Introduction
Your Content Marketing Transformation

Welcome to Inbound Content. This book will teach you content marketing concepts that you can apply to your business, turning yourself into a lean, mean content marketing machine.

By the end of this book, you will:

1. Have completed a workbook that will help you get your business's content process up and running.
2. Be prepared to pass the HubSpot Academy Content Marketing Certification final test, earning a valuable industry certification.
3. Be equipped with the knowledge needed to start and maintain a content marketing process for your business.

If you're like me and are a visual learner, watch the content in video format by signing up for a free HubSpot Academy account. Sign up for your free account now: hubspot.com/cmc.

Ready? Let's do this.

What Is Content Marketing?

Content marketing is a strategic marketing and business process focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content. This content is meant to attract and retain a clearly defined audience and, ultimately, drive profitable customer action.

Even though content marketing has grown in popularity in the past ten years with the rise of Web 2.0, content marketing is not a new concept. Early signs of content marketing date back hundreds of years—from Benjamin Franklin creating his annual Poor Richard's Almanac to promote his writing business in 1732 to, more notably, John Deere's ever-popular magazine, The Furrow. Deere's publication launched in 1895 and is still running strong today with a dedicated website that has more than 38,000 inbound links.1

And although the medium has evolved over time, the framework for content marketing is pretty much the same. It's all about your audience, what they value, and how you can help educate and entertain them. When done correctly, content marketing creates a relationship with your audience that leads to trust. And if your audience trusts you, they'll be more willing to do business with you when they're ready to make a purchase decision.

To communicate with your audience, they need to first find you online. And for your audience to find you online, you need to publish content. The process of being found (and achieving results), however, is a marathon, not a sprint. There's a lot of consistent conditioning needed to achieve success. As an example, see Figure I.1 for a graphic of data security company Townsend Security's organic, nonpaid traffic coming from search engines.

Figure I.1

Townsend Security created content consistently, for years. Their results grew over time, not overnight. The process was similar to that of a marathon, not a sprint.

This company is not alone in understanding how content can help grow their business. Although content marketing costs 62% less than outbound marketing, it generates more than 3 times as many leads.2 Think about that for a minute.

Content has the important job of pulling people from one stage of the inbound methodology to another.

It plays an integral part in the attract, close, convert, and delight stages (see Figure I.2).

Figure I.2

Your content should attract the right people to your site, convert those people into leads, and nurture and help close them into customers. But it doesn't stop there—your content should delight your customers, turning them into promoters of your brand.

In a nutshell, content marketing is really just the art of communicating with your prospects and customers without having to sell to them. Instead of marketing or advertising your products and services, you're creating helpful, entertaining content that your prospects and customers can enjoy and learn from.

If it sounds like inbound marketing and content marketing are similar, that's because they are. They both focus on empowering potential customers, building a lasting relationship with your audience, and creating valuable content that both entertains and educates them.

But what's the difference between the two, and do you need both?

Think in terms of “and” not “or” when it comes to the content marketing–inbound marketing relationship. Success relies on both. Content may help fuel your inbound engine, but there are similarly valuable inbound projects—like technical search engine optimization, product or services trials, marketing automation, and interactive tools—that may exist outside the scope of a content marketer. This is where inbound marketing comes in as a valuable counterpart.

If you aren't opening yourself up to the wide range of inbound practices, you're limiting the potential growth and impact you can have as a marketing leader. In other words, your inbound plan should be a superset—inclusive of your content assets but not limited to them.

It's important to know the landscape of the journey you're about to embark on in this book. Let's review each chapter and get a sense of what you'll be learning.

How Do You Create an Effective Content Marketing Framework for Your Business?

Now that you know how content marketing can help you build a better relationship with your prospects and customers, what steps should you take to create a successful content marketing plan?

You'll start off by learning how to create a content creation framework in your organization. If you really want to create great content, you need to have a process in place that's more advanced than just writing and publishing content. You need to be able to identify campaigns, set timelines, and review and edit content before it goes live, all of which will be discussed in Chapter 1.

You'll also learn about the tools and responsibilities of team members needed to build a successful framework for creating content.

Once you've built this framework, you'll learn about the power of storytelling in Chapter 2.

We just talked about how content marketing is about a relationship. Every company has a story—you need one to survive. What do you stand for? What message do you support? These are all concepts we'll discuss.

Then, once you understand how important storytelling is to content marketing, you'll learn how to generate content ideas to support your content creation efforts. One of the differences between good and great content marketers is that the great ones have a process they rely on to consistently produce high-quality content ideas.

In Chapter 3, you'll learn the techniques to research and uncover an idea and expand on it, whether you're doing it yourself or with a team. Sometimes ideas aren't easily apparent.

Once you're confident in generating content ideas, you'll learn how to plan your long-term content strategy.

In Chapter 4, you'll learn how to create realistic goals for your audience, also known as your buyer personas. You'll learn to perform an audit that will identify content needs and gaps to build a helpful, relevant journey for your personas. You'll also learn how to create your long-term content plan by mapping your content creation road map. This way, you're not wasting gas and you can focus on getting to your destination while circumventing roadblocks along the way.

Once you've learned how to plan a long-term content strategy, you'll learn how to become an effective writer.

In Chapter 5, you'll learn how we get ideas out of our heads and format them into effective pieces of content. Additionally, you'll learn some grammatical pitfalls to avoid. Sometimes a simple incorrect use of “it's” and “its” can deter your audience.

Once you've learned how to become an effective writer and you're ready to start creating content, you'll learn how to create an effective blog post.

In Chapter 6, you'll learn how to format your content in a way that communicates what you're trying to say to search engines while keeping the reader's experience in mind.

Once you've learned how to create a blog post, you'll learn how to extend the value of your content by repurposing it.

In Chapter 7, you'll learn how to proactively identify repurposing opportunities before a piece of content is created, as well as how to repurpose content after it has been created.

You'll also learn how to republish the same content across multiple platforms—a great way to extend the value of your top-performing content.

Once you've learned how to repurpose a piece of content, you'll learn how to effectively promote it.

In Chapter 8, you'll learn how to promote content through distribution channels like email and social media. We'll show you specific tactics to promote your content while making sure you're effective in your approach.

Next, you'll learn how to analyze and measure your content.

Chapter 9 will help you understand various metrics and data points you can track and measure to see if your initiatives are successful. This way, both you and your business will be constantly growing and...