Content marketing goes beyond stuffing your website with blog posts on industry topics. Like every other form of marketing, it’s made of several moving parts; and you hold these elements together with a plan or a content marketing strategy.

So what’s a content strategy, and why do you need it? Content strategy is a blueprint that outlines where you want to take your business with your content marketing efforts and how you plan to get there.

It is a process that guides your efforts in planning your content. It will contain details of your audience, content topics, distribution channels and many more.

It can’t be a mere coincidence that 66% of companies who said they succeeded in content marketing had a documented strategy. Below I have highlighted the elements of a successful content strategy and how to implement one.

What is Content Marketing?

Let’s get a working definition of content marketing before delving into the steps involved in creating a strategy for it. Content marketing is the use of valuable information to attract, nurture, convert and retain a specific audience. As noted earlier, you need a sound content plan to excel at this.

How to Create a Content Marketing Strategy

We have outlined a 13-step content strategy framework for you:

Discovery Phase

1. Outline your Objectives
2. Define your Target Audience
3. Analyze the Competition

Development Phase

1. Define Broad Topics
2. Create Topic Clusters
3. Content Mapping
4. Content Gap Analysis

Execution Phase

1. Create a Pillar Page
2. Create Subtopic Pages
3. Repurpose your Content into a Lead Magnet
4. Deconstruct and Repurpose your Assets to Strengthen the Pillar Page
5. Grow your Database
6. Start the Process Again

 

Discovery Phase

Step 1 – Outline your Objectives

The aim of all forms of marketing is to drive business growth. This also applies to content marketing. There has to be an end in mind, and your efforts need to contribute to the realization of specific business goals.

So how do you select content marketing goals that tie into your overall business objectives? Identify and track profitable customer actions.

These are actions that your content will encourage people to take which translate into potential or instant benefits for your business. They include subscriptions, downloads, views, calls for a demo, and landing page conversions.

After noting profitable customer actions you can drive through content marketing, set them as goals using the SMART framework. SMART goals are Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Time-bound.

Your goals should read like this: “increase the number of email subscribers by 100 each month,” or “improve the number of calls for a demo by 20% (from 5000 to 6000) by the end of the first quarter.” As you can see, these goals promise relevant contributions to business growth in some way.

Step 2 – Define your Target Audience

Your content is going to help you achieve your business objectives only if it serves your ideal customers. To make this happen, you need to define your buyer personas and tailor your content to meet their needs.

To learn more on how to define your ideal buyer personas, please check out our blog post here.

Once the personas are defined, expand the details you have about them to include their problems you can solve with content. This can be accomplished by moving beyond details like their age, gender, location and asking questions such as:

• What are their interests as it relates to your business?
• What problems does your product or service solve for them?
• What questions do they have about your product or service and its use?

There are many ways you can find answers to these questions. Some of these methods include conducting direct surveys, going on social media, visiting platforms like Quora and Reddit and using tools like Google Keyword Planner.

Step 3 – Analyze the Competition

Finding out what your successful competitors are doing is a great way to identify what works. By skimming their content topics, you can get an idea of what your audience wants.

What’s more, such analysis can reveal content gaps you can exploit. In other words, you can create content to provide the help your audience isn’t getting from your competitors.

You can extend your research to what types of media and channels your competitors often use. Doing this will help you identify the content your audience wants, how it wants it and where it wants it.

As regards “the where,” offering content on your website should be your main focus. But you can take parts of your content to places your audience is and direct people to your website for more valuable information. That way, you will have them on a publishing platform that is actually yours and that you have full control of.

Development Phase

Step 4 – Define Broad Topics

This step is to identify broad topics that you can create content on. These topics will depend on the insights you get from studying your audience and competitors.

You may want to narrow your focus when defining the broad topic to work on. However, this might not always be the case depending on your industry and business. For example, this article falls under the broad topic of content marketing but it has already been narrowed down from the extensive subject of digital marketing.

Download our free guidebook and learn how to develop a winning digital marketing strategy

Step 5 – Create Topic Clusters

Using the broad topics you’ve identified, you can then implement the topic cluster model. This is a content creation model that focuses on creating subtopics around one extensive topic.

The topic clusters are essentially branches of your broad topic. From my example above where the broad topic is content marketing, subtopics for my topic clusters could include:

• How Much Should I Spend? 5 Simple Steps to Structure a Digital Marketing Budget Plan (Actionable Guide)
• From 1895 and Beyond: John Deere’s “The Furrow” and Why Content Marketing is Still Relevant Today
• A simple 4-step Guide to Creating Effective Content

To find relevant subtopic ideas, conduct research using your main topic. Brainstorm and use tools to find long-tail keywords related to that broad subject.

Step 6 – Content Mapping

Content mapping is a technique used to create content that meets the needs of prospects and customers at different stages in their buyer journey. As HubSpot puts it, the process helps you create personalized content for your audience so you can deliver the right content, to the right people, at the right time.

Proper content mapping requires you to know two things. One is your buyer persona, and the other includes the different stages that people go through from when they identify a problem to when they make a purchase. You should then create content for every persona and phase of the buyer journey.

The question to ask is what is my target audience looking for at each stage of their journey? You should then outline topics that can satisfy those needs.

The point of this is to ensure that for every stage of your target audience’s buyer journey, you have content to guide people. This way, you’ll keep prospects within your sales funnel and increase your chances of converting and retaining them.

If you would like to learn more about how to map your content, check out our blog post here. To learn about how to map out your customer’s journey, check out our link here.

Step 7 – Content Gap Analysis

Content gap analysis is assessing existing content on a topic for holes that you can fill. Such gaps could be thoroughness, simplicity, recency or usability.

It could also mean cross-checking your audience’s needs with existing content to find unanswered questions. The idea is to see how you can improve on what’s already out there so you can provide unique value.

You can conduct a content gap analysis in several ways. One method is to look to your competitors and see what they already have on specific topics.

A simple Google search will reveal all you need to know. Look at the first page results for a particular keyword and assess the quality of the content available on that topic. Then note where you can step in to provide more value.

Another way to do this is to conduct a gap analysis of your content. Scrutinize all the elements of your blog posts and see how to optimize them.

Do you need more visuals? Can you further simplify the concepts? Or is there an aspect of that broad subject you totally left out? Having a solid knowledge of the needs of your audience will help in this process.

Execution Phase

Step 8 and 9 – Creating a Pillar Page and Subtopic Pages

This is the point where you use broad topics you’ve earlier identified to create what is called a pillar page. This page contains highly detailed information about a specific topic.

It’s structured such that visitors can find almost all the basic details regarding a subject on that page. But that’s not all. The pillar page will also act as the focal point for the subtopic blog posts you have created for your broad topic.

It will link to them, and they will link back to it. This ensures visitors can find information on related subjects easily and search engine crawlers can index your pages easily.

The pillar page is also a useful tool for identifying gaps in your topic cluster. If there are any specific subtopics that you have yet to write on, you can give an overview of them on the pillar page and blow them up later into stand-alone blog posts.

And finally, don’t forget to add a table of contents and back to top button for easy navigation.

To learn more about creating pillar pages and topic clusters, check out our blog post here.

Step 10 – Repurposing your Content into a Lead Magnet

A lead magnet is any valuable material you offer prospects in exchange for their contact or to encourage them to take a profitable action.

Putting together a material good enough to serve as an incentive is usually tasking. However, this can be easily achieved by going through your existing content and repurposing it.

Find one of the major pain points your audience has and build your lead magnet around it. Begin by identifying assets that are on your blog which you can use in creating the material.

Then decide what form the lead magnet would take – would it be an eBook, a whitepaper, a video, a report or a checklist? This would mostly be decided by your audience’s preferences and the type of information you want to share.

To maximize the conversion rate, it is important to create lead magnets based on which stage of the digital marketing funnel your buyers are at. To learn more, you may check out our blog post here. 

When repurposing your content, you will likely need to do some editing and make the information more suited to the format you have chosen.

Step 11 – Deconstruct and Repurpose your Assets to Strengthen the Pillar Page

Now you can break up the entire set up and see how you can move things around to provide more value on your pillar page. The idea is to keep optimizing this page to make it as attractive as possible to search engine crawlers and users alike. Some examples of how this can be done include having more visuals on the page, fine-tuning your headings and changing your content from text to video format.

Step 12 – Grow your Database

The idea is to begin by ensuring that you direct consistent traffic to your website. To do this, you would also need valuable content and search engine optimization measures.

It is also vital to continue to produce quality content to keep your audience engaged. You might also have to promote your blog on social media.

Once these structures are in place, traffic to your website should increase. As this happens, your lead magnet should be on hand to hook your visitors to grow your database.

Check out our blog post on how to develop a SEO content strategy and drive targeted traffic to your website.

Step 13 – Start the Process Again

Your content strategy is a plan, no doubt. However, as you might have already noticed, some of its parts are dynamic and will require reviews as you go along.

Your first plan will help you begin the journey. Then as you progress, you’ll need to measure results and make adjustments as you deem fit.

One area that could require constant review is the definition of your buyer persona. Having begun by targeting a particular segment of your market with your content, you can expand your reach in two ways.

One method would be to niche down. In this case, say your initial buyer persona was for small businesses in your region. By niching down, you can build a new persona for small marketing firms or small retail stores and look to create custom content for them.

Your second option would be to explore a totally different market segment. From small businesses, you could move to larger ones and create content for them too.

You must not use a one-size-fits-all strategy when trying to extend your content marketing reach. Doing so would only limit your results.

Final Words

Creating an effective content strategy is a rigorous process. At the same time, delving into content marketing without a sound plan will greatly diminish the benefits from your efforts.

Hopefully, this article will give you a foundation on how to develop a solid strategy to ensure that your content marketing will help you to achieve your business objectives.

What are some of the challenges you face when developing a content marketing strategy? Please feel free to share your thoughts in the comment section below.

 

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Other Related Blog Posts:

• How to Use Content Distribution Channels to Amplify Your Digital Marketing Efforts
• How To Create A Buyer Persona In 4 Simple Steps
• How to Complete a Competitive Analysis and Stay Ahead of Competition
• 18 Lead Magnet Ideas To Help You Convert Leads for Every Stage of your Digital Marketing Funnel
• 10 Proven Ways to Drive Targeted Traffic to Your Website
• 7 Simple Steps to Setting Up a SEO Content Marketing Strategy
• Creating Effective Customer Journey Maps: A 4 Step Guide
• Pillar Pages & Topic Clusters: The Next Revolution of SEO

Converting prospective customers is a lengthy, intricate process that requires different kinds of persuasion tools at each stage of the buyer’s journey. The process begins with collecting leads and the more leads you can get, the higher the chances of conversion. 

Lead magnets are opt-in strategies that start a conversation between you and your potential customer. You may consider them ethical “bribes” to get a prospect’s contact details and opening the door for possible further interaction. Therefore, making a lead magnet is now one of the top marketing skills. 

But how do you make a lead magnet that converts?

For maximum results, lead magnet ideas must have the following key features:

1. Highly Specific
2. Give A Promise
3. Speak to A Known Desire or Problem
4. Immediate Gratification
5. Shifts the Relationship
6. High Perceived Value
7. High Actual Value

Below is a more detailed description of these key features:

1. Highly Specific

Lead magnets must have a pinpoint focus. Generic lead magnet ideas often attract irrelevant leads to your business. Targeting is an extremely crucial aspect when making a lead magnet. The most effective lead magnet ideas are clear, direct, and highly specific. For instance; “how to grow your sales.”

On the same note, different lead magnet ideas will only work at different stages of your sales funnel. For instance, a free trial access to your product or service may deliver better results further along the buyer’s journey. A mini e-book or guide, on the other hand, might work better at the early stages of the buyer’s journey. 

Your lead magnets should specifically target your desired audience. For instance, if you are targeting more advanced customers, you would not want to have a lead magnet that contains tips for beginners. It may attract some leads but they will barely interact with your content.

2. Give A Promise

Apart from specificity, an effective lead magnet always carries a promise or a clear end result. For instance, “double your conversion rates in less than 30 days.” It is this specific promise that instantly capture their attention. 

Most of your leads will most likely be casually browsing the internet or search engines when they come across your lead magnet. Therefore, it must grab their attention right away and show a promise of value without making them read through long paragraphs or lengthy videos. Your lead magnet must be instantly obvious to lure them to click on it.

3. Speak to a Known Desire or Problem

Your lead magnet should be incredibly helpful at any stage of the sales funnel. It should address a specific pain point or solve a known problem that your prospective client may be experiencing. Always create a lead magnet that provides a specific solution to a specific problem with the least amount of effort on their part. For instance; “the 25-word email that will instantly get you more clients.”

In general, prospective clients appreciate the real value from you helping them find solutions to their problems. To maximize results, you may, in addition to leading them to the solutions, also put a new spin to it by showing them a fresh perspective on how they should solve their problem.

4. Immediate Gratification

The most effective lead magnet ideas provide real results both immediately and over the long term. However, Lead magnet ideas that provide immediate gratification (results), or the ones that instantly solve prospects’ problems or helps them accomplish a certain goal, tend to attract engagement and action a lot quicker. 

On the other hand, always ensure your content is delivered immediately after they’ve signed up and avoid keeping your leads waiting before you start delivering the content. Let them get the content as soon they opt-in or hit the download button.

5. Shifts the Relationship

The best lead magnets immediately demonstrate expertise and authority. They should build your own credibility so that prospective customers can begin to consider your business as a solution for their problems. All your lead magnets should always be created with the intention of drawing your prospects further into the funnel at all times.

6. High Perceived Value

Your lead magnet needs to be of real perceived value to your prospective customers. It’s important to state the value of your lead magnet so that your prospects can immediately see how it would help their objectives. Even though they are free, your lead magnets must enable your prospects to achieve the desired results. If they are impressed with your free content, chances are that they would be willing to sign up for your paid products.

Your lead magnets should also engage your prospects logically, which should lead to solving their problem. This, in effect, becomes a step in their overall journey and you become the right person to help them with the rest of the way. Your lead magnet becomes a progressive step and another stage of your relationship in working together to solve the rest of their problems and potentially open up their eyes to other areas they may need help to achieve their ultimate goals.

7. High Actual Value

Most lead magnet ideas have a problem-based approach. The best lead magnets are the ones that relate to real problems your prospects are experiencing. And this does not mean something or a set strategies they’ve seen many times before. You’ll have to provide something unexpected, surprising, or one your competitors are not currently providing. 

Potential customers no longer just consume content for the sake of it. They want something they can interact with or something with practical application in their life. Always provide lead magnets they can practically implement like trials, quizzes, assessments, and tools they can use in their everyday lives or business operations.

Conclusion:

Whichever lead magnet you decide to use, always test it out. What works for one business and its customers may not work for another. Always A/B test you lead magnets to find out which ones work best.

For better conversion rates, always lay the foundation for your lead magnet. You can do this by closing with a question, a CTA (call to action), or an irresistible offer to keep the conversation going. An easy, actionable step will make your prospects feel like they’ve received value from your lead magnet.

If you would like to learn more about how to create effective lead magnets, click here to check out our blog post on lead magnets ideas for every stage of the digital marketing funnel.

 

What is your experience with building effective lead magnets? Please feel free to share your thoughts in the comment section below.

Enjoy this article? Subscribe to get similar articles delivered to your inbox and don’t forget to share it with your friends.

Other Related Blog Posts:

• 18 Lead Magnet Ideas To Help You Convert Leads for Every Stage of your Digital Marketing Funnel

Here’s something that every business can relate to: the people who show interest in their products or services seem to be more than those who eventually buy. These seeming window shoppers get your hopes up by lingering on your website, reading blog posts, and viewing product pages.

The clock keeps ticking while you wait for your new leads to finally make the purchase but it looks like that moment may never come. Don’t give up yet. There’s a good reason why this is happening and a way to increase the number of conversions.

According to Marketo, half of the leads in your sales funnel are not ready to make a purchase! You see, those leads who are yet to convert aren’t trying to raise and dash your hopes.

They are probably still considering their options or gathering information. So what do you do with these people who appear to be stalling?

You have two choices.

One is to let them be and hope they one day decide to buy from you. The second is to build a relationship with them and find a way to steer them towards making a buying decision.

It’s obvious that the latter is the better option, and a summary of what lead nurturing entails.

What is Lead Nurturing?

Lead nurturing is the process of answering your prospects’ questions that are related to your product or service at various stages of their buyer’s journey.

The point of lead nurturing is to create and develop relationships. There are a few reasons why leads might not be ready to make a purchase. Specific objections could exist in their minds, they could be uncertain whether you are the best option to solve their issues or at the initial part of the sales cycle, they could even be unaware that your products or services can solve their problems. 

As a savvy business, you should aim to remove objections in your leads’ minds or showcase your product’s value to ensure that your prospects choose your business when they are set to make a purchase. To achieve either of these goals, you’ll need to be in regular contact with your prospects. There’s no better tool for staying in touch with your leads and meeting their needs than tailored content.

We’ll delve into the place of content in lead nurturing later in this article. But for now, let’s answer that nagging question that’s on your mind.

Why is Lead Nurturing Important?

Good question! We’ll let statistics do some of the talking.

• 96% of visitors to your website are not ready buyers (Marketo)
• About 80% of new leads never make a purchase (MarketingSherpa)
• Nurtured leads make 47% more purchases than non-nurtured leads (Invesp)
• Well nurtured leads produce a 20% increase in sales opportunities (DemandGen)
• Lead nurturing creates 50% more purchase-ready leads at a 33% lower cost (Forrester Research)
• 74% of businesses affirm that converting leads to buyers is their top priority (Hubspot)
• 53% of businesses claim that converting their leads is difficult.  (Ascend2)

Numbers are cold, hard facts. But here are some additional points you can use to gain more support for lead nurturing:

It Helps You to Maintain Communication with Your Leads

It shouldn’t be surprising that people are more likely to opt for businesses that have embedded themselves in their lives. It’s just similar to how you are more likely to help a friend who has always stayed in touch than one who calls out of the blue asking for a favour. Effective lead nurturing makes your business that friend that stays in touch and therefore will be top of mind when your prospect is ready to make that purchase. 

It Offers Useful Audience Insights

Lead nurturing fosters communication, and effective communication is a two-way thing. So as you reach out to leads with relevant content, ideally, they are to respond.

These responses will range from email replies to social media comments or likes. By engaging with your prospects, you build rapport with them. Additionally, these interactions can also reveal insights you can apply to convert more leads in the future. 

For instance, from the data collected through various lead nurturing campaigns, you will discover how your prospects would like to engage with you. Also, running polls and surveys can give you an idea of what’s going in your leads’ minds and how to answer their most pressing questions.

It Establishes Your Business as an Authority in Your Industry

Your prospects want to be sure they will be getting good value for their money by choosing your solution ahead of your competitors’. Posing as an expert in your industry is one of the best ways of convincing them of your product’s superiority. 

By using strategically crafted content that addresses specific pain points during the lead nurturing process, you will heighten your prospects’ confidence in your expertise. They will perceive you as one who is in touch with their needs, goals and fears. This will ultimately make them trust your product’s ability to meet their needs.

What is a Sales Funnel and a Buyers Journey?

You use lead nurturing to move prospects down your sales funnel and through their buyers’ journey. As such, your effective use of lead nurturing depends on your understanding of these two contexts in which it is applied. So what is a sales funnel and a buyer’s journey?

Sales Funnel

A sales funnel refers to the steps you take leads through right from when they contact your business till they become paying customers. It includes a set of marketing and sales actions you apply to get leads, convert them to and retain as customers. 

Think of the sales funnel as an actual funnel. The top is wide and accommodates many leads. Then as you establish a relationship with them, the qualified leads trickle down the funnel till they come out of the other end as customers. 

The sales funnel is divided into several stages, representing the actions you need to take to ensure that you move your leads closer to a purchase.

Stages of a Sales Funnel

There are five stages of a sales funnel, namely: attract, engage, capture, nurture, and convert.

Attract and engage – Top of the Funnel

Capture and Nurture – Middle of the Funnel

Convert – Bottom of the Funnel

Attract

Here is the point where you try to get your business in front of your audience. You want people to know you exist and that you offer something valuable. To drive the most attention and impact, you want to be loud, catchy and remarkable. 

Your channels for attracting the right eyeballs include superb content marketing, search engine optimization, social media management and paid ads. In using these channels, focus on speaking directly to your audience in their language. Remember, the goal is to get them to look in your direction. Also, be value-driven. Your content needs to be relevant and helpful.

Engage 

This stage requires you to kick your publicity efforts up a notch. You aren’t just targeting awareness alone; you also want to drive conversations and interactions with your audience. You’ll need to be consistent and focused on fostering two-way communication.

Capture

Now you’re moving your leads to the middle of your sales funnel. You need to be more strategic with your content in this phase because you want more than social media responses and return website visitors.

Your goal should be to get your leads’ contact details. To do that, you’ll have to offer them an irresistible incentive in exchange for this information. It’s generally called a lead magnet.

The details you’re looking to get will be information you can use in qualifying each lead with their email addresses. You can also segment these leads through different content types and channels with the use of various lead magnets.

You’re gunning for your prospects’ contact to create a more personal relationship with them and craft messages that are better tailored to their needs. They have also given you permission to contact them, which is a big step in the lead nurturing process.

Nurture

With relevant insights at your disposal, you move into nurturing your qualified leads. Now you know who your prospects are and what they want. The data they provided as you led them through the other stages can help you create personalized messages.

To develop personalized messages, you’ll need to segment your qualified leads based on their different traits. Once this is done, you can begin to send out targeted messages with a specific tone and voice to address specific issues that your target audience may have. 

Your marketing messages can involve helpful content connected to your niche, answers to questions about your product and general content that demonstrates your solution’s value.

Convert

Leads at this stage are usually ready buyers. As such, your content should be very compelling.

Your goal should be to ensure your leads choose you above your competitors. Product samples, demos and free trials will come in handy.

You’re moving beyond mere words now to helping your prospects have a feel of what it’s like to be a consumer of your products and services. Other conversion-focused materials include customer testimonials and data-driven success stories would also help with this process.

The Buyer’s Journey

The buyer’s journey is closely related to the sales funnel, only that it assesses the customers’ actions from their perspective. It’s the stages that prospects take themselves through right from when they discover a problem to when they choose a solution from a particular provider.

Some businesses may skip this process altogether. The truth is people don’t buy things without going through certain stages of research and consideration. 

Every prospect experiences the buyer’s journey. What differs is the time that passes between each lead’s transition from one stage to the next. 

So if every prospect exists in one stage of the buyer’s journey or the other, it’s beneficial for you to provide information each of your prospects requires to move to the next stage with your business in mind. 

To provide effective information specific to each stage, it is important to understand the stages of the buyer’s journey.

Stages of the Buyer’s Journey

Awareness 

You’ll find two sets of buyers at the awareness stage: those who know they have a problem but cannot name it and those who do not realize their needs yet. While both groups are in slightly different situations, going forward, their actions are usually similar. They will search for relevant information that explains their situation. 

Those who already realize they have a problem will research their situation without additional prompts from any quarters. However, people who are still oblivious of their needs usually require gentle explanations to realize their needs.

Since buyers are still getting acquainted with the problem at this stage, they wouldn’t be ready to purchase a solution just yet. This understanding should influence how you plan to reach leads at the awareness stage.

Consideration 

The consideration stage comes with even more research on the buyer’s end. However, research at this stage is various. Now buyers have identified their problem and have also decided that the issue requires attention. They then explore the possible methods of managing or changing their situation. 

It’s important to understand that people in the consideration stage are still uninterested in a specific solution provider. They are simply looking for information on the generic ways of dealing with their problem.

Decision 

At this stage, buyers have decided on a solution category. They believe they understand the type of product or service they need and compile a shortlist of such options.

They will do some more exploration, but this time they are concerned with the quality of the solutions they have identified. As such, they are tasked with choosing the most fitting option from their shortlist.

People’s activities at this stage usually end in a purchase. When all is said and done, the buyer invests in one solution and ignores others. If you want your business to be the one your leads choose, you should create a sound lead nurturing campaign.

Planning, Executing and Optimizing Your Lead Nurturing Campaign

So far, we’ve looked at what lead nurturing is and why it matters. We’ve also delved into vital lead nurturing concepts like the sales funnel and the buyer’s journey. It’s time to piece all this knowledge together and see how you can effectively plan, launch and improve a lead nurturing campaign.

Understand Your Customer

The foundation of every sound marketing or sales strategy is a strong knowledge of the customer. Without it, you’d be building your plans on too many assumptions, and that hardly ever ends well! So, begin by mining data about your target audience when you are planning your lead nurturing campaign.

Your search for information on your audience will lead you to create a buyer persona. It’s a fictional representation of your ideal customers. It usually includes relevant details about them like their pain points, goals, objections and content preferences.

Once you’ve gathered ample useful information, segment your audience and know who you’re dealing with. Creating audience segments will ensure you craft personalized messages during the lead nurturing campaign. That way, you can speak to people directly and address their peculiar problems instead of creating generic marketing messages.

We have written a blog post on how to create a buyer persona in 4 simple steps, which you may access through here. To learn about the differences between targeted audience and buyer personas, check out our blog post here.

Map out Your Customer’s Journey

This is where your understanding of the buyer’s journey comes into play. The purpose of lead nurturing is to ensure you cater to buyers at various stages of their journey.

To do this, you would have to identify exactly how people do business with you. This is what a customer journey map is – a graphic representation of how people interact with your business.

To create your customer journey map, assess each stage of the buyer’s journey and define the actions that leads would typically take to engage with you.

For instance, people generally research symptoms of their problems during the awareness stage to understand their situation. How does your target audience look for ways to address the problems your product can solve? Do they search online or go to specific forums and websites? If they search for the information online, what keywords do they use in conducting their queries? If there is a website they visit to get information, is there a way to get your brand on that platform?

Answers to these questions will tell you what kind of lead nurturing content to create and where to place this content so your audience will find it.

Mapping out your customers’ journey also includes identifying all potential customer touchpoints and ensuring that they are well optimized to improve the customers’ experience and move them closer to a purchase. The idea is to be where your audience will be looking and ensure that they find what they are looking for there.

To read about how to create effective customer journey maps, check out our blog post here. 

Create Content for Each Stage of the Customer’s Journey

Now you know who your customers are, what they want and how they interact with your business. It’s time to ensure that these people find answers to the questions they might have at each phase of their journey to becoming repeat buyers. These answers can be provided through tailored content. 

Let’s take a look at the content types to focus on at each stage of the buyer’s journey. Note that some of these content formats can be used at different stages. You’ll only need to tailor their content towards the demands of each phase.

Awareness stage (Customers are trying to understand the problem)

Your goal: to help customers identify, understand and discover ways to solve their problem.

The most effective way to connect with your customers is to describe their pain points or goals in their words. Address issues like the scope of the problem, the consequences of leaving it unaddressed and the benefits of dealing with it. Try to be honest and helpful when describing your customers’ situation and clarify common misconceptions people might have about the issue.

Relevant content formats for the awareness stage include: 

• Blog posts
• Social media posts
• Infographics
• Guides
• Ebooks
• Reports
• Statistics
• Tutorials and How-To Videos
• Whitepaper

Consideration Stage (Customers are researching possible solutions)

Your goal: to help customers understand the available solutions to their problems and see your product as a good fit for them.

Don’t be pushy or overly focused on the sale. Your leads are still gathering information and aren’t interested in your product specifically. So focus on creating educative content on how buyers can choose suitable solutions.

Again, appraise each solution category honestly. You want customers to view you as having their interests at heart. Having done this, you can also highlight your product’s peculiar features that make it a good fit for a particular segment of your audience.

Relevant content format for the consideration stage include:

• FAQs
• Webinars
• Product comparison guides
• Case studies

Decision Stage (Customers are ready to make a purchase and are considering a shortlist of solution providers)

Your goal: to help your target audience view your product as the best solution for them and choose it.

Here’s where you can pull out all the stops and bring your A-game to the pitching table. Leads at this point are obviously interested in your product, so they wouldn’t mind you coming at them with the hard sell.

Ensure you clarify and emphasize your product’s value. Also, dispel common reasons why leads are usually hesitant to buy your product.

Relevant content formats for the decision stage include:

• Testimonials
• Free trials
• Live demo
• Free consultation
• Coupons, discounts and promo codes

Point to Note: at this stage, you’ll likely be communicating with leads directly through emails. It’s important to schedule your promotional content, so you don’t overwhelm them with offers.

To learn how to get started on email marketing, check out our blog post here. To learn about its dos and don’ts, please click here.

Use Multichannel Lead Nurturing

Earlier, we talked about mapping out your customers’ touchpoints during their buyer’s journey. One reason why this is important is so you can take advantage of multi-channel lead nurturing.

It involves delivering targeted messages to leads through various channels. This allows you to cast a wider net to capture your audience on the platforms they use. Doing this will prevent you from losing touch with your leads at any point.

The goal of multi-channel lead nurturing isn’t to harass prospects with the same messages across diverse platforms. It’s to create a seamless experience that allows leads to get the information they need to move closer to making a purchase whenever they want.

To achieve this, you need an integrated system that will allow you to monitor your interactions with qualified leads and know which prospect has seen which message. You should also be able to track a lead’s progress through your sales funnel.

Channels for Lead Nurturing

Marketers do not consider these methods as having the same effectiveness levels when it comes to lead nurturing, 47% of marketers say email marketing is the most efficient lead nurturing channel, while 45% favour content marketing.

The other lead nurturing channels ranked in order of their popularity among marketers are social media marketing, web personalization, search engine optimization, demos or events, and paid search.

Review and Update

There is no such thing as a perfect system. This means in designing your lead nurturing system, there will always be room for improvement.

For instance, attempting to cater to new customer preferences with old methods can prove ineffective and cause some leads to slip through the cracks. But by constantly reviewing customer behaviour, your lead nurturing process and its results, you can reshape your methods to meet your prospects’ emerging needs. 

Conclusion 

Businesses that thrive go the extra mile. In this case, going the extra mile means deliberately using great content to nudge prospects towards making a purchase.

Doing this requires a deep understanding of your audience and the alignment of your marketing practices with their buyer’s journey. It also demands consistency and tact. However, the rewards are worth the effort.

For businesses that look to stay ahead, lead nurturing is a no-brainer. The question is: are you ready to put in the work to create an effective lead nurturing system? 

Was this information useful? What is your take on lead nurturing? Share your thoughts with us in the comment section below.

Enjoy this article? Subscribe to get similar articles delivered to your inbox and don’t forget to share it with your friends.

Other Related Blog Posts:

• How To Create A Buyer Persona In 4 Simple Steps
• Target Audience and Buyer Persona – What’s the Difference? (With Samples)
• Creating Effective Customer Journey Maps: A 4 Step Guide
  
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• 9 Email Marketing Dos and Don’ts
  

Generating more traffic for your website and improving your SEO rankings isn’t the easiest of tasks. With ranking signals constantly changing, it can feel like running a maze and trying to figure out which turn will get you closer to your goal. 

You may have heard the reports that there are more than 200 factors when Google runs its algorithm to rank a page, even though no one has any hard-and-fast evidence of this. 

What we do know is that these factors constantly change and Google’s goal as a search engine is to provide the best possible experience to its users. 

As SEO experts have found out through analyzing millions of Google’s search results, more comprehensive content has a strong correlation with higher SEO rankings. That means some of the ranking factors that have the most impact on your SEO rankings have to do with the user intent and having the kind of content that attracts backlinks. 

In a previous article, we discussed how pillar pages and content clusters are the next revolution for SEO. Here’s a more in-depth analysis of specifically how pillar pages can help you generate more website traffic:

The Relationship Between Pillar Pages and Topic Clusters

Google now places a huge amount of emphasis on machine learning to help deliver better search results based on users’ natural languages. Therefore, topic clusters and pillar pages play a crucial role in SEO rankings since Google is now hyper-focused on user experience and how your content best suits their search queries. 

Simply put, a topic cluster is where you group all your content together, that is, having a single, main topic (a pillar page) and then multiple subtopics (separate pages) linking to the main page (pillar page).

A pillar page is simply a long-form article, usually about 5,000 – 10,000 words long, that exhaustively covers multiple aspects of a core topic. It would have the following kind of titles:

• The Definitive Guide to [the main topic]
• What is a ……
• Why …… matters
• Everything you need to know about ………

Using pillar page and topic clusters will allow you to create a web of information, build internal links, and attract inbound links, all of which will improve the visibility and ranking of your website.

How to Create a Pillar Page

Ranking factors constantly change and you can no longer rely on stuffing your pages with keywords as a strategy to outrank your competition. Google now rewards pages that demonstrate a wealth of knowledge on a particular topic.

Therefore, pillar pages should be an important part of your content strategy. Here are five steps on how to create one:

Step One: Select a Core Topic

Identifying a core topic will provide structure and direction and help you create a high performing pillar page. Figure out what you want to be known for, ideally a broad topic that can serve as a theme which you will explore in greater detail. 

In summary, your topic must be:

• Very relevant to your business,
• Aligned with your buyer persona’s needs,
• Able to generate enough search volumes
• Broad enough to be explored in more detailed sub-topics

The following questions can help point you in the right direction:

1. What’s your buyer persona?
2. What are your customers looking for?
3. What are their current pain-points?
4. What key product or service do you want them to be aware of?

After selecting your topic, identify topic clusters (sub-topics) and remember to include and focus around your keywords. Audit your existing pages and find out if there are relevant pages or any that need updating or repurposing to support your core topic. This could save you a lot of time and effort.

We have previous discussed how you may create a buyer’s persona. Click here to learn more.

Step Two: Topic Research

The next step is to conduct an exhaustive research on your topic, focusing on your keywords, buyer personas, and potential search intent. 

This is the time to get a good gauge on your topic’s landscape and figure out how to make your content stand out. If your topic is saturated, come up with ideas on how to make your content distinguishable or some creative angles you can take to make it unique.

Step Three: Create Your Cluster (Sub-topics) Content

We recommend creating and/or organizing your cluster content first before building your pillar page. Also note that it’s crucial that all your content is professionally written. If writing isn’t your forte, then it is best to outsource this specific task. 

After auditing your existing content, you should establish whether it needs updating/repurposing or you need to create more blog posts on the specific sub-topics that you currently don’t have. 

Your cluster content should have as much detail as possible, that is, strong enough to rank on their own. You will also have to employ all the SEO best practices such as on-page optimization while writing each of the sub-topics.

Step Four: Create Your Pillar Page

Finally, it’s time to showcase all the relevant content on your website and to invite your visitors to engage you further. While writing your pillar page, it’s important to note that it will act as the doorway to your content and your brand. 

Design your pillar page as a blog post, but also as a downloadable document. You can then use a contact form to encourage them to download the contents of the page in case they don’t want to read it through to the end at that particular moment.

In exchange, they will be providing you with their contact information which you can use to include them in your future marketing strategies such as email marketing. In our previous blog posts, we discussed the effectiveness of lead magnets and how to launch an email marketing campaign.

Include call to actions statements (CTAs) all throughout the article and make them as appealing and enticing as possible to create a conversion path that will guide them further along your sales funnel. 

Optimize the page to generate leads by using anchor text and hyperlinks to link direct them to all the other relevant content and different CTAs all throughout the page. 

Step Five: Promote Your Pillar Page

As soon as you publish your pillar page it will become a focal point of your SEO. However, you will still need to increase its exposure maximize results. 

There are several ways you can promote your pillar page. They include:

• Running paid ad campaigns, for both social media and paid search
• Running a PR outreach to begin building backlinks (guest posts, influencer marketing, etc.)
• Email marketing where you notify the contacts in your database that would be interested in the content
• Using it as your sales tool, that is, having your sales team use it in all their sales conversations
• Answering questions that are relevant to your pillar page topic in question-and-answer forums such as Reddit and Quora.

Your pillar page should always remain a work in progress if it’s going to be worth occupying the number one ranking spot. You will need to constantly update it and develop it into something more comprehensive to meet a search user’s needs.

If you would like to learn more about pillar page and content marketing, take a look at the pillar page that we have built by clicking here.

Conclusion:

Thanks to advances in semantic search and machine learning, Google’s search algorithms are now doing a better job of providing the exact information users are looking for. 

Therefore, It has become increasingly crucial that you organize your website according to this trend, which covers all the different inquiries your targeted customer may have. And using topic clusters is the best strategy to achieve that.

Having a comprehensive pillar page that covers one topic and links to more specific cluster pages will not only help improve your SEO rankings and generate more organic traffic to both your pillar page and all other blog posts, but also increase the number of total leads you will get as well as your conversion rates.

Was this article useful? Share your thoughts with us in the comment section below.

Enjoy this article? Subscribe to get similar articles delivered to your inbox and don’t forget to share it with your friends.

Other Related Blog Posts:

• Pillar Pages & Topic Clusters: The Next Revolution of SEO
• How To Create A Buyer Persona In 4 Simple Steps
• 7 Must-Have Features of an Effective Lead Magnet
• Email Marketing Made Simple: Getting Started
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Internet usage has continued to grow and online marketing has become one of the most important forms of sales and marketing. Marketing experts have turned their focus on digital channels to promote and grow their businesses. 

Of course, advertising plays an important role in building brands and influencing buyer decisions. Reports indicate that Canada is among the top ten countries in the world that spend the most advertising dollars. 

Here are the important points you need to know about online marketing that will help you to succeed in the Canadian business environment.

Why Digital Marketing? 

Online marketers use a variety of channels and platforms such as cell phones, computers, and other digital media to create, distribute, and track marketing messages through digital and social media.

Canadian consumers are spending more time online as they turn to digital platforms for news and entertainment. Therefore, having a strong online presence and a well defined digital marketing strategy will help to boost and grow your business.

With an increased internet penetration and more proliferation of digital content, there has never been a better time to turn your business’ focus to digital marketing if you want to stay ahead of your competition.

Digital Marketing in Canada

Traditional media such as print, broadcast, outdoor media, and direct advertising haven’t quite disappeared. But they’ve certainly taken a backseat and if your business hasn’t jumped onto the digital bandwagon, you are likely missing out on huge opportunities for growth and expansion.

Government Support for Digital Marketing

SMEs are the backbone of the Canadian economy and the government has laid out support for their digital transformations. The province of Ontario, for instance, is now helping small businesses, through the Digital Main Street Platform, to enhance their online presence and reach more customers. 

The platform features three main programs;

1. DMS shopHERE: powered by Google and aims to help young Canadians to build and launch online stores. It helps small businesses to compete and grow in an increasingly online business environment, both now and beyond the COVID-19 period.

2. DMS Grants: aims to provide grants to support businesses embrace digital marketing and to adopt new technologies that will make them become more digitally effective.

3. DMS Future-Proof: aims to provide support for in-depth digital transformations. It helps small businesses to develop new online business models and to implement digital marketing strategies.

Other government programs provide small businesses with all in one digital marketing programs to grow and expand their business online. The programs may be in the form of training or grants to fund different aspects of your business. 

Content Marketing as a Central Part of Your Digital Marketing Strategy

Digital marketing has been proven to help business grow and improve their performance. A solid online marketing strategy will help you keep your current customers and at the same time, help you bring in new ones.

Content marketing is particularly crucial in a digital marketing strategy. This is because a digital marketing strategy will most certainly go nowhere without content.

It gives value to your website and gives users a reason to visit in the first place. You can then guide those visitors along your marketing funnel and eventually convert them into sales.

When done right, digital content helps to engage your prospects and further your reach, it’s the most important component in a digital marketing strategy. Only by creating content can you ensure that your website ranks well in search engine results pages (SERPS) and enable you to reach those potential buyers. In fact, modern day customers now expect consistent and top-quality content from their favourite brands or businesses.

Develop Buyer’s Personas and Customer’s Journey

As with all forms of marketing, understanding who you are communicating with is often the difference between a successful marketing campaign and an unsuccessful one. The most basic rule of marketing stipulates that, it’s not about trying to sell to everyone or to reach as many people as you can. It’s about passing the right information to the right people at the right stage of their buying journey.

Therefore, digital marketing requires a good understanding of your target market, your buyer’s persona, and their customer journey. This will help you create and distribute the right kind of information and content to push them along the journey and eventually make a purchase.

If you would like to learn more about creating a buyer’s persona, check out our blog post here. For learning how to map out your customer’s journey, please click here.

Website and Your Landing Pages

Just like the internet, the value of your website increases exponentially year after year. A website provides a range of benefits for any type of business. A website will: 

• Help your business look more professional,
• Allow you to showcase your products and services
• Help you attract new customers through search engines
• Help you establish your place in your specific industry

A landing page is an important part of your website design and your digital marketing strategy. It’s a standalone webpage created for a specific marketing campaign. 

It’s super focused on increasing conversion rates in your marketing funnel since it has a call to action (CTA) specifically designed to convert a visitor into a buying customer.

Landing pages are markedly different from homepages in that, they are where your visitors “land” immediately they click on a link in an email or a search engine ad or link. Therefore, you’ll need great content and a good content marketing strategy to get visitors in the first place.

To learn how to drive traffic to your website, please feel free to check out our blog post here.

Social Media

Social media has quickly become one of the core components of digital marketing. It’s now almost unthinkable to succeed in digital marketing without using social media. It has enabled businesses expand their reach by making it easier to spread word about their products and services to millions of customers worldwide.

Therefore, a good content marketing strategy will always include a social media strategy as part of the overall digital marketing strategy. It will provide a cost effective way to improve your visibility, brand recognition, brand loyalty, brand authority, and SEO rankings. Your brand will connect, engage, and convey the brand message which ultimately helps your conversion rates.

Paid Online Advertising

As the name suggests, paid online advertising typically has a cost implication associated with it. Examples include PPC (pay per click) campaigns, website takeover, and online partnerships such as influencer marketing.

Despite the cost aspect, paid advertising can help you generate more business and grow your customer base. It can also help to significantly improve the perception of your business as well as brand awareness.

Paid online advertising guarantees reach. With specific or granular targeting, it can also help you get more qualified leads, i.e., relevant website visitors who are already interested in your products and who fit your buyer personas. 

When carefully planned, paid advertising can bring in more high-quality traffic to your website, and with a lot less effort than it would take using SEO. However, to reap the potential benefits of paid advertising, you will need a great content marketing strategy to ensure you have the right content at every stage of the buyer’s journey.

For more information about online paid advertising, check out our blog post here.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

One of the most popular ways to find more information about anything on the internet is to enter the question or the search term on a search engine. Internet users are now looking for specific answers to their queries rather than just browsing through news channels or social media platforms looking for information.

More and more customers are using search engines to find out more about a brand or a product before making any purchasing decision. Therefore, it’s important that your brand shows up in the first few pages of their search terms. 

Both you and the search engines have the same goal: to provide valuable information to visitors. You will require a good content marketing strategy to ensure you have the kind of content that addresses users’ queries and eventually boost your conversion rates

You will also need to understand SEO and how it works as you create your content. SEO is always evolving and what worked three, five, or even one year ago may be obsolete before you consider executing it as part of your digital marketing strategy. It will also be beneficial to have an understanding of what the future SEO trends are so that you can position yourself ahead of your competition.

If you are interested in learning about the history of SEO, please check out our blog post here.

Email Marketing

Email marketing is still one of the potent ways to connect and build relationships with your customers and your leads. Because email marketing is permission-based, everyone on your mailing list is already interested in your brand. They want to get more information about your business, your products and services, and any promotions, discounts, and offerings. 

Email is convenient, personal, relevant, and instant. It’s not only quite affordable, but it allows you to use the full range of HTML features since it’s more interactive and doesn’t have some of the media limitations of some social media platforms (word count, file size/type, etc).

You can effectively use email marketing to invite both potential and existing customers to your website through relevant links and CTAs.  A great content marketing strategy will ensure that they consume the right content depending on where they are on the buyer’s journey.

To learn about getting started on email marketing, please feel free to read our blog post here. To learn about its dos and don’ts, check out our blog post here.

Conclusion

From a digital perspective, reports indicate that Canadian businesses are generally considered to be around two years behind their U.S. peers. Therefore, to reach the kind of standards showed by the US and other countries, they’ll need to prepare to compete by implementing digital marketing and e-commerce strategies and maximizing the use of digital tools, platforms and content.

It’s content that gives true value to your website and all your digital platforms. Without it, nobody would visit your digital platforms in the first place. Only a solid content marketing strategy can position your business for growth and expansion in the digital market place.

While content marketing may cost time and money, the rewards are more than justify even the smallest of efforts. Always be on the lookout for the latest trends and local government initiatives and other federal programs that support digital transformations to maximize your efforts and results.

For more information on why content marketing should be central to your digital marketing efforts, please feel free to check out our blog post here.

 

What is your experience with digital marketing as a Canadian business owner? Comment below and let us know!

Enjoy this article? Subscribe to get similar articles delivered to your inbox and don’t forget to share it with your friends.

Other Related Blog Posts:

• How To Create A Buyer Persona In 4 Simple Steps
• Creating Effective Customer Journey Maps: A 4 Step Guide
  
• 10 Proven Ways to Drive Targeted Traffic to Your Website
  
• An Introductory Guide to Online Paid Advertising
  
• The History and Evolution of SEO
  
• Email Marketing Made Simple: Getting Started
  
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• Why Content Marketing Should Be Central to Your Digital Marketing Efforts