How to find your way in the content jungle.
SEO, SEA, customer journey, content mapping — a website today is much more than an online business card. Every customer who begins a customer journey on your website will encounter bears and tigers along the way. How do you guide these customers from prospect to sale? You’ve probably already guessed: with relevant content. But what is relevant content and where should you start? With these tips we’ll help you find your way in the content jungle.
Content marketing vs. inbound marketing
Nowadays there’s more content available online than ever. Companies seem to be holding a genuine race among themselves with their content. If you’re just starting out with content creation, this amount of content seems overwhelming. What’s more, creating content costs both time and money. It’s important to think carefully about what you want to achieve with the content you offer on your website.
To see which form of content is most useful for your website, it’s important to distinguish between content marketing and inbound marketing.
Where content marketing broadly focuses on creating and sharing valuable information, inbound marketing focuses on sharing knowledge, being found through SEO, and building lasting relationships. Although both terms overlap, inbound marketing is therefore more focused on the customer journey.
Anyone who wants to save time and money on creating content is best off focusing on inbound marketing.
Know your customers
The starting point of inbound marketing is sharing knowledge. It’s important to know your customers’ wishes and needs in this. Try to reason out which problems they run into, that your product or service can offer a solution for.
An example. Anouk sells water-saving garden sprinklers. Instead of describing why her garden sprinklers are the best on the market, Anouk reasons from the customer’s perspective. Who’s looking for a smart garden sprinkler, and what do they type into Google? Anouk discovers that many people struggle to keep their garden looking nice during persistent dry spells in summer. Add to that the fact that they’re allowed to water less! Anouk decides to write a blog about dry summers, water companies’ call to water less, and of course the solution — water-saving garden sprinklers.
By researching and implementing search terms like “dry summer garden, water less” versus “water-saving garden sprinkler”, Anouk ensures her website is easier to find. Even for those people who don’t know her product yet.
Keep it personal, keep it simple
Writing relevant content is quite tricky. A problem-solution structure is a good starting point. Reason out what a potential customer runs into and what their wishes or needs are. Answer existing questions in blogs, case studies or news articles. Not really your thing to write content yourself? Outsource it! We’re happy to help.