Inbound marketing is all about bringing leads and customers to your company with useful, helpful, educational, or timely content. Quality content is at the heart of this marketing strategy. While the phrase “Content is King” has been thrown around for years, inbound marketing’s value is in the way it creates and uses the content.
One of the ways inbound marketing works its magic is by storytelling. Since we were mere cavemen, humans have always loved a good story. Inbound marketing uses this innate love of storytelling to hook leads. Here’s how you can do it too.
Pick A Topic Your Customer Base Has Interest In Or Problems With
To start off, pick a topic. Not just any old topic though. Pick something that most of your new leads or customers either have expressed they have a problem with or are interested in finding out more about.
You can usually get great ideas from customer questions that your sales team often hears. Content that is helpful to your sales team will also get the most online traction since the questions customers are asking are things they already care about. One common mistake we see with content creation is that companies only create content that sells their product or service. Focus on answering a question your prospects already have and providing value.
Explore The Topic At Length
Once you have your topic nailed down, now is your chance to explore the topic at length. It’s no longer enough to just briefly skim over the topic and sprinkle keywords and phrases into your content. Approach this like a journalist would. Do the research, take notes, write down important statistics or numbers, try and help your leads get to the root of the problem, and find a solution (which, of course, your company or service should provide).
Be Authentic & Legitimate
When covering a topic, do not lie. Let me state this again, DO NOT LIE. Customers can sniff bad content out pretty quickly these days. Customers have also become much more morally conscious, meaning they don’t like to do business with liars. Don’t avoid a point that relates to your topic because it contradicts your business. Instead, you should address it head on and explain why the point is valid, but also why it shouldn’t deter people from using or purchasing your product.
Explore How A Related Topic Fits The Next Stage Of The Buyer’s Journey
Once you’ve covered a topic that a lead in the awareness stage would be interested in, move on to another related topic that that same lead would find interesting in the evaluation (consideration) and purchase (decision) stages. This way all of your storytelling melds together, like one long-form piece of content. This also continuously leads customers through the buying cycle and buyer’s journey, which we know is important to convert a lead into a customer, and a customer into an advocate of your business.
It Doesn’t Stop With The Form Fill!
Once you’ve created the content your leads are searching for, distributed it via the appropriate channels such as social media and email marketing, and the leads are converting on your lead-optimized website you’re done, right? WRONG! The real power of inbound marketing is bigger than a blog. Close the loop with lead nurturing and let your sales team work smarter not harder as automated content collects more information about your leads and nurtures them through the buyer’s journey.
Inbound marketing is the ultimate tool to tell stories your customers want to hear. While storytelling is a big part of that strategy, there’s also a lot more that goes into converting leads to leads.
Contact Lure Creative and we’ll help you convert even more leads into customers today with our Kansas City marketing services.
