Creating a content offer strategy can seem like an overwhelming exercise if you haven’t done it before and aren’t sure where to start. Like most new endeavors, it’s not actually as bad as it seems if you break it up into smaller, more manageable steps.
To get you started, I’ve listed out 8 easy steps to creating a content offer strategy:
Step 1: Decide on the piece of content you’re going to create and get to work creating it.
To help you figure out where to direct your content creation efforts, a content matrix is a great place to start. Mapping out your existing content offers to each persona and lifecycle stage will reveal any holes in your current strategy.
A full funnel’s worth of content should be your goal for each persona. That is at least one awareness offer, one consideration offer, and one decision offer tailored to each of your personas’ buyer journeys.
Step 2: Set up your campaign.
If you’re using a marketing automation platform like HubSpot, you’ll want to set up a campaign for the promotion of this particular offer to get proper intel and attribution. With the right information, you’ll be able to perform a content scoring audit to better understand what types of content most resonate with your audience.
Step 3: Build your content promoting the foundation.
We all need a little help from our friends and premium content offers are no different. A beautiful eBook or well-thought out webinar will only perform as well as the foundation upon which they’re built. In order to capture folks’ attention and contact information, people need to be able to find and access the content you’ve crafted.
This step is essentially a series of smaller steps as you’ll need to build out a landing page, form, thank-you page, and follow-up fulfillment email. Luckily, there are several great resources that are useful in tackling this project.
Step 4: Design your call-to-action images.
As your primary form of promotion, careful consideration should be taken when pulling together the images that will ultimately drive visitors to your landing pages.
Before even getting started on the actual design, you need to establish where these images will be utilized. Are you going to put one in the body of a blog post? Is one of them going to live inside of an email workflow or in the sidebar of your site pages? Figuring this out ahead of time will help ensure that the copy of the image connects the visitor to the offer in a way that is both intuitive and helpful.
It’s also critical that you keep in mind the context of which a viewer or visitor is seeing your call-to-action image. Why is this person searching or viewing content in the particular place you’ve selected as a CTA opportunity? This will help you bridge the gap in their buyer’s journey with the piece of the puzzle you’ve created.
Step 5: Create a list of contacts based on your target audience and draft an email around your content offer.
If you’ve done a good job of grooming your contact database, the contacts remaining have demonstrated an interest in the content you provide. Satisfy their content appetite with new, relevant stuff as it is available.
Take the time to determine which segments would be MOST interested or would consider your new content offer to be the most beneficial, though. If you start sending people content that doesn’t align with their interests or apply to their buyer’s journey, you could alienate important segments of your database.
Step 6: Identify the right keywords to leverage for your blog strategy and begin crafting your blog posts.
Blog posts provide another excellent channel for getting the word out about your new premium content offer. With 800-1200 words, you can put together quite the teaser for your content offer. To make sure the right people see it, though, you need to determine the right keywords those people are likely to search for.
Once you’ve done your research to establish the right keywords, build out your blog content editorial calendar to incorporate them strategically into your post series.
Step 7: Schedule out any related social media posts, either promoting your blog posts or the offer itself.
You’ve put a lot of work into creating an amazing offer, building a platform to promote it from, and putting together a blog strategy around it. The last piece of the inbound puzzle is boosting all of your efforts through the various social media channels.
There are few ways faster and free-er than blasting a message across each social platform you belong to. However, the key to social strategy is tailoring your message to the particular platform and audience on each channel. It’s important to avoid coming across as spammy or overly-promotional.
Step 8: Launch your campaign!
This one should be pretty straight forward. Good luck on your launch! Don’t forget to review the campaign’s performance, analyze the data and make tweaks accordingly.