Inbound Marketing Plan: How to Outline a Content Strategy

Content Strategy is Essential to an Inbound Marketing Plan

As more and more businesses begin to grasp that the traditional outbound marketing template of constantly trying to capture the attention of potential customers through advertising has given way to the much more effective process of building a compelling inbound marketing plan, a lot of questions quickly follow about how exactly to implement such a strategy.

The answer revolves around designing a process that organically delivers the type of information your prospective clients need in-order to inform their ultimate buying decision. Learning how to develop and deliver the type of content that forms the backbone of such a marketing approach is central to making it start working in your favor.

The Conceptual Outline

As with any comprehensive long term plan, the process begins by laying out the contours of what exactly you’re trying to achieve, and then filling in the details of precisely how you intend to implement it. And the driving force behind any effective inbound marketing plan rests on anticipating and meeting the buying public’s need for basic, reliable information to guide their process of self-education.

This boils down to determining what type of data do most people need during the different phases of such a process. With that in-mind, a generic content delivery program can be pictured as a feeding funnel, funneling information to those doing research with attention to the three principal phases of the buying process:

• top of the funnel? research begins at the broadest point and is aimed at attaining a generalized knowledge of the subject at hand
• middle of the funnel? this is when the researcher is now ready for product specific information, and the first point at which it is appropriate to introduce your brand to the information stream
• bottom?of the funnel? here is where the buyer is ready for detailed information on your specific product and how it will meet their particular need

The key to making each stage of this process smoothly lead to the next depends upon your ability to figure out the types of inquiries, concerns and obstacles impacting your customer’s thinking process.

The Action Plan

The two most important elements of a realistic inbound marketing plan are: who are you targeting and what do they need to know. Once you have determined these aspects of your strategy, the job becomes producing and presenting the content material to meet the desire in each phase of the sale funnel.

The key phases and substance of building your content delivery system should broadly include these steps:

• start at the end ? once you establish what product specific information you’ll present at the buying stage, determine what someone would need to know just before that in-order to arrive at that point
• build a timeline ? determine your publishing goals for a specific period of time
• develop specific delivery methods ? this is where you design content for different platforms; from blogs, to social media, ebooks, video, webinars, etc.
• create the schedule ? once you know what you want to say, in what order, and via which platform ? now it’s time to plan when each element will be released ? and where

This is the bird’s eye view of how exactly you can build a schematic outline of content presentation that will enable an inbound marketing plan to gain traction ? and produce observable results. The key is to integrate actionable substance with a perceptive understanding of your customer base so that you are authentically delivering what buyers actually need ? which an inbound marketing assessment can help you determine.

Marketing Matters Inbound?is an inbound marketing firm specializing in online conversions, content?strategy, PPC campaigns 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.