Did you know Hubspot generate about 75% of their lead generation through inbound marketing (Source – Kissmetrics)?
75%! How much you could save in lead buying if you generated 75% of all your leads through inbound marketing?
Inbound marketing is a growing trend and blogging sits at the heart of the strategy. Essentially you’re looking to create a hub that your audience swarm to when they wish to educate themselves on your businesses topic.
But without enough value (within your content) you’re blog will become awkwardly quiet. So how can you come up with content ideas that your prospects will find value in?
Introducing: ‘The bank raid!‘.
If you’re an established business (or even a new start-up!) your customers likely hold a wealth of information so by examining the bases between your customers and your product you can uncover a huge amount of content ideas.
Let’s start with your internal teams:
The Support bank
Most support teams seem to have recurring issues which constantly hit their desks. By sitting with and interviewing your support staff you can rapidly get a first hand idea of what you may need to address further (perhaps within your FAQ’s section) – Build on this by writing up content to answer these questions before it hits your support teams.
The Sales bank
Similar to support, sales teams too have first hand experience with direct prospect issues. I recommend asking the following questions:
- What do prospects need educating about?
- What features do your prospects get excited about?
- What are the sticking points which hold up deals?
Turn this knowledge into a Q&A format on your website.
Online reviews
By scanning your online reviews you’re can get an in-depth look into how your customers feel about your product.
If multiple reviews all rave about a certain feature you might want to consider featuring these more heavily within your blog.
Web Analytics
Hopefully you already have a tracking system (such as Google Analytics) set-up correctly – For example you filter out internal visits, have set-up goals ect – This is your new treasure trove!
A few benefical Google Analytics reports for content ideas:
- Page value report
- Site search results
- Landing page
If you set-up goals and assign a value to them you can effectively see which pages of your site add the most to your bottom line. Accessible via: Behavior > Site Content > All Pages.
In this example I’ve searched only for blog posts (by adding in /blog to the search) – Are there certain content types (e.g. Case Studies) which tend to have a higher page value?
Can users search on your site? Integrate with Google Analytics to see which phrases are most commonly searched for.
Accessible via: Behavior > Site Search > Search Terms
In this example most searches are for CRM followed by the Outlook connector; since the Outlook Connector is a feature of our product (Workbooks.com) this suggests either people want to find out or need help with configuration. Both which could be answered on our blog.
Accessible via: Acquisition > Search Engine Optimization > Landing Pages.
See which pages are most commonly landed on (i.e. where people start their journey on your website). Most likely this will be your homepage; by adding in Next page path or Exit page as a secondary dimensions you can follow your visitors path through your website, giving you an idea of which pages lack in information.
Questionnaires
Why not just ask your prospects? Online questionnaires such as Qualaroo or iPerceptions.com allow you to identify what’s missing from your site.
In this example we used iPerceptions 4Q questionnaire to get an idea if our web visitors were trying to understand what CRM was or if they we’re further down the buying cycle and trying to decide which CRM system was best for their organisation.
By identifying basic answers such as these you can set the direction of your content creation in a much more productive way.
Interviewing your current customers is also a great way to build content ideas but note this tends to result in product centric topics (rather than lead generating topics).
Conclusion
Since many of these ideas are not quick fixes and a few (such as online surveys and interviewing internal staff) may take time to set-up and carry out you often won’t hear these banded around. However by using your own banks knowledge you can start to uncover and create real value adding content which provides much more benefit than just creating further ‘Marketing fluff’.
Do you already use any of the ideas mentioned above? Let us know how they’re working for you in the comments!
