lot of traffic just yet, you can focus on long-form blog content to bring in more traffic, though this will take a long time to do.
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Suppose you want to drive a lot of traffic in a shorter time. In that case, you can purchase traffic through advertising with OutBrain and Taboola for native content or Google Display and Facebook for more traditional display.
So when you start generating this traffic, how do you use your website to get users to opt into your content download? Let’s say you are a divorce attorney and have an eBook about Prenups. You’ll want to have an offer to download this eBook on your “Ultimate Guide to Prenups” pillar page on your website. You can use pop-ups and embedded forms to capture your users’ information while they are on your website and browsing a specific topic.
Whether the user came from organic or paid, you want to make sure that the user doesn’t leave your website having never had the chance to enter your funnel. An exit pop-up is excellent to get that user into your funnel so you can continue to nurture them and see if they’re a fit for your company.
Embedded forms are also a great way to make your content offer as users scroll down and engage with your article.
The key is to offer content that makes sense to the user at the moment, so it feels seamless to them.
Measuring Your Success
How to measure if content marketing is working
Content marketing can be challenging to understand which moving part is contributing to your bottom line.
A CRM like Hubspot is essential to understanding what is working and what isn’t. The contact timeline is a great way to see at a glance how prospects engaged with your company and how they ultimately became a customer. With content marketing, you’re more likely to see many prospects in your CRM, thanks to your content downloads.
What you’ll want to measure is what percentage of these prospects ultimately become customers. You can go one step further and measure how many prospects that opt-in end up having a consultation call with your company. This should be a higher percentage, and you can see where your drop-off might lie.
The only wrong way to measure your content marketing is not to measure it at all! Make sure you’re reporting on how many opt-ins you get each month, where they’re coming from, and whether or not these opt-ins are generating revenue for your company. You can do this with automation via Supermetrics
Where to go from here
You may not see the direct business right away if you’ve just launched your content marketing initiatives.
Remember: you’re creating demand and building your brand assets, which takes a long time!
Traditional marketing has changed a lot over the years, and customers are more in control of their destiny than ever. They can choose from thousands of different companies, and the best way to stand out is to create meaningful content and engage them at the right time.
Your business has a story to tell and a ton to talk about.
Start today by creating content and distributing it to your target audience.
