INBOUND ACCELERATOR

Creating high quality marketing content requires a significant investment of time and expertise, especially if you are putting your best people to work creating it (and you should be — here’s why). If you want to get the best return for that investment, don’t just create a single piece of content, use it once, and then move on.

Some of the most compelling market content, especially in the B2B marketplace, is built on original research, data, and statistics that provide decision makers with solid information.

While most marketers are familiar with using surveys for market research to develop customer personas and optimizing marketing tactics, fewer have capitalized on the power of data as a basis for their actual marketing content, from reports and blog posts to videos and thought leadership articles. When used this way, surveys can provide the data that sets your marketing materials apart from the competition.

How do you define your marketing strategy?

Are you a digital marketer?

A content marketer?

An inbound marketer?

Does the distinction matter?

I think it does. How you define your strategy provides the guidance you need to be sure you are maximizing your resources.

Ask a marketer what their strategies need to achieve to be successful, and the answer will almost invariably include one key objective: Increase lead generation.

One of the first questions to consider when creating a marketing strategy or any individual piece of content to fuel that strategy should be this:
Who am I trying to reach?

Who are your customers? What are their needs? How do they like to get information? What is most important to them in making a purchase decision? What prevents them from buying?

One of the biggest mistakes I see companies make when they decide to start a business blog is failing to plan and document how they will use the blog, what it will look like, and what they want the blog to accomplish.

As I write this final blog post of 2017, here at JONES we are preparing to take a couple of days at the end of the year for an intense huddle to review our 2017 efforts and flesh out the final details of our content and campaign plans for 2018. 

By setting aside the day-to-day of blog writing and emails, we can focus fully on what is coming next.

New Year’s Eve is just around the corner, and who doesn’t love a party? Of course, if you are hosting, you want to make the right impression and offer a range of beverages to suit all of your guests’ tastes.

When working with our inbound marketing clients, we stress the importance of providing content their prospects can use — educational, helpful, or inspirational materials as downloadable offers.