Inbound Content Strategy: Do I Need a Content Strategy?

What is a Content Strategy? Why Do You Need One?

– If you are asking the question “Do I need a content strategy?”, the answer is a definitive “Yes”.

Content is what drives Inbound Marketing. It is what your website and blog visitors read and digest. It is what search engines crawl to decide your website rankings.

To make the most of your Inbound Marketing efforts, you need to put out consistent, high-quality content that addresses your target audience’s wants and needs. You do that with an Inbound Content Strategy.

Having an Inbound Content Strategy gives your marketing what it needs to thrive. It allows you to:

• Tie your content into your marketing and business goals. Whether you want to increase your visitor counts, improve your keyword rankings, or highlight a new product, your content strategy is what allows you to link your content to your goals.
• Stop wasting time and effort on creating unfocused content. Creating random content that has no links to your business or marketing goals is not a good use of your limited resources. That time is better used creating focused content or doing other business-related tasks.
• Focus your content on the best platforms. What are your best marketing channels? Some companies do better with blogging than social media. Others find that email marketing and downloads work. An Inbound Content Strategy allows you to focus on what works best for your business.
• Reuse and repurpose your content. Do not throw out your old content when you start implementing an Inbound Content Strategy. For example, if you have an eBook, you can turn that content into blog posts or social media shares. When it is part of your Inbound Content Strategy, you can do the same with any future content you create.
• Tie your content into what your customer wants to read, not what you want to write. This is critical for any Inbound Content Strategy. You need to focus your content on what your visitors are looking for. That is central to Inbound Marketing.
• Make all your content a part of your larger marketing strategy. You can use your content to reinforce the messages of your marketing campaigns. For example, you can time a series of blog posts that introduce a new product or service.
• Outline when content must be created and by whom. This is a key part of your Inbound Content Strategy. Your content generation needs to be constant and consistent. Your strategy needs an editorial calendar that outlines the who, what, when, where, why, and how of each piece of content you generate.
• Link your content creation efforts to visitor count and lead generation numbers. Monitor how many people read a particular piece of content. Using calls-to-action, you can see how many visitors converted to leads due to a particular piece of content. That is tangible proof of your content creation success.
• Make your SEO efforts more effective. When you know the content you will be generating, you can optimize it for both your readers and the search engine bots. It becomes a natural part of all your content generation.

Your Inbound Content Strategy maps out everything you and your team needs to know when it comes to creating and using content in your marketing efforts. Without one, your content creation efforts are random and unfocused. That is a waste of time, money, and effort that could be spent doing more useful tasks.

Take the time to create an Inbound Content Strategy and your marketing efforts will blossom as a result.

Marketing Matters Inbound?is an inbound marketing firm specializing in online conversions, content?strategy, call-to-action mapping and traditional media placement. Our experience in?B2B digital?marketing?and traditional media allows us to deliver results through a strategic media mix. We believe in?aligning and merging marketing and sales/operations for optimal return on your marketing investment.