Part of developing a marketing plan is developing the right content to post on your marketing channels. Inbound marketing strategy is meant to raise brand awareness and attract new customers, so the content for this type of marketing should speak to this goal. Content types that are often considered for this goal include blogs, social media, SEO and content marketing. An inbound marketing strategy should accomplish three things:
- Attract – Appeal to those that would become new customers and create a relationship with the audience.
- Engage – Speak to the target market by addressing their pain points and presenting solutions.
- Delight – Set customers up to feel empowered.
Value-driven content is an important part of your inbound strategy, as it sells your value proposition to your customer, building up the brand and cultivating a relationship with your audience along the way. Here are five reasons why value-driven content is important to your brand’s inbound marketing strategy:
- A reflection of your brand’s purpose – Authenticity is key, and value-driven content should mirror the values and mission statement of your brand. By sharing your brand’s purpose through your content, consumers will be more attracted to your brand if those values align with their own.
- Supports SEO – Search engine optimization (SEO) is a strategy that helps your customer discover your brand through search. When they need information, you want to be in the top rankings when the search engines deliver results from their inquiry. Value-driven content has important keywords that will increase the probability of your content being a top result of your audiences’ search. This will make your brand more discoverable and help you to better engage with customers.
- Provides answers – Most people do research online before making a purchase or engaging with a brand. Knowing your target audience means that you can anticipate questions they have and address them directly within your content. This is incredibly valuable to your target and can help reduce any barriers to entry.
- Boosts engagement – When your content becomes informative, it will lead to insights and then engagement. As your target audience looks for, finds and then gets the answers they need directly from content, they see the value in further engaging with the brand.
- Builds trust – Authentic and honest value-driven content will provide answers to your target audience, which in turn will establish your brand (and its content) as an authority in your field. This will allow your brand to position itself as a leader, and will result in your audience having trust in your brand.
Inbound marketing is an important part of your brand’s overall strategy, and value-driven content is an important part of attracting, engaging and delighting your customer. It helps your customer feel connected to your brand through shared values, supports SEO efforts to make your brand easy to find online, provides answers to your customers’ questions, boosts engagement with information and builds trust by setting your brand up as a leader.