5 Tips for writing quality content for your Inbound Marketing strategy

Inbound Marketing is all about knowing your consumer and engaging with him or her through quality content. This means the content should be relevant and successful; it should, ultimately, achieve a goal such as drive more traffic or increase conversions.

For many, creating content might sound like an easy task, but creating quality content involves lots of creative, logical, and strategical thinking and thus, can be very time-consuming. Content marketing is one of the most important elements for the success of the Inbound Marketing Methodology, so learning to create great quality content is key. Here are five tips to help you master the creation of quality content for your business.

Make Your Content Consumer-Centric

Before creating content, make sure you understand your buyer persona, in other words, you should have a clear comprehension of your target client prototype. With this representation in mind, you can tailor your content accordingly. Your content should be of value to your customers or prospects, meaning it should be knowledgeable and educational. Do sufficient research to know what are your buyer persona's motivations, conflicts, and desires and show them, through your content, how what you have to offer can help them resolve their challenges or make their daily tasks easier.

>> Importance of Content Marketing in the Retail Industry <<

Having said all this, it is essential for you to also know where in the buyer’s journey your target audience is. You should create content for people in all steps of the buyer’s journey, meaning for people who are in the awareness stage and are just beginning to sip their toes in your business and getting to know your products or services, for people in the consideration stage who are showing increasing interest in your content and for people who are about ready to make a purchase and are in the decision stage. Content for each of these types of consumers will be different because each type of consumer will have different motivations and behavioral patterns depending on the stage they are in.

Create Content Clusters

Content creation may get a bit messy if you are not organized. Choose a broad, general yet important topic and link various subtopics to it. Arranging your content into these topic groups or clusters will not only make the content creation process easier for the one creating the content but it will also be clearer for your audience to dive into each essential element you create if everything is properly linked and the connections between topics and subtopics make sense.

Create Strong Headlines

Headlines are one of the most important lead conversions tools  of your content because they are the only chance you have to catch your target audience's attention. With the infinite amount of data, links, and pages available on the internet, getting a potential customer to choose to look at your webpage is not easy. Your headline needs to hook the reader while at the same time giving him or her a good idea of what your blog, video or article is going to be about. This latter bases on the fact that if you mislead the reader into thinking your content will be about something it is not or if you are vague, it’s likely the person will leave your page as soon as he or she starts reading. Not only is it not useful for you to have a click that will not convert to a lead, but it can be damaging is you are using SEA (Search Engine Ads) since you pay per click.

Leverage on useful tools

Don’t limit yourself to using one piece of content on itself. What does that mean? Use each piece of content as a passageway to another. Take a blog post, for example. Use internal and external links to other blogs, landing pages or pillar pages and insert powerful CTAs (calls to action) after the first paragraphs and at the end of your blog post. HubSpot has these and many other efficient tools that help you optimize and exploit your content so you can benefit as much as possible from each piece you create.

Mingle With Media and Media Channels

There are plenty of media, especially social media that you can use to create your content. Some of the most popular are: blogs, podcasts, infographics, webinars, ebooks, guides among others. Experiment with different types of media and control which ones work best for your target audience. If one gives you better results, don’t stop using the other ones, simply focus most of your content using that media. The same applies to media channels. Do not post only on Facebook, for example. Analyze which media channels give you the most leads or have the most clicks and focus on that one without limiting to using only that one. You should aim to create new content periodically and consistently, but sometimes there is not enough time to brainstorm and create new content from scratch. A very clever way to post more content in a short time is to recycle content. This means you can use excerpts from a blog post on an ebook or update old content and change your headlines to give your pieces a fresher feel.