How to develop a winning content strategy | RedPandas Digital

Developing a winning content strategy is easier than you think

Content. The very word is enough to send shudders down the spine of everyone in your organisation. You’re thinking –…

Content. The very word is enough to send shudders down the spine of everyone in your organisation. You’re thinking – “I know I need it, but where will I find the resources”? Your boss is thinking – “waste of money”. Your staff is wondering, “where will I find the time”? These are all valid concerns. So how do we go about developing a winning content strategy? Enter the flywheel.

How to develop a winning content strategy with the flywheel

If we look at content creation through the lens of HubSpot’s ‘flywheel’ ideology, it becomes easier to develop a targeted content strategy. This results in time and cost savings – something we all strive to achieve. Your content strategy also becomes highly goal-oriented and customised – making it easier for your business to measure ROI (because you know what success looks like). Finally, your content strategy will be closely aligned to your customer’s needs –resulting in amazing growth (it’s undeniable that providing exceptional customer experiences leads to growth and profitability).

But first, what is the flywheel? Well, you may be familiar with the marketing funnel, but the flywheel takes it a step further. Whilst the funnel takes a linear approach to the customer acquisition process, the flywheel is a circular and holistic approach. It’s a framework that puts the customer at the centre of your business, ensuring that marketing, sales and service are all working together to ensure the best customer journey. This operates within the context of the ‘attract, engage and delight’ methodology. The concepts of ‘friction and force’ are then applied to demonstrate how various customer-facing departments can improve to ensure a seamless experience for the customer (thus maximising force). Through the alignment of content, data and processes across customer-facing departments, the customer journey is improved, as a result, leading to more customers and sales.

It’s important to note that the marketing funnel is not defunct – it’s just been updated with a new model that centres customers and aligns departments to create a positive and seamless journey. Here’s what it looks like in comparison to the funnel.

So what are some of the ways the flywheel can help you easily develop content that will convert customers, sending ROI through the roof (and have your boss singing your praises)?

Putting the flywheel to use when developing your winning content strategy

ATTRACT STAGE

It’s as important as ever to complete your buyer personas and customer journey mapping in the flywheel framework. Once that’s done, marketing can look to sales to get information on the main reasons customers have converted, or why they did not proceed with the sale. Both sales and service can offer input on pain points. Some types of content might include;

  • Blog posts; they needn’t be very long, just valuable and relevant
  • Tip graphics for social
  • Soft copy product brochures which can be tweaked and digitised
  • Feature and pricing comparison charts
  • Customer savings graphs
  • White papers, which can be as little as 3,000 words and can contain information you already have

HubSpot has excellent tools for creating blog posts and social graphics. You can also use it to host reports and one-pagers, so everything is in one place.

What does success look like in the ‘Attract’ stage?

More traffic, enquiries and leads – HubSpot makes it very easy to see which kind of content your lead has engaged with, what pages they’ve seen and what forms they’ve filled out.

Remember, more targeted content will attract less traffic but higher quality leads.

ENGAGE STAGE

In the engage stage, sales can work with both marketing and service to ensure customer expectations or uncertainty are managed to prevent any ‘friction’ in this crucial stage. Sales can look to service to find out where customers become confused, or if there are any issues with the product. Types of content might include:

  • Detailed and comprehensive list of product features
  • Industry-specific product information (for example, how a customer can tweak your product for their niche)
  • An outline of onboarding processes and communication timeline
  • Information about your team and business structure to make them feel more comfortable
  • Glossary of jargon
  • FAQ
  • Training material and set up guides

Don’t forget to create this important content in various formats – some people may prefer videos, others reading.

What does success look like in the ‘Engage’ stage?

Higher conversions and possibly larger sales through up-sells. Customer satisfaction and customer willingness to complete training independently. Again, HubSpot makes it easy to measure these metrics and to see which pieces of content customers have engaged with.

DELIGHT STAGE

In the delight stage, marketing can work with services to provide amazing experiences post-sales. This serves a two-fold purpose to keep current customers informed but also to encourage them to become promoters of your product by sharing their own story. Some types of content include

• Case studies, reviews and referrals White papers Surveys

Also, don’t be afraid to portray yourself as a market leader to your customers. Surveys are perfect for creating annual published reports and statistics on industry trends.

With loads of functions such as landing pages, customisable field properties and forms, HubSpot is a perfect tool to help you collect this data easily.

What does success look like in the ‘Delight’ stage?

Referrals from customers, up-sales, positive reviews and completed case studies.

How can our business manage success of the content strategy?

Your content strategy can be built and managed using tools such as mind maps, scripts, templates, and questionnaires as well as by implementing processes and procedures. However, if your systems are somewhat manual, you may be in the dark about what’s working and what isn’t.

Don’t forget – you should also be repurposing your content where possible – by tweaking the format, you can use it on every platform possible.

Having championed the flywheel for a few years already, HubSpot presents the best tool to help your content strategy. Packed with CRM features, workflow tools, automation and reporting features, it really is an important factor to success.

Developing your winning content strategy – conclusion

As you can see, following the path of the flywheel is an excellent way to develop a content strategy. All departments are guided by the customer’s needs and there are no doubts about what is needed to get started. You’ll probably find that some of this content already exists within your organisation.

By using the flywheel framework to closely monitor your customer’s needs, you can easily build a winning content strategy that is relevant, targeted and leads to exceptional growth. HubSpot is a great tool to help you put this into place.

If you’d like more information on how to develop your content strategy to help propel your business to the next level of growth, get in touch with us today.

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