C is for Content.

C is for Content.

Learn how to strengthen your Inbound strategy with content marketing and meet your buyer on the buyer funnel stage they are at.

What is content marketing?

Content marketing is a strategic marketing approach, focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain and clearly defined audience and drive profitable customer action.

Marketing is impossible without great content.

• Search engines reward businesses that publish quality, consistent content. 
• Successful PPC campaigns have great content behind the ads. 
• The best email campaigns use fantastic content in the email to encourage clicks and conversions. 
• Good content is key to driving inbound traffic and leads. 
• The best social channels utilize great content to drive engagement. 
• Successful PR strategies address issues readers care about, not their business.

“81% of marketers view content as a core business strategy” (CMI)

What is the difference between inbound marketing and content marketing?

In today’s marketing landscape, there are many different strategies brands can adopt. From inbound marketing to content marketing to account-based marketing, results marketing, agile marketing, influencer marketing and much, much more. To understand which is right for your business, and to know how much of each you should use, you must understand the differences, how they fit together and how they work together to deliver the results you need to grow your company. 

But what’s really the difference between inbound and content marketing? 

The simplest explanation is always the best: inbound marketing provides a complete methodology that helps companies adjust their marketing to better fit the way today’s buyers are shopping for products and services. Your prospects don’t want to be sold to – particularly if they’re not ready to buy. Inbound marketing includes tactics that help companies get found when people are looking for their product or service, as opposed to attempting to interrupt people who are not yet looking for what you’re selling.

Inbound marketing provides a systematic approach to turning those anonymous visitors into leads and helps nurture those leads until they become sales-ready. All along the way, inbound marketing offers real-time data and insights that can be used to improve performance and results continuously 

How to use content marketing as a part of your inbound marketing strategy 

As discussed above, inbound marketing is about drawing your customers to you, rather than pushing your brand outwards. This means using a combination of channels – content marketing, SEO and social media in creative ways, to drive traffic to your business through earned and owned channels. 

It’s also important to consider your customer journey (or sales funnel) when utilizing content marketing as part of your inbound marketing strategy. There’s no point in using case studies to try and attract customers who don’t even understand their need for your prospect or service. One of the best tactics to use is to give away something for free that is directly related to your business. 

Create content that meets your buyer at the stage of the funnel they are at.

ZYM and the top of the funnel

ZYM CRM, marketing, and sales platform can help you deploy these tactics as part of your inbound strategy – here is an example of ZYM’s landing page templates, where you can easily use a landing page template from ZYM’s extensive library of templates to capture leads or build your own from scratch.

Middle of the funnel examples include: 

Blogs. Ensure that you blog once or twice a week about topics that your prospects will be searching for information on. Focus on a few keywords that are valuable and create specific blogs that include these keywords specifically. Guests are also a powerful piece of content that can help generate even more brand awareness. Becoming a guest poster on another blog with engaged readers is also a great way to create backlinks. 

Host a webinar. Providing a free webinar or training session that encourages a customer to learn in real-time is fantastic, as it lets your prospect see your face and understand your personality. 

ZYM and the middle of the funnel

Plan, schedule and store all your rockstar blog content from ZYM, adding keywords to get found online! Become an expert at inbound on ZYM.

Bottom of the funnel examples include

Case studies and testimonials from current clients. This type of content is a powerful way to gain peer-to-peer endorsement and shows your product or service in action and how people have benefitted. 

Review sites such as Trip Advisor, G2 Crowd, or Trustpilot are fantastic places to set up a profile for your business and are a great resource to pull testimonials from for your social and website

Pricing comparisons are another great way to compare your product or service directly against your competitors and help do the comparison research for your prospects. 

The symbolic ‘funnel’ operates like a funnel in real life, except instead of liquids we have prospects inside the funnel, and several stages to filter out potential prospects. These stages help determine the stage a prospect is within their buyer journey. By corresponding a prospect’s position to a particular stage, marketers can use the funnel to determine what content to use to push these leads down the funnel.

Now you know more about meeting your buyer on their journey with content, you can start planning your content strategy on ZYM and build great content for the stages of your buyer funnel. 

Want to find out more about how Zym works? Click here to view the video tour.