It is not the same, but what is true is that content marketing is one of the fundamental pieces of any inbound strategy.
Content marketing works on its own, and we have proven it to be successful on many occasions. But when it is part of an inbound marketing strategy, it must be approached differently, since it is subordinated to the general objectives of the campaign.
The goal of inbound is to attract visitors to our website , convert them into contacts, nurture them , select them , transform them into clients and, finally, into prescribers of our brand.
inbound marketing process
Throughout this process, it is the content that we will use to latvia business email list/ attract, convert, nurture, select and retain.
This forces us to align each content to the stage of the purchasing cycle of our buyer persona .
If we take into account that we can basically make two groups of types of content...
Contents to obtain data from our buyer persona that we call Content Pillars .
Content to attract traffic , which are generally blog posts that we share on social networks, through email marketing, etc.
...we must organize the work of preparing these contents based on this simple scheme:
EXPLORATION CONSIDERATION DECISION
Pillars of Content Content Pillar 1 Content Pillar 2 Content Pillar 3
Content to attract traffic post 1 post 2 post 3
post 4 post 5 post 6
post 7 post 8 post 9
In which we see that each of the phases of the purchase cycle has its corresponding Content Pillar and its posts associated with it.
We want to clarify that when we talk about Content Pillars we are not necessarily talking about something (ebook, video, course...) that is "downloaded" in exchange for some data, but we also understand Content Pillars to be an online course, virtual advice in real time, an invitation to an event...
It is very important to make a list of the topics that we can use to solve problems for our potential clients in each of their phases – exploration, consideration and decision – in order to organize a publication calendar that, over time, is always offering answers to our buyer persona regardless of the purchase cycle they are in.
In other words, we should not first publish all the content to attract traffic corresponding to the exploration stage, then all the consideration stage and finally the decision stage. Instead, the ideal is to simultaneously publish content from all three stages in order to capture the attention of our buyer persona regardless of the phase of the cycle they are in.
Although we will discuss in depth in future posts how to organize content marketing in an inbound strategy, we must basically keep the following in mind:
Content Pillars.
These are the contents that we are going to offer in exchange for a potential client's data. We advise you to ask yourself these questions before developing them:
What is my ideal prospect (buyer persona) concerned about at this stage?
What type of content should I offer my buyer persona so that they are willing to provide me with the data I need to begin selecting leads?
What kind of content do I think is indicative of whether that person might be of interest to me as a client? Be careful with this last question, which, as we will see in the next few days, is the most important one.
