How to Outflank Your Competitors With Inbound Marketing?

As a continuation from Monday’s Zoober – Inbound Marketing Methodology to Outflank Your Competition post on listening to your potential customers talking, we will be elaborating more on the next two steps you need to take in order to make inbound marketing work for your business.

2. Creating

Creating is another essential step in the Zoober methodology. This is because inbound marketing centres around the strategic use of targeted and compelling content to create and reinforce a relationship with potential leads and customers. To generate content, you also need to consider how to identify and utilise the intellectual property and specialist knowledge within your business. This is your unique content asset and applying it right will help raise your profile as an industry leader.

Creating means exactly that – creating your own content of a high enough quality to define you as an industry expert. This content should directly target the demand you have identified through the listening stage to reflect the buying cycle in your potential customers to ensure that the right information reaches the right leads at the right time. It includes online content such as:

• Articles
• Blogs
• White papers
• Mobile apps
• Webcasts
• Videos

Giving your content a lifecycle

Like everything in the Zoober methodology, you’re following each step on a cyclical basis. So your content isn’t a one-off campaign or occasional blast. It’s carefully crafted and distributed to meet each stage of a clearly defined lifecycle – your potential customer’s buying cycle.

Strategy: This involves your content plan and how you’re going to distribute it, how you’re going to create and source your content and how you’re going to define the tone of voice of your content and ensure it fits with your brand.

Plan: This involves planning which content goes with which platform and how you’re going to get it there.

Create: This is about getting the content produced according to your plan and ensuring that it meets the standard required to maintain the credibility and profile of your brand.

Maintain: This is about keeping the standard of content consistent and setting up a plan for regularly auditing and updating the live content.

Audit: This is the vital stage of assessing the impact and the environment for your content.

3. Engaging

This is the stage in the Zoober process where you engage in a conversation with your potential customers by building an audience for your products or services. Engaging is vital because it’s about connecting your potential customers with your content and your business.

At this stage, your content is publish, promoted and distributed through social media channels, industry websites, online communities, forums and internet PR channels. The vital thing is getting your content seen – and noticed – in all the right places. It’s also about knowing which marketing platforms your potential customers use and connecting and conversing with them through these as effectively as possible.

The engaging stage establishes a two-way engagement which helps build knowledge of (and trust in) your products and/or services. Ways of engaging your potential customers with content include community and group engagement through:

• Keyword alerts to find out when people are talking about your product or service
• Social media participation and blogging to establish yourself as an industry expert and highlight your expertise
• Taking part in industry forums and communities
• Answering questions about your industry or sector
• Clear calls to action to attract people to your proposition
• Optimisation activity to boost Search Engine Optimisation and Search Engine Marketing