Inbound marketing is different from the old ways of disruptive marketing (or outbound marketing). The reason is that instead of bashing the audience over the head with what you want to tell them, inbound marketing focuses on understanding what your audience needs as well as when the best time would be to give it to them.
6 Tips for Creating Great Inbound Marketing Content
1. Know Your Audience
You can’t get away with not understanding your audience when it comes to inbound marketing. Knowing your audience will help you to approach them with both the content and solutions they need at a time when they will be most receptive to it, which will give you better returns on your content creation efforts.
If you create content for an audience you don’t know and understand, you might as well be looking for a needle in a very big haystack, hoping that someone who sees your content will react positively to it. Instead, you should focus on getting to know your audience through research. Your research should cover aspects such as:
- Their likes and dislikes,
- What they need,
- How and where they interact, and
- What your competitors are doing for the audience.
This will give you valuable and time-saving insights to create content your audience will love.
Tip: Get to know your audience
2. Building Trust
Now that you know your audience, you’ll have a good grip not only on what makes them tick, but also about what will be likely to build trust for your brand. When you build trust with your audience, they will be more inclined to share your content and recommend your service or product to their loved ones, thereby reaching a wider audience and potential client pool.
Content that builds trust is authoritative, well-researched, relevant and updated regularly. Good, authoritative content gets shared and linked back too. All this serves to show Google that you are trustworthy and, as a result, will help you to climb the search engine rankings, leading to wider exposure and better brand reputation.
Tip: Earn trust with authoritative content
3. Don’t Fake It Because You Won’t Make It
Inbound marketing content relies on making connections with your audience through your online presence and, therefore, authenticity is the key to making lasting connections. It is easy to see through the spammy, fake interactions that try to force engagement with some scheme. Besides, most people don’t fall for it in the long run. The key is to balance professionalism with letting the human side of the business shine through. You can be real and fun and professional all at once, and that is something your audience will respond to.
Tip: Be real
4. Plan Ahead
The worst content plan is the one that doesn’t exist. If you don’t have a clear strategy or if you don’t plan out your content ahead, you’ll most likely end up with awful, half-baked ideas in your online presence. That is, if you actually get around to posting anything.
Creating batches of content at once will not only save valuable time, but it will also give you continuity throughout the messaging process. And, with Facebook and Instagram Creator Studio, as well as the scheduling functions on most blog platforms, you won’t have to manually post any of the content you’ve created.
Tip: Plan and schedule your content
5. Be Spontaneous
Yes, this goes against what we just said, but hear us out. Great content can be spontaneous and, therefore, you need to leave room for spontaneous moments that occur so you can benefit from those unexpected events. Adding some spontaneous content to your online presence can break up the monotony of perfectly planned out content. It will also go a long way in helping you to connect with your audience, especially on social media.
Uncomfortable with the idea of making spontaneous moments permanent? Post this kind of content to Instagram stories or Snapchat, and it will disappear from your feed in time. This option also leaves you with more room to experiment with new content and to gauge your audience’s reaction to something outside of your usual messaging.
Tip: Live in the momen
6. Experiment and Measure Results
Great inbound marketing content comes from experimenting with different types of content, different platforms and different approaches. Don’t be scared to test out new ideas and plans. They can pay off for your content strategy – if you remember to measure the results. While it is important to always measure the performance of your content, it is vital to measure results when you’re trying something new to understand how successful your efforts are and to adjust your strategy accordingly.
Tip: Test and measure
WSI OMS is a digital marketing firm specialising in search engine optimisation, website design, link building and PPC strategies. Contact us to find out more about our inbound marketing offerings.