When we talk with companies, the number one challenge they face when trying to implement inbound marketing on their own is the volume of content that needs to be created. Not just any content will do. With each updated that Google makes to their algorithm, a greater and great emphasis is placed on the quality of the content being produced.
In addition to quality, content relevance is important as well. With the inbound methodology, someone with a pain goes to Google or social media to find a solution, they find your website for the first time, they read a great blog post that helps them solve their problem, and the click a call to action that leads them to a resource with more information on the same topic.
The question is: How do you create enough content that is still relevant to the eBooks, white papers, webinars, checklists, and tools that you’re listing as content offers?
Our answer to this question is the Content Branching System (CBS). Like every great invention, the CBS was born out of necessity. We needed to find a way to efficiently map out a high volume of quality content in a short amount of time.
Core principle #1: Everything starts with your buyer persona.
The keystone to a successful inbound marketing campaign is a clear understanding of your buyer. This is the foundation upon which you construct your helpful campaign. By understanding your buyer personas, you understand the pains they face and the questions they’re asking.
Core Principle #2: Be an authentic resource by creating amazing content offers.
With this understanding, set out to create amazing content offers. The easiest content offer to create is an eBook. These quick guides can be anywhere from 5-50 pages in length. They are easy to design in PowerPoint or Keynote and save as a PDF. Within these educational offers, outline the key questions that personas are asking in reference to the application you’re addressing with the content offer.
The next step is easy: answer their questions. Answer them as a expert, not as the owner of your business or a marketer. Pretend you’re giving a family member advice. Use your industry expertise to be an authentic resource to your readers.
Core Principle #3: Extract blog posts topics from content offers.
After you outline your persona and your content offers, it is time to start promoting those offers with blog posts. Like we said at the beginning, to generate qualified leads blog posts need to be relevant to the CTA at the end of the post. What better way to make sure that your blog posts and content offers line up than to extract your blog post titles from your content offer?
This practice makes it 10x easier to write engaging headlines because your mind is already engaged int he relevant topic. It also makes it easy to pull a prompt right out of the content offer text and add it to the blog post assignment.
By implementing the Content Branching System into your workflow, you will find that you’re able to plan a massive amount of quality content in a short period of time. We use this exact methodology to plan content for our clients and it has revolutionized our workflow. Not only are we saving time as we’re planning out new campaigns, but we’re also delivering a higher quality product to our clients. That is win-win!
I would love to hear your thoughts on the process, please drop them in the comments below or give me a shout-out on Twitter: @AndrewJDymski.