Marketing Plan Components: How to Craft Content for An Inbound Marketing Plan

Are you getting people to your site, just to have them leave it? That’s not doing you any good.

Yes, you get a better click-through rate, but your bounce rate stays high. So what’s wrong with this picture?

It could be a lot of things, but in this day and age, you may not be delivering the level of content consumers expect. In the age of reciprocity marketing and freebies, there’s a lot to keep up with.

The PDF that you sell for $2 is being given away with an email subscription for free somewhere else.

You’re competing with millions of others for web traffic, so what can make you stand out?

Your well thought out marketing plan components, that’s what. You need to be intentional from start to finish and we’ve got your guide to creating intentional content below.

Let’s get started!

Creating Marketing Plan Components: The First Steps

Before we teach you how to write a killer blog post or talk about the benefits of podcasts, let’s talk details.

By details, we mean people. Who are you marketing to? We’re sure you have a demographic like males aged 30–50, but you need more details than that.

Let’s say you sell vitamins for men in their middle age. You don’t want to just say your audience is “middle-aged men”. It’s too broad

You need to create customer personas to really target your marketing.

Customer Personas

Let’s think about middle-aged men and why they’d take vitamins. You probably have the man who takes them because his wife buys them, the health-conscious but not too serious consumer, and the supplement addict.

That’s three people in the same population that you hadn’t flushed out before. For ease, let’s name them.

Carl’s wife buys him vitamins which he dutifully takes. Peter takes a vitamin because he knows he doesn’t eat enough vegetables. Bob is always in the gym and takes pills and powders throughout the day.

You’re not going to market as aggressively to carl as you do to Bob. Why? Because in this example, your target customer isn’t Carl, it’s his wife. She’s the one with the buying power.

If Peter is a customer, you want to exert medium effort. He knows he has choices, but if he finds something that works for him, he’s going to stick to it.

Bob’s money is harder to get. He is educated about what he needs, the specifics of the products, and will go to a new vitamin if he’s not 100% happy quicker than the rest.

You need to spend more time and effort getting Bob’s money. Not only is he a harder sell, but he probably has friends who know he likes supplements and ask him for recommendations.

Now that you know your three personas, we need to talk about the budget. Like we said above, your ad spends will be different for the different personas.

Learn more below.

Budget

To calculate a content creation or marketing budget, you need to look at your goals.

Maybe you’re happy with the amount of Bob type customers you’re getting and want to expand your market to more Peter’s. Maybe you’re a new product and you want to market equally to each persona and see what clicks.

Marketing budgets aren’t all ad spend vs conversions. There are other things to think about like, who will create your content? What are you willing to pay?

If you have someone in-house that does marketing, are they able to create high-quality content as well?

If they can’t add anything else to their plates, you can outsource content creators. You give them information about your target audience and products and they write the blogs.

Or the video scripts or the ad design creative. It’s hard to find one marketing professional that has all those skills in their wheelhouse.

Calculate what you can spend right now on marketing to your personas. Add into your calculations which personas you want to market to more than others.

With this starting guide in mind, keep track of what you spend creating content for each persona. Yes, there can be overlap between the ad copy and creative, but you want to have options.

When it’s time to launch your content (see below) you’ll have an idea of ROI, since you know exactly what each campaign will cost.

Deciding Types of Content

If you scrolled down to this section and didn’t read above, we encourage you to go back and read.

You can have a successful inbound marketing campaign without strategising, but that’s up to lady luck. With your budget and your personas under your belt, it’s time to decide what kind of content you’ll create to reach them.

First, let’s talk about the two main times people pay attention to ads.

The first is called a pain point. That’s the problem or the annoyance your customer is having that your product solves. The second is once your customer is already in your buying cycle and wants to increase usage or try other products.

The type of content you create needs to be targeted for different intention types.

Types of Content

Google is the king of content. They decide what helps you rank in search engine pages and what their spiders crawl.

For a while, marketers were getting away with short and breezy content. Two years ago you could get away with 500-word articles with lots of keywords.

Not anymore. Before we get into the types of content, know that you need to deliver high quality and long-form content.

Don’t try to cut corners or Google will cut you off.

Blogs

Blog content in the major content avenue people use to get people to their product pages. The idea is easy. Write about a problem that your product addresses.

So, you could write about how men don’t get enough vitamin whatever once they turn 30. You educate your customers then put in a subtle suggestion to your product at the end.

You can add keywords to your content to further make Google happy, but there’s an issue with this method. Consumers are starting to catch on. Not only that, but the amount of blog content increases exponentially each day.

So, people have come up with other content avenues. The big two that are up and coming right now?

Podcasts and videos.

Why? They deliver value to a client in an easy-to-consume fashion.

Podcasts and Videos

No longer does your customer have to read an article and pay attention to the names and types of vitamins. Why would they when someone is telling them what they want to know?

It’s easy to put a product cameo in a video, but not so easy to do so as a podcast. However, the avenue continues to thrive.

Most people who make money or gain clients from podcasts get their name out there by sponsoring influencers.

If they’re a healthy eating podcast, you could give the broadcaster a check and then they’ll say
“this podcast was brought to you by ___ vitamins”.

It’s customary to give a discount code with the podcast mention, so you can track the ROI of your deposit.

If you want to learn more about getting into the podcast market, check this out.

PDF’s and Ebooks

If you have a more complex product or know more than the average retailer, you can offer Ebooks or PDFs. You deliver information for free in exchange for their email.

With their email, you get them in your funnel and you can add them to your email marketing campaigns. This idea is called reciprocity marketing — when you deliver something you could charge for without charging for it.

The idea is that it shows your customers how dedicated you are to their experience.

Deciding What’s Right for You

It’s hard to know exactly what type of inbound marketing is right for your company off the bat. To figure it out, look at what your competition is doing. Does it seem to work for them?

You could try to steal some of their audience and make your own posts of that type or give your customers another choice. So if they’re doing blog posts, you could make your own or concentrate on delivering videos.

The best way to figure out what your audience likes? Try out all the content types. See what gets more engagement and what gets the most conversions.

You can also try out different ad copy and creative for the same type of content, using AB testing. It’s up to you and your marketing team to decide what you think is best.

Wrapping Up

When you sit down to come up with your marketing plan components, make sure you do the groundwork. Figure out the persona that you’re marketing to and your budget.

Then you can figure out what kind of content you’ll use to market to them. It’s a lot of work — but it can be a lot of payoff if you do it right.

Want to learn more about inbound marketing, Check out more articles on the blog.

Strategic Optimisation + Growth consultant for lean start-ups and change-making entrepreneurs enabling them to grow their business in a sustainable and profitable way. My super-powers are business optimisation, CX, SEO, and leveraging data insights for business growth. #fuelledbycoffee

Originally published at optimiseandgrowonline.com.au on October 28, 2018.