Four easy steps to content marketing

B2B Marketing Insider has a great article on inbound marketing. In it there is a great line that is nicely sums up the approach many, many marketers out there are taking:

So where our prospects are looking for answers to questions, we give them promotions they don’t want.

For us, the key words of that sentence is “looking for answers to questions.”  Marketers need to be there to answer questions or PROVIDE SOLUTIONS. Better yet proactively provide answers to questions they didn’t know they had.

The post continues:

• A content strategy that identifies all the content that answers your customers top questions in all the places they search for it, for all stages of the buyer journey, for all the types of buyers you serve
• You need a search strategy that effectively places that content in all the places they search for it
• You need content that is engaging enough to get shared
• You need a conversion or nurture path that maps to the buyer journey by offering the right content to the right person at the right time.

We could not agree anymore. We think of content marketing in 4 simple steps:

1. Identify what questions they have (or will have)
2. Answer those questions
3. Place the answers where they will get found (i.e. where your customers are)
4. Stay patient

Kudos to Michael Brenner for saying it so precisely.

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