Inbound content marketing writing is one of the best ways to get the most leads with the least effort. Here are a few reasons:

Outbound marketing uses approaches like cold pitching, ads and sponsored posts to get your products and services in front of new eyes. However, these approaches require a lot of effort and a substantial budget. They tend to spike and then fizzle out, requiring constant updates for a low ROI compared to the budget. Inbound content marketing, on the other hand, is self-propelling and when it’s done right. Your leads will find you based on the strong content pillars and pieces you deliver to your audience.
Warm leads generally want to know in-depth information to vet your products or services before making a purchasing decision. Inbound content marketing puts a system in place to support your leads at every step of the buyer’s journey.
Re-engaging existing leads works really well when you’ve captured their information in your mailing list, so you can segment them according to their needs and send useful updates and information in a timely manner.

What is inbound content marketing?

Based on the benefits I listed above, one thing should be very clear about inbound content marketing. It’s all about linking your buyer’s journey to the content you provide your leads.

Inbound content marketing optimizes your content so it gets shared or found by the right audience at the right time for your brand. Once they enter your lead capturing system at the “top of the sales funnel,” they are strategically led to immerse themselves in your brand and learn more about your offerings over time.

The lead nurturing that takes place in an inbound content marketing strategy helps qualify the right leads for your brand. And much of this can happen without much effort after you get a strong content-based sales funnel in place.

One of the most well-known client management systems for tracking your leads is Hupspot. The Hubspot methodology of inbound marketing focuses on three main steps. Here is its process of ensuring your leads remain satisfied with their experience as they interact with your content:

Attract

Clients can find your brand or website in numerous ways like searching online for something that interests them and stumbling upon your blog or seeing your posts shared in social media.

Since this brand awareness stage is much like a “first date,” it’s important to ensure that written content at the “attract stage” over-delivers. Give ample authoritative and quality information in a reader-friendly style. Including strategic calls to action can quickly move your leads onto the next step, where they’re actually browsing your products or services.

However, keep in mind that customers may need to see more of your top-of-funnel content a few times before moving to this next step. It’s also good to link to other blog posts, your social media channels or your email mailing list to keep your brand top of mind.

Engage

When customers become interested in your products and services, they usually want to learn more. Here’s where they really want to learn every minute detail about your product or service before making their decision. They want comparisons to your competitors, specs, reviews, and social proof. Giving all of this to your clients will ensure that they move on to the next step.

Delight

This is when your buyer is ready to make a purchase or sign a contract. This part of the process can get especially cumbersome and it’s crucial to have a user-friendly experience. Making a seamless transition between product purchase and product delivery is of utmost importance. This is why in my own inbound content marketing approach, I always start with a clear on-boarding process. This gives reassurance to leads that they’re in good hands.

Flywheel karma

Once you’ve made a sale and satisfied a customer, they become a part of your community. And if they’re extra satisfied, they’ll continue to refer you to friends and promote your work beyond your expectations. As they say, it’s much easier to reengage an existing customer than acquire a new customer.

The key ingredient to creating successful inbound marketing strategies is to use online content effectively.

What counts as online content?

Online content is any published, shared, written or designed piece of internet material that communicates.

Facebook post? That’s content.
Youtube video? Yes.
Blog post? Obviously.
Gif? Can be.
Infographic? That’s absolutely content.
Published essay? Content for that journal, yes.
Book? Yes, if it’s an e-book.
Email? Yes.

I would draw the line at purely reaction-driven gifs or memes. And things that are purely visual are more in the realm of design. Some may disagree, however. Generally, if it’s online and has words (spoken or written), it’s content.

What is content marketing?

So, content marketing means using online content to engage with your potential buyers (also your broader audience) on some level. You can think of the different levels by envisioning your classic sales funnel leading from the brand awareness stage down to the sale and finally to the sweet spot of up-selling and referrals from loyal customers.

You generally engage with these folks on different channels of content. These channels are broken down into the following media categories:

Paid (advertising)
Owned (your blog, website, etc.)
Earned (articles or mentions published externally about your brand)
Shared (social media like Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Youtube, Pinterest and more)

With so many different channels, it can be difficult to implement a cohesive content marketing strategy. It helps to work with a professional who can easily navigate the intersections between each channel.

In fact, none of these channels are isolated networks; they’re all the tissue of your unified brand identity. It helps to form a cohesive brand identity, so repurposing content becomes easy. With brand-centric guidelines, you won’t waste time as you populate your channels. Every post can be a mutually beneficial branding opportunity.

You’ll be sure to achieve all of the benefits of content marketing when you seek professional help. Here are the benefits of content marketing in a nutshell:

You’ll receive Increased organic traffic
High-quality content marketing has high ROI
You can tailor content for your specific sales funnel
Content can easily be repurposed
Content marketing makes it easy to track and monitor what works
It helps you know your audience better
You can position your brand to earn more

Let’s go into a bit more detail on these points below.

Top 7 Benefits of Inbound Content Marketing

1. Inbound content marketing attracts organic traffic

Organic traffic is any traffic that comes from the web for free, by the virtue of clicks. It excludes paid advertising. Generally, organic traffic comes to you the following ways:

Direct brand name searches, if you have a well-known brand
Clicks on your blog posts, product pages or website content through online searches (this requires SEO writing, which usually requires a professional)
Clicks on your blog posts, product pages or other website content that has been shared in social media
Clicks on links to your blog posts, product pages or other website content that has been published in external magazines, blogs or news sites

Since content marketing strategically positions your brand for these click through moments to happen, it is the best way to bring organic traffic.

2. Inbound content marketing has high ROI because it's like an investment

Unlike paid advertising, which has a temporary timespan of impact, content marketing can be designed to attract people organically for long periods of time. For instance, one evergreen (always relevant) blog post with a high click through rate and high SEO ranking can bring you new customers for years.

That’s why it helps to work with a professional content marketer who is capable of getting these results. This will help you reach your target buyers for the long term.

3. Providing content at each stage of your sales funnel streamlines sales

Using an Inbound methodology, you can think of your content as a support system for your business sales funnel. For the sake of simplicity, let’s limit this to four simple stages:

Brand awareness: When you attract people to your brand enough to get them to journey to the next stage
Brand engagement: When you engage people with your products or services enough to get them to buy.
Brand sales or purchases: When you inspire action and close the deal
Brand loyalty: When you delight customers enough to lead to long-term relationships and repeat sales

Of course, there are additional steps along the way. Some marketing professionals may use different terminology used to describe these steps.

But the point is this. You cannot expect brand awareness content to perform the function of brand loyalty content. Each piece of content should be strategically designed to succeed for its specific stage of the sales funnel.

4. One piece of high-quality content can spawn infinite new pieces of new content to use in different channels

The abundance of user-friendly content is mind-boggling because:

It breaks down easily into bite-sized social media posts
It links horizontally to relevant sister pages or blog posts
It combines with sister pages to build authoritative long-form content

Let’s use this blog post as an example. All of the definitions, bulleted lists, headings and interesting quotes (I hope I have some) can be repurposed as social media posts. It helps to add gifs, emojis or other design elements (think Canva or Venngage). In a matter of minutes, I can create at least 20 additional posts from this one blog post.

There are a number of linking opportunities for sister blog posts within this blog post as well. I now have a range of new ideas popping up from this one piece of content. In one blog post, I can add depth to the types of content you can use at each stage of the sales funnel. In another blog post, I can explain why I didn’t understand the point of creating online content at first.

Finally, this one post can lead to something greater. Perhaps I could use what I’ve already developed here and expand it into the chapter of a larger e-book on strategic content marketing for beginners.

5. As owned media, inbound content marketing has built-in metrics that are easy to measure

E-commerce companies that make most of their sales on Amazon versus on their own website operate in the dark about who their customers are. They have no way of knowing how they found their customers, what they searched for, etc. However, when you attract people to your own website for sales, you have all the metrics right there at your fingertips.

You can use Google Search Console to identify exactly which search terms someone used to find you
You can use Google Analytics to understand which sources a customer came from to reach your site
You can see which posts they’re engaging with most
How long they’re spending on each post before they bounce, etc.

Content marketing helps you gain these valuable insights and more, so you can predict what works best to keep site visitors longer.

You can go further and run A/B testing experiments to see how your customers respond to different types of content. It’s like observing and working in a real-time human psychology lab as you fine-tune your strategy. (So maybe the “mad scientist” analogy is an exaggeration. We’re not creating Frankenstein or anything.)

6. Strategic inbound content marketing is designed to capture and understand leads

With content marketing, you can see what posts resonate most with your audience. Then you can specifically repurpose that content to your different channels. However, you can also use that information to dig deeper to address more of your potential buyers’ needs.

If you’re getting a lot of questions that require your exclusive expertise, you can create a piece of gated content to answer them. They’ll access the content by filling out a form that adds them to your mailing list where you can segment them based on their form responses. Or, once a person has made a sale, you can follow-up with a survey.

Essentially, content marketing can position you to learn and know more about your audience and nurture them with exclusive, tailored content.

7. As your audience and influence grows, you can use other strategies to earn more

Maybe you’ve already got serious blogging or social media game and you’ve amassed a huge following. Well done! Something about your brand, message, identity or charisma has worked.

Now you can start to partner with other businesses who want to reach your type of following with their products. This is where you can cross over into the passive earning opportunities of affiliate marketing.

I say “passive earning,” but it’s not always as passive as it sounds. Sometimes brands are looking for real ongoing partnerships that require work and mutual respect and support. Either way, you can grow and help others grow while you’re at it with these brand-to-brand linking opps.

Setting inbound content marketing expectations with the 80/20 rule

Now that you’ve heard about the benefits of content marketing, it’s important to understand that not every post goes viral. Also, the exact scale of a viral piece of content can depend on how well your brand is established and how many people actually engage online in your industry. For some, this could mean 500 site visits, for others it could mean 500,000.

Another thing to think about is that a lot of people want their entire audience to be buyers. But if that’s your goal, you’re setting yourself up for disappointment. This is where the Pareto Principle comes in.

Consider how the 80/20 ratio works. Only 20 percent of your site visitors represent 80 percent of your sales. Aim to convince the rest to share your enthusiasm.

Your audience can still appreciate your work and add value to your company without buying. Don’t underestimate the value of brand-evangelists or enthusiastic content sharers who might not own your products yet. They can also mention your work to other potential buyers by recommending you.

It is also important to apply the 80/20 principle to your content. Don’t get disappointed: not every single piece of content is bringing in loads of traffic. Generally, just 20 percent of your content will attract in 80 percent of your engaged audience.

Inbound content marketing Isn’t as basic as it sounds, is it?

Content marketing is an evolving field with many new benefits arising everyday. It’s an innovative space in which experimentation is welcome.

Now, you’ve read all about the benefits of inbound content marketing from the perspective of accepted frameworks within marketing.

Ultimately, it’s my goal to help others see the strategic potential of the seemingly effortless, artless and fun work that goes into making a solid piece of content.

There’s a lot more to it than what meets the eye, and it really is an area that depends on professional support to achieve and maintain desired outcomes.

What inbound content marketing benefits do you think can help your business most? Write your response in the comments below.

Inbound content marketing: How to strategically take advantage of its many benefits