Where is the first place you go for expert advice or an answer to a burning question? My guess is Google (or your preferred search engine). You’re not alone — Google alone answers over four billion search queries everyday.
当你在搜索栏中输入问题,头脑冷静se links that appear in your search results are content. Whether you know it or not, you consume content on a daily basis.
Thatmarketing strategy guide。。。content.
Those articles that diagnose your symptoms ... content.
The video tutorial on how to create Victoria Secret-level hair volume ... content.
News stories, Instagram feeds, blog posts, cat videos, GIFs, memes ... all content.
Content is a large part of your everyday life. It’s hard to avoid, but why would you want to? Content keeps us informed, answers our questions, entertains us, makes us smile, guides our decisions, and more.
Content helps you attract, engage, and delight prospects and customers, bring new visitors to your site, and ultimately, generate revenue for your company.
In other words, if you’re not creating content, then you’rebehind the curve。
为什么内容很重要？
内容创建入站销售是最终的practice. When you create content, you’re providing free and useful information to your audience, attracting potential customers to your website, and retaining existing customers through quality engagement.
You’re also generating some major ROI for your company, as these content marketing stats demonstrate:
- 内容营销带来3Xas many leads as traditional marketing and costs 62% less.
- SMBs that use content marketing get126%more leads than those that don’t.
- 61％的在线购买are the direct result of a customer reading a blog.
- Companies that publish 16+ blog posts per month get3.5Xmore traffic than those that post four or fewer posts per month.
Content equals business growth. So, let’s get started with your content strategy.
Content Planning and Strategy
You wouldn’t start building a house without a blueprint, a sculpture without a sketch, or a company without a mission statement. So, there should be no content creation without a plan. Otherwise you risk getting derailed from your objective.
Acontent strategy包括从品牌和音调到如何推广内容并最终重新利用它的所有内容。让我们逐步介绍如何制定内容计划。
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Set Your Content Goals
Similar to a traditional marketing campaign, your content strategy should be centered on your marketing goals (which should, in turn, be derived from your company goals).
Your goals could range from attracting more visitors to your site to generating more leads to anything in between — as long as they’reSMARTgoals. An example of this kind of goal would be to increase organic traffic to the blog by 25% in the next quarter.
Once you determine that, each piece of content you create should be aligned with your goal and contribute to your desired outcome.
In sum, start with your goals, then create your content.
Create a Buyer Persona
Building a content strategy is more than considering what type of content you want to create. You first need to know who you’re speaking to, how you want to speak to them, and where to find them.
The key to creating successful inbound content is to make each reader feel like you’re speaking directly to them.
The only way to do this is to get intimate with your visitors, leads, and customers — you need to know them like you know an old friend. You should be aware of their obstacles, their pain points, their challenges, and fears. Similarly, you should understand their best possible outcome, their dream solution, and their biggest fantasies.
Always remember that you are marketing tohumans想要感觉到联系。
Ideally you’d know and be able to speak directly to every individual that visits your website, but you can’t. The solution? Create a buyer persona.
Your buyer persona is the person that you want to reach with your content. This semi-fictional character serves as a representation of your target audience, i.e., the people who are most likely to benefit from your message and become customers.
Creating a buyer persona takes a bit of research, some guesswork, and tweaking. But the end result is a clear picture of the person you want to market to and someone who will happily consume your content.
Not sure where to start? UseMakeMyPersonato build out your buyer persona.
Rely on the Buyer’s Journey
If you’ve ever had a headache, the first thing you likely did was try to figure out the cause. Perhaps you were dehydrated, or caffeine-depleted, or maybe you were sick. After you diagnosed the problem, you moved on to solutions — drink some water, grab an espresso, or take some medicine. Finally, you decide between solutions: Evian or tap water? Starbucks or Peet’s Coffee? Aleve or Tylenol? Hopefully, your headache then subsided and you were able to go about your day.
This is a representation of the buyer’s journey. Each of your prospects follows a path to a solution — that path involves awareness, consideration, and decision stages. But each of your prospects is in a different part of that journey, so it’s important to use your content to appeal to each stage.
通过为买家旅程的每个阶段创建内容，您可以确保没有访客陷入裂缝，并且进入您网站的每个人都感觉到他们正在收到相关，有用的信息。
You also want to select a format for your content so that it’s tailored to each stage of the buyer’s journey. A new visitor in the awareness stage won’t want a live demo of your product, but theywould阅读快速清单或博客文章，以帮助他们更好地理解自己的问题。决策阶段的前景不需要了解所有可能的解决方案，他们需要咨询或演示，以表明他们您的产品是rightsolution. Always meet your audience where they are.
Here’s a guide to the best content formats for each stage of the buyer’s journey:
Awareness:Whitepaper, Blog Post, Checklist, Tip Sheet, Infographic, Ebook, Game, Quiz
Consideration:Podcast, Webinar, Worksheet, Comparison Matrix, Template
Decision:Demo, Free Trial, Product Guide, Consultation, Coupon
执行内容审核
无论您是在没有任何明确方向的情况下创建内容，还是一直遵循策略，每个营销部门都可以从内容审核中受益。仅仅因为您没有从明确定义的策略开始，并不意味着您已经不适合其中的内容。
A content audit is simply taking inventory of the work you’ve already done, then organizing it to fit under a your new content plan.
The process might involve some re-writing, or it could reveal gaps that need to be filled with content that appeals to your persona and their journey stage.
Here’s how you’d perform your content audit:
- Gather all of your content in a spreadsheet.
- Create columns for target keywords, buyer persona, buyer’s journey stage, format, and main topic, then fill these in for each content piece.
- Add columns for your key metrics, like page views, shares, engagement, etc.
- Finally, categorize each post (using highlights or another column) by those that are doing well, need improvement, should be rewritten, or can be merged with another post.
While a content audit may seem tedious, all the manual labor will be worth the增加交通和线索。另外，您将有一个验证的计划向前发展。
If this process seems a bit overwhelming, check out这个帖子有关更多指导。
Choose the Right Format
Remember that buyer person you created? You’re creating contentforthem. That means you should be crafting content in a format that is most easily and enjoyably consumed by your prospects.
你选择的格式可能是一个博客,视频,slideshare, graphic, ebook, whitepaper, podcast, or whatever your creative mind can conceive. As long as it serves your persona, you’ll be in good shape.
Also, you don’t need to stick to one format for every piece of content that you create. But you should be able to create content — in whatever format — on a consistent cadence. What I mean is, a podcast series might be a great marketing tactic, but if you lack the resources (and patience) to stick to it, then a blog might be a better route.
选择您的内容格式时，请使用这些问题作为指导：
- What stage of buyer’s journey is this for?
- How easy is it for your audience to consume this content?
- Where does your persona spend their time online?
- 您可以一致地创建哪种格式？
- Are you able to produce this content at aquality level that’s competitive?
Content Promotion
What good is it to create all this great content if no one sees it? In a perfect world, herds of people would flock to your site every time you published a new post. In reality — especially when you’re just starting out — you’ll need to entice people to consume your content and even shepherd them into your online space.
Hence why content promotion is just as important to your strategy as whatever content you create.
你的推广计划应该遵循你的人员na. Where do they spend their time online? What time of day do they use a particular platform? How often do they want to see content from you? How do they like to consume content? What email subject lines get them to click?
Content promotion varies by medium, and there arespecific rules to followfor each.
社交媒体
虽然社交媒体是一种建立关系工具，但可以是used to promote content。It’s all about finding the right balance between self-promotion, sharing useful information, and entertainment. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, and Snapchat are all great mediums to both create and share relevant content. The key is modifying that content to fit the platform.
Featured Resources
- How to Use Twitter for Business (+ Follower Growth Tracking Template)
- 30 Days of Instagram: A Guide for Businesses
- How to Attract Customers With Facebook
Email Marketing
Email is one of the best ways to reach your audience for any reason, especially topromote content。The reason is anyone on your email list has opted in to hear from youand哟u can guarantee that they’ll get your messages. Better yet, you can improve your open rates by sending relevant content to segmented lists, meaning they’ll be eager to read everything you send their way.
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付费促销
Pay-per-click (PPC) helps you get your content in front of new audiences through targeted, paid advertisements. These ads can run on social media, search engines, or other websites. Once you define your buyer persona, you’ll want to go the paid route so not to waste money targeting uninterested parties. Once you have your audience down,paid promotioncan yield a great ROI.
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Syndication
Getting your content promoted through authoritative, third-party channels is a great way to build your audience. Syndication gets your brand in front of fresh eyes (and wallets) that you wouldn’t otherwise reach with your own efforts.
Repurposing Content
When you repurpose content, you’re reusing something you spent a lot of time to create and transforming it in various formats so that it can be more widely consumed.
Think of it as recycling. You want to spend less time creating and more time getting your content in front of your audience. For example, that blog post that you wrote on marketing stats can also serve as a great infographic or even a video.
If you created something in one format, try to think of all the other ways that you could reuse that information that might be just as effective.
内容创建过程
We marketers are busy. We don’t have time to waste on inefficient systems. That’s why we create processes for everything we do. We devise a system, roll it out, tweak it until it works, then repeat that system over and over to generate the results we want. Think about every marketing campaign you’ve ever done — webinars, autoresponders, surveys. Each of them had a process. Content creation is no different.
Follow these steps to create content, remove the guesswork, and allow for more creative mental space.
1. SEO Research
Creating your buyer persona likely gave you some ideas about what topics to write about and what questions your audience might have, which is a great start. Now, you need to confirm if those ideas can apply on a bigger scale to a larger audience. Sure, it would be great to write a blog post directed toward a single person, but,boy, would it be a waste of energy.
SEO research — a.k.a. keyword research — will show you the search volume of a specific keyword phrase and whether it’s worth the investment of creating a piece of content around it.
A good way to go about keyword research is to write down some questions that your persona might have based on their obstacles and goals. Then, perform some keyword research around those queries to see if enough people are searching for them. A rule of thumb is to target keywords that are attainable, meaning that have a monthly search volume (MSV) and keyword difficulty that corresponds to your domain authority. Trying to target high volume (read: highly competitive) keywords when you’ve just started blogging won’t pan out too well for you.
在我们进一步前进之前，让我们绕开一个快速差的SEO解释：
One important factor that helps you to rank in search engines is domain authority. You gain domain authority by how many external sites link back to your content. In order for this to happen, you need to have a pretty large library of content that is valuable enough to cite. That means, the longer you write high quality content, the higher your domain authority and the easier it is to rank for highly competitive keywords that will put you on the first page of Google.
If you’re not quite there yet, the best thing to do is to targetlong-tail, low-volume keywords with minimal keyword difficulty (<50) — we’re talking 200-1000 MSV. This will give you the best chance at ranking for keywords and getting your content in front of more people.
SEO课程结束。返回我们的计划编程。
There are a few ways you could perform your keyword research:
- Use keyword research tools, likeSEMRushorMoz关键字资源管理器。
- 将关键字输入到搜索引擎中，并记下自动填充的查询。
- Check out the related searches section on search engine results pages (SERPs).
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2. Ideation
现在，您已经确定了要定位的关键字，现在该集思广益一些内容想法了。HubSpot研究表明，组织内容的最佳方法是通过topic clusters, meaning you create a long-form, comprehensive pillar page based on a keyword that then links to content you’ve created on related subtopics (think blog posts).
To illustrate the point, it looks something likethis。
The topic cluster model makes brainstorming so much easier because now you have structure to follow (... told you we like processes). You can use your main keyword to create a pillar piece that covers that topic in depth, like … say a guide to content creation. Then, you can create shorter pieces of content — infographics, blog posts, templates — that help your audience dive deeper into the topic and target long-tail keywords.
If you’re stumped for ideas, you might want to consider looking for inspiration from books you’ve read, industry studies, your competitor’s sites, or related searches on SERPs.
一旦所有的想法都淡化，您就可以发展自己的想法editorial calendarand start creating.
3. Writing
I’m going to talk about the writing process because … well, that’s what I do.Yourspecific content creation strength might be videos or graphics or podcasts. Whatever it is, the creation process follows some pretty similar guidelines:
- 写信给你的角色。利用他们的声音，委婉语，甚至幽默来构建引起共鸣的作品。
- Use titles, meta descriptions, and other teasers to compel your audience to read your content. Put the benefit of your contentrightin the title to let them know why they should read it.
- Create something unique. Don’t simply regurgitate the information that’s already out there. Infuse a unique style or cite new research to emphasize your points.
- Stick to one idea and use your content to reinforce it. Don’t confuse your reader by going on tangents or trying to explain multiple semi-related topics in a single piece.
- 忠于你的声音。不要试图用雄辩的散文或广阔的词汇来吸引您的听众they不要那样说话。
- Be concise and clear. You want your audience to relate to you and derive value from your content … and not have to sift through jargon or confusing metaphors.
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4.编辑
您（或其他人）的工作方式是一个非常主观的过程。您可能需要随身携带编辑，或者您可能会等几天，然后用新鲜的眼睛查看工作。您可能会非常关心语法，或者您的目标是要进行更口语。
Either way, there are a few things that should definitely look out for as you refine your content, like active voice, clear language, short sentences, and plenty of whitespace. Consider having a colleague or manager review your work, too.
Some tools that will help you cut down on your editing time areGrammarlyand海明威编辑。
5. Uploading
现在您的内容已经准备好了，您需要将其放置在人们可以访问它的地方。内容管理系统（CMS）是托管数字内容的软件，并允许您在网站（或网络上的其他雷竞技苹果下载官方版任何地方）显示。
CMS的好处是它将您的所有内容连接并存储在一个地方。因此，您可以轻松地链接到博客文章中的着陆页，或在电子邮件中插入内容优惠。不仅如此，您还可以分析为特定广告系列创建的所有内容的结果（这可以帮助进行内容审核）。CMS可以使您免于具有脱节的内容营销系统。
例如，CMS Hubis home to our blog, where you get access to all of our great content and useful free offers.
6. Publishing
Publishing content is as simple as clicking a button. So, why include a section on it? Well, because it’s not always that simple. Yes, you can publish your content immediately after uploading, or you can maximize its impact by waiting for an optimal time.
If you’re just starting out, then clicking publish right away probably won’t impact your audience too much. But if you have committed to a regular publishing schedule, like delivering a new post every Wednesday, your audience will expect to see posts published on Wednesdays.
Something else to keep in mind is to publish according to trends or time-sensitive events. For example, if you create content about national holidays or current events, then you’ll want to publish those at specific times.
A CMS will allow you schedule posts for a future date and specific time, so you can click, schedule, and forget.
内容创建Tools
While a CMS will help you manage your content, it won’t help you create it. That’s where content creation tools come in handy. These are especially useful if you’re artistically impaired, like me, or if you don’t have the capacity to hire help. From GIFs to infographics, these content creation tools will help you look like a professional, regardless of what kind of content you’re making.
Canvawill help you create beautiful designs for any platform, from social ads to Facebook cover photos to infographics. The software features aesthetically pleasing templates that you can customize with colors, images, and text ... for free.
GiphyGIF已经取代emojis完全正常form of communication, and, therefore, an acceptable way to present content. Giphy allows you to search millions of pre-created GIFs in their database or even create your own.
Vidyardis a video hosting platform that was made for marketers. The software allows you to customize your video by adding overlays, text, or CTA buttons, split test, transcribe, and has SEO features.
SurveyMonkeyis a leading survey creation platform. Why might you need such a thing? Because a good marketer knows that customer feedback is critical to an effective marketing campaign.
MakeMyPersona是HubSpot自己的精美工具，它将引导您完成创建买家角色的过程。您可以在整个内容创建过程中生成文档以参考。
锚is the podcasting tool for beginners. It’s free, allows you to record and store unlimited episodes, and you can easily upload to any third-party platform.
This is far from an exhaustive list of all the great content creation tools out there —此列表is much better!
创建内容计划
Content exists everywhere, but its success relies on哟urability to adapt it to the medium on which it lives. One size does not fit all when it comes to posting on different mediums — or the platforms within those mediums, for that matter.
Social media content varies from blog content, which is different than website content. So, you need to know how to tailor your creation to reach your audience where they are.
Let’s dive into some guidelines for sharing content on various platforms.
社交媒体Content
There is an art tocreating content for social media。但这非常值得您花时间2.6 billion全球社交媒体平台的用户。另外，在社交媒体上关注您的人就像一个热情的领导 - 他们已经喜欢您，并且对您所说的话感兴趣。因此，您有一个渴望与您的内容互动的观众。
Here are a few quick tips for creating content on some popular social channels.
Facebook可以用来通过Facebook组来建立微社区，也可以在Facebook页面上与大众分享。在共享内容时，问题和视频获得最大的参与。
Instagram最适合与简短标题共享高质量的图像和简短视频。只要与您的帐户和业务相关，主题标签在此平台上都可以很好地工作。Instagram Stories推出了一种与您的追随者互动的新方法，从快速民意调查到问题再到实时视频。
YouTubehas1.3 billion users和计数。用户经常观看此平台，以观看从DIY视频到模仿的内容。该平台上一些最成功的内容是How-To指南，视频博客，产品评论和教育视频。
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Twitterbest practices include short messages, supporting images, relevant hashtags, and retweets. And, of course, replies go a long way to win over your audience.
Website Content
Website content should focus on three things: your persona, your target keywords, and your solution. Not unlike your blog content, the copy on your website needs to guide visitors to your solution in a cohesive and natural way. Think of web content like a map to your product.
Be careful not to turn visitors away through social media feeds and other distracting elements. Once you you’ve attracted a potential customer, you must do everything you can to keep them there, and that’s the key function of your website content.
博客Content
The purpose of blog content is to support your business by attracting strangers and bringing in qualified leads. Blog content is a free resource that’s not often directly tied to sales, but don’t underestimate the power of a well-crafted blog to ultimately generaterevenuefor your business. Research shows that companies that blog more get more traffic and more leads than those that don’t.
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Analyzing Your Content
The final, and arguably most important step in content creation is analyzing your content. Without data, you can’t know what’s working or how to improve it.
There are several data points you could track when analyzing your content, so use your goals as a guide to set some parameters. Whatever you want to accomplish with your content will help you choose your metrics. (Remember that initial goal we talked about?)
What you analyze is completely up to you, but here are some ideas for metrics to track:
- Page Views:the number of users that visit your content.
- 有机交通：the amount of traffic that comes from search engines.
- 跳出率：the percentage of visitors who leave your site after visiting only one page.
- Conversion Rates:游客与CTA的百分比。
- Engagement Rates:the number of people that interact with your content through likes, shares, comments, or in other ways.
- Audience Growth:the new subscribers or leads that are generated from a piece of content.
If you need more tips on analyzing your content, check out this freeHubSpot Academy course。
Start Creating
Content creation is an iterative process that pays off tremendously with your audience. Once you have the content creation process down, you’ll be able to generate creative work that not only delights your audience but also grows your business.
Editor's note: This post was originally published in August 2018 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.
Originally published Oct 19, 2020 7:00:00 AM, updated October 26 2020
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内容创建