You need to create awareness and educate your prospects. Your salesperson is bugging you for relevant content as she drives opportunities through the pipeline. If you’re strapped on resources, here is a simple way you can get your content marketing started.
- Do a quarterly spreadsheet showing: what content is planned each quarter, which formats it will be in, who will create it, when each piece is due, how it will be distributed and how it will be used in the sales cycle. Here is an example from the Content Marketing Institute.
- What stage of the sales cycle is the content needed? To educate your prospects or nurture leads? Then plan for things like blog posts, an infographic, a slideshow, a quick video link, results of a survey, “how to” articles and guides or an industry article. During the active part of your sales cycle with a qualified prospect? Case study, whitepaper, webinar, solution comparison outline, demo.
- Keep buyer personas in mind for each content piece: influencer, decision-maker, user, etc. Tweak content as necessary to increase relevancy to that person. Click here for more insight on this.
- Note on size: Keep content short and highly relevant to your targets or it won’t be read. White paper, survey results: 1-2 pages. Case study: 1 page. Online video: “YouTube” length: 1-3 minutes max. Webinar presentation. 30 minutes max.
- Click here to see how you can repurpose or recycle each content piece for maximum impact, such as a blog post that can also be a how-to article download.
- Plan how you will distribute each content piece. Link on website, press release, guest blog post, provide link via email campaign to your opt-in list, etc. Then do your social media announcements as each piece is published. Twitter, LinkedIn status update, etc.
To dive deeper into these topics, the Content Marketing Institute’s post on 50 Questions Answered on Content Marketing is a great starting point.