
“To be successful at inbound marketing, you have to think and act like a publisher.” This quote is essentially unattributable, as just about every inbound marketing expert has said it at one time or another.
Content is the attraction device that brings prospects to your website where they’ll learn more about you, your knowledge and your capabilities; it’s how prospects develop confidence in your ability to solve their problems. Content is everything you publish: web content, blog posts and more advanced content offers like guides, ebooks, worksheets, and videos.
For search engines and for your best prospects, that content has to be published frequently and with the goal of providing insights on topics that are of interest to your prospects.
Frequency is sort of a relative thing: for some companies blogging twice a week might suffice. In others, daily blogging is a must. It all depends on your product and your prospects, though generally speaking “more is better.” In fact, 82% of marketers who blog daily acquired a customer using their blog, compared to 57% of marketers who blog monthly (HubSpot, State of Inbound).
Here’s an example of what can happen (or, really, what will happen) when you don’t publish regularly and with discipline:
A professional service firm published their first set of downloadable content offers—a tipsheet, a guide and a checklist—about a year ago. The content offers did well; all three had good conversion rates (the percentage of viewers who provided their contact information in exchange for the content) and resulted in highly qualified leads for the sales team to reach out to. After a few months, though, those offers became stale and the number of form submissions fell sharply. Today those same content offers are still on the company’s website, repeatedly being promoted to the same list of contacts…and guess what? The company’s inbound marketing program has failed.
This company’s journey into inbound started off really well. A lot of important work was done on the front end: the company’s customers were interviewed to identify their needs and topics of interest, a positioning was developed, detailed prospect personas created, goals were set, and message strategy and editorial calendar created…all of which are key to inbound success. But the most critical aspect of inbound—content creation—fell by the wayside because there was no real commitment to it. Even blog post frequency dropped off significantly after the first few were published.
This example should put a little fear into anyone doing or considering inbound marketing. It takes commitment and a dedicated marketing team. Fortunately, there are very straightforward ways to ensure success:
First, develop the editorial calendar. This assumes that you’ve done all the work prior to this point to ensure your editorial is aligned with your prospects’ needs. That work includes the things mentioned above:
Once that foundational work is done you’re ready to create the editorial calendar. An editorial calendar is a detailed schedule of topics, and all the related promotion that will make prospects aware of your blogs and content. Here’s a basic template to show format and elements:
This template outlines:
These all need to be determined well in advance (6 months at least) so there’s no last-minute scramble to come up with something to write about. Without a set-in-stone calendar outlining every blog, every email and every social media post, effort will become sloppy and, before you know it, frequency is down, quality is lacking, emails are going out less often…and pretty soon you’re that company we referred to earlier.
Managing your content creation and publication takes an actionable editorial calendar, and someone on your team who can get people pumped up, put the smack down when needed, and who has little sympathy for excuses. Without a taskmaster who can keep everyone and all the moving parts in order, your inbound results will be less than stellar.
If the company mentioned above had stuck to their editorial calendar, would their efforts have been successful? Yes, though certainly an inbound approach is dependent on a number of factors, each of which influences success. Every company considering inbound marketing should first understand that it will not work if all the pieces aren’t in place and all the work that needs to happen gets done, and done well. Inbound requires discipline, intelligence, insight and foresight. If your team isn’t ready to take on all the responsibility, talk to an experienced inbound marketing team. They know from experience what it takes to be successful.
Topics: Content Marketing