Deep Persona Understanding
If inbound marketing is an exercise in making connections, you have to know what audience you want to connect with first. When we begin an engagement with a new client, we dedicate ourselves to learning and understanding our client’s customers and business before finalizing a strategy. This persona research phase is critical to understanding our intended audience and creating a strategy that speaks to their pain points.
Unearthing key insights will make the difference between creating content that nurtures and converts, and missing the mark at pivotal moments along your prospects’ buyer’s journey. Data points you should collect include your prospects’ interests, habits, challenges, goals, and basic demographics. We recommend utilizing different research methods such as 1:1 interviews and online deep dives to get a well-rounded view of your audience.
Tie Content Back to Your Overall Strategy
If research is the chassis of an inbound marketing campaign, a comprehensive content strategy is the engine that drives your ROI. At Beacons Point, we create long-term content strategies based on in-depth persona, keyword, competitor, and industry research.
Content without direction, though, can waste your team’s precious time and resources.
The best inbound campaigns should include a body of written, visual, and video content that serves the overarching campaign strategy. Having a web of content that supports and links to the central strategic core of your campaign will engage your intended audience at the right point in their buyer's journey.
At Beacons Point, we use the Topic Cluster model to structure content efforts for ourselves and our clients because it allows search engines to crawl and deduce the structure of our content easily.
Take a look at the topic cluster below for our “content planning” campaign. You can see our pillar page in the middle with green links to and from each supporting content piece created throughout the campaign’s life.
Engines will recognize a pillar page as the most authoritative piece of content for a high-value keyword because of comprehensive linking to and from the supporting content in the cluster.
The topic cluster model also provides our team with guideposts for content ideation. Every content idea proposed must tie back to a planned or developed “target topic,” ensuring our team and clients stay focused on the strategy.
Want to learn more about planning content? Check out our ultimate guide!
Subject Matter Expertise
So you’ve done your research, and built your buyer personas and content strategy. Now, it’s time to start producing your content.
If you’ve ever tried rallying your team to create and maintain a healthy stream of content for your company, you’re probably familiar with the headache it can cause. Oftentimes, the subject matter experts (SMEs) on your team may not have the bandwidth to sit and write that blog you tasked to them.
If you work in a highly complex industry, this can cause a serious bottleneck when your SMEs hold the technical knowledge to speak to your intended audience.
We often work with clients in highly technical niches with audiences that expect content that speaks to their level of expertise. Because we can’t be SMEs in every industry our clients serve, we take a journalistic approach to content creation. By interviewing our clients’ SMEs, we can capture their knowledge to build in-depth outlines and write well-informed content.
If you find yourself struggling to create content on your own or get help from your SMEs, we highly recommend utilizing content interviews. You will have less resistance from your team when you ask for an hour of their time to interview them versus asking them to dedicate three or more hours to write a blog from scratch.
Learn more: Want to start utilizing interviews in your content process but don’t know where to start? Check out our pre-recorded webinar to learn the 10 Do’s and Don’ts of Conducting Painless Interviews.
