So here's a couple of things about inbound marketing that you need to know.
One, it's simpler to do inbound marketing than you might think. But, if you're going to be successful with it, you have to produce A LOT of content. And when we say A LOT of content, we mean, A LOT...
- Regular blogs
- Videos
- Social media posts (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram seem to be the obvious ones but there are others that you could use, and it depends where your audience is as to which ones you focus on)
- eBooks
- Whitepapers
- Research reports
- Thought leadership
- Website content for new pages and landing pages
- Email
The list goes on. See, we told you there was a lot of content to produce. But it is simpler to do than you're currently thinking - honestly.
Now, to say that you need to be organised to keep on top of all this content would be an understatement. But before you start diving into your content ideas there's one thing you need to do first.
Do a content audit
Just as a quick side note, if you're struggling to come up with any topic ideas for your content, give this blog a read which goes through 16 places to find content ideas.
What's a content audit?
A content audit is a review of EVERY PIECE OF CONTENT you have currently produced to date. You'd be surprised how much you'll have created over the years. And now you'll be glad you did.
Fair enough, it might not be the best content in the world, but like any content production, editing something that's already there is way easier than trying to create something from scratch.
Your content audit is an essential part of your inbound marketing planning because it will carry out a few important roles:
- You can see what content you already have (and what topics it covers)
- You can map your current content to your buyers' journey
- You can see what kind of content you're lacking (either particular topics or types of content - blogs, eBooks etc)
- You can get a handle on what type of content you need to focus on first
For instance.
Your content audit might reveal that you have tonnes of evergreen top of the funnel content, but are lacking some of the middle of the funnel content you need and have almost nothing in the way of bottom of the funnel, decision stage content.
That would tell you that you're doing a good job driving traffic to your site (have a check through your web traffic to confirm this) but that once you get people there, they have very little to look at or download to get into your sales funnel.
Your focus, therefore, will be to produce content for lead conversions.
A content audit will also save you the effort of writing or producing a load of new content, only to find you already had it on your website from a few years ago and you'd just forgot about it.
OUR COMPLETE GUIDE TO INBOUND MARKETING STRATEGY COVERS CONTENT AUDITS AND EVERY OTHER ASPECT OF CREATING AN EFFECTIVE, LEAD GENERATING INBOUND MARKETING STRATEGY.
YOU CAN DOWNLOAD IT HERE.
So how do you organise your content audit?
First of all you're going to need to create a document (a simple Excel spreadsheet or Google sheet works fine) and map out a table with these categories:
- Content type - eBook, blog, social post etc.
- Topic/ theme
- Buyer stage - pre-awareness, awareness, consideration etc.
- Buyer persona
- Primary Keyword - for blogs, web page copy etc.
If you need more help with this, HubSpot has a useful content audit template that you can download for free.
Once you've created this document, simply go through all your existing content (include any offline content like leaflets, product sheets, mailers etc) and map it against the categories in your table.
Now you have a complete oversight of your existing content and can organise it quickly by content type, topic, buyer stage etc.
As we've said, this is especially useful for trying to figure out if you're overly heavy on a particular type of content, or if you've covered one topic more than others.
Now you can start to think about and organise the content you don't have. And, we're going to tell you how to do that.
Organising your editorial and publishing calendar
Now we're getting into the nitty gritty of your inbound marketing content plan. You need to get this right, and keep it organised if you're going to be successful with inbound marketing.
To start with, you'll need to create another spreadsheet or Google doc - yes, another one.
To create your calendar, create a column for each of these categories:
- Publish Date - The date the content is due to go live
- Due date - When the copy should be completed
- Author - Who the content will be attributed to
- Topic/theme - The headline & description of what it covers
- Content type - Blog, eBook etc
- Keyword - What keyword the content is targeting
- Offer/CTA - What action the audience should take
- Current status - Is it in draft, under review, scheduled etc
- URL - The link to the content once it's live
Now you can start to create your content.
It will be difficult at first. You have a lot of content to create. But if you have some dedicated resource, you can quickly start to get ahead and be in a position where you have content completed, and scheduled, as much as two weeks in advance.
Don't forget to leave some flexibility in your content plan. It's good to be organised, but things can happen or change quickly that might need you to move some publish dates around.
Again, if you're struggling to create this template, HubSpot have created a free one that you can download. If you're wondering if it's any good, we based our own publishing calendar on it, and it serves us well.
While all of this is useful information (we hope) it is just a small part of your inbound marketing strategy. To get a more comprehensive guide about every aspect of your inbound marketing, download our "COMPLETE GUIDE TO INBOUND MARKETING STRATEGY".
