You’ve probably heard of the term content marketing on more than one occasion. But what is really behind this well-known term in the field of marketing? Everyone, companies and marketers, have their opinion on the subject, so from InboundCycle we want to give our vision on what content marketing is, basing the definition in all our years working on this topic.

The content can be found in almost every piece of communication of our day to day: from a flyer to a landing page they require content to be able to communicate the objective that is pursued with that action. In the face of this, it should be mentioned that content and content marketing are not exactly the same, however much it may seem to the naked eye. The content, as we have mentioned is generic, since we can find it in all kinds of communicative parts, however, the content marketing is more specific since the objective that it pursues is to position a product and/or a service in the market through the contents.

What is content marketing and how does it work?

Content marketing lies in creating content of interest to your target audience, personalized content adapted to the purchasing phases in which each of your potential customers is.

In addition to the creation, the publication and distribution of the same is contemplated within the marketing of the same, so that it reaches the users who need it. Social Ads, SEO, and SEM campaigns can be helpful in spreading it and expanding the audience reached in publishing content on the blog or on the website.

The operation of content marketing is simple, although doing it correctly involves a great work of approach and subsequent dissemination.

• The first step in getting started with this technique is to define the target audience you want to reach. This is paramount as it will mark the strategy to follow and what type of content you will need to publish.
• The second step is to define the content to publish.  In this case you have to see if written, audiovisual, infographics… there are a variety of formats to reach your target audience, so study which one is most convenient in each case.
• It is also important to define at what stage of the purchase process the user is in to offer you as personalized content as possible.  We will delve into this aspect throughout this article.
• Finally, after making the content you must publish it and disseminate it by one of the means mentioned above. It’s little time to publish the content and expect it to reach the end-user by magic.

As you can see, content can help you connect with and accompany your target audience throughout your purchase cycle.

Content marketing and inbound marketing

As the content strategist, talking from my perspective, it is very difficult to talk about content marketing and not link it directly to inbound marketing. Inbound marketing without content marketing would not exist.
The reason for this close relationship between the two terms is as follows:

Inbound marketing is the strategy that a company launches to accompany the user throughout the entire purchase process, from the time he is aware that he has a need or concern until he ends up buying from the company, as well as helping a customer’s loyalty to keep the call alive for the company. How do we work on these purchasing and loyalty processes? The answer is found through the content and also through additional techniques such as payment platforms and technology. Thanks to the content that will be raised in the different phases to carry out the lead nurturing (lead nutrition), the user will change between the stages of the sales funnel and will be able to scale positions until they become a customer of the company.

This proves that CONTENT IS KING as it is the only technique that allows you to work in its entirety the marketing funnel.
As you can see, it’s clear that inbound marketing and content marketing are related but, there are still beliefs in the market that talk about inbound marketing vs. inbound
marketing. content marketing. For us there is no VS. as they are both part of the same strategy.  The two terms had long since been confused, creating confusion even among market specialists. Now, little by little you see the differences between the two and the relationship between them.

How is the content used throughout the buyer’s journey?

As mentioned above, the content is the king as it can be used in virtually all processes related to customer engagement and loyalty.  Let’s see it!

The use of content for customer loyalty

We’ll start by talking about how we can use content when it comes to customer loyalty.

Once the customer has taken the step and has already purchased the product or the company service, it is important not to leave it forgotten because, if you do, it is likely that the flame will go out and your company will disappear from the customer’s mind. In the face of this, we have two options, both of you can work with content marketing:

• Upselling: This technique is based on offering customers a superior (more complete) product to which they have purchased. This helps to cover more demand and increase the shopping cart. Upselling can be worked with content. There are several ways to do this. For example, you can create specific content for users who have purchased a product and may need a higher version and provide it through emails after 10 days of purchase, through display or retargeting campaigns, etc.
• Cross-selling: When a user already has the main product of the brand, it is possible to inform him, thanks to the content, that he has collateral products that may be of interest to him.
  To do this, for example, when browsing the web you can complement a product with information about related products, so that the user knows more options. Another example is by sending emails with content from other products that may be complementary to those that the customer has purchased.

The use of content to attract new customers

Once it is clear what can be done in the case of loyalty, we will develop what we are really interested in: the acquisition of users and new customers and, for this, we will use two variables very related to each other: the sales funnel and the user purchase cycle (AIDA).

Sales funnel

The sales funnel is like a funnel that a user goes through from when a company identifies them as a potential customer until it ends up making a purchase. It consists of 3 phases:

• TOFU (Top of the funnel): This is the top of the funnel.
• MOFU (Middle of the funnel): Located in the middle of the funnel.
• BOFU (Bottom of the funnel): This is the lowest and narrowest part of the funnel and therefore the closest to the final purchase.

These three phases are the ones that the user passes from the time he shows interest until he makes the purchase, and in all of them can be influenced thanks to the content. How? As follows:

• TOFU:  In this first phase, the user realizes that he or she has a need and starts searching to collect information about it.
  The company has to get to appear in its searches.
  To do this, you must work on content that is aligned with the first searches performed by the user. The most common thing is to work with that content through a blog. In blogs, the content being worked on is extensive and aims to answer the questions that users have in this first phase of the purchase cycle.
  Thanks to the SEO positioning of these contents and the dissemination of them on social networks or with online advertising techniques, the audience of the content will be amplified and it will reach the user who presents these information needs.
• MOFU: In this phase, content that is more related to the business is worked on. In InboundCycle we call them pillar or cornerstone contents. These are usually made from the 10 keywords most related to the company’s product or service. However, we should not confuse these words with transactional ones, as these are worked on in the next phase.
• BOFU:  At this stage of the funnel is when you start working on transactional content, that is, the pre-hiring content.
  Mention that these contents are often difficult to position because words that are very competitive work. It is also advisable to work them both at the level of blog content and on the static pages of the web.

AIDA – Purchase Process

The sales funnel can be directly related to AIDA, which is the acronym that receives the purchase process from users. These are its phases:

• Awareness: A time when the user realizes they have a need. If we relate it to the sales funnel, these users are in the TOFU phase.
• Research: The user investigates their need and what options exist in the market to solve it. In the sales funnel, we would still be in the TOFU phase.
• Decision: The user chooses one of the options that he/she has found in the previous phase to solve his need. Here we would change phases in the funnel and move on to the MOFU.
• Action: This phase would be the time of auction and purchase of the company’s product. The user would already be in the BOFU phase.

Once clear, we see that in each of the phases of AIDA, certain content marketing strategies can be applied. The list in each of them can be as broad as your imagination comes to encompass, but we want to give you some basic guidelines for each phase:

• Awareness: The purpose of this phase is to create and disseminate content related to the need of the buyer persona of the company and show you that the company can solve it.  What actions can be used to achieve this?
  • Launch a corporate blog.
  • Create a Youtube channel and/or podcast channel.
  • Build viral campaigns. These will allow us to achieve great visibility.
  • Draft and disseminate press releases.
  • Launch display campaigns.
  • Make use of tools like Outbrain to promote blog articles.
  • Ads on Facebook or other social networks.
  • Advertisements in traditional media.
  • Etc.
• Research: In this phase, it is essential that the company appears in the user’s searches as a solution to their problems and, for this, tools such as:
  • Blog: It can be an ideal tool to capture by content the options that users have to face their problem or need.
  • SEM: Before you had the belief that everything that had to do with inbound was about some free topic and, that’s not the case.
    The inbound also includes all kinds of actions to generate traction and attraction about the content that has been written and published. To do this, the SEM is a very useful tool to make itself known in the middle of the research phase.
  • Checklists and infographics, to make your content more visual and easier for users to internalize.

• Decision: In this phase we can divide the content strategy between blog and web.
  • In the blog you can also write posts with a character closer to the purchase, talking more about the products but still being educational.
  • On the website, you can use actions such as:
    • Cornerstone contents: Create content for static pages about the most important keywords for the company.
    • Videos about products, demos…
    • Customer testimonials.
    • Success stories that show the good results of work that has been done.
• Action:  We got to the transactional part and, at the content level, we couldn’t work that hard anymore. Yes we could talk about content on a landing page to close the sale, but this part, in our view, is not the content marketing that we are talking about, since this, in any case, is educational and, in this case, it would not be so.

The content map

When implementing content marketing and adapting it to each phase of the user’s purchase process, the content map can be of great help.

The content map is a  scheme that represents the phases of the purchase process that the user goes through and what content will be delivered to the user in each of them.  It specifies what messages will be provided to the user and with what formats (articles, ebooks, testimonials, success stories, reports, videos…).

Why should you do content marketing?

As you can see, content marketing should be one of the key parts in your marketing strategy. And there are several reasons to have it:

• It helps throughout the user’s purchase process, as it adapts to the needs of the leads at all times.
• In addition to the actions that can be carried out of attraction, it can also  be used within the lead nurturing  to accompany the lead and make it mature,
• One of its peculiarities is that it can help a customer to join the project regardless of what stage of the purchase process is in.
• It can be a  comprehensive strategy, carrying it out from start to finish, as partial, since each client can pursue different objectives.

Content is still king, so our advice is to develop a good content marketing strategy to help you carry out a good inbound marketing strategy for your business.