Content Marketing Conquered – How to Build Your Inbound Marketing Funnel

Course Overview

Three practical and interactive workshops on content marketing will show you how to understand your customers’ buyer behaviour, refine your online value proposition and key differentiators, and the different content you need for each stage of the inbound journey.

You’ll learn how to grow as a content marketer and work effectively with others in your organisation to develop your customer insight, clarify your points of difference, and build the foundations for lasting success.

Session one – The Destination: How to create content that reaches your customer’s heart, and mind

It’s not enough to think like a customer, we need to get inside their head to truly understand what motivates them and makes them tick. Unless you’re able to spend time with your customers, you can only make assumptions about what they want and the solutions they require. This session will take you through the process of characterising your customer step by step, until you feel confident about what they want to achieve.

If you don’t get to talk to your customers directly, we have several strategies to help you find the answers to these questions, before starting to develop Buyer Personas of your own.  

Session two – Get Ready: From ‘top of mind’ to ‘top of preference’: how to become the clear choice for customers.

This session will help you discover how you are unique. As Sainsburys said: “Our Values Make Us Different”. It’s as true for businesses, charities, agencies, corporations and sole traders as it is for us as people. Each has a personality and identity. But it is how you apply your values and deliver the benefit of them to your customers that is unique.

If you can turn your values into the value they deliver to your customers, then you’re really onto something. It’s time to show them what you do and why only you can do it.  

Session three – The Inventory: How to design a Content Marketing plan that keeps you sane

If you have been marketing your business, products and services for some time, you will have a back-catalogue to harvest for content ideas and online content to share more widely.

This includes any digital content assets, but may also include offline, traditional marketing materials – even old brochures and reports. The efficient content marketer will look for opportunities to re-use and repurpose older content, or ‘hero’ assets like video, podcasts, webinars, online events and e-books.

Course Content

1. The Destination: How to create content that reaches your customer’s heart, and mind.

It’s not enough to think like a customer, we need to get inside their head to truly understand what motivates them and makes them tick. Unless you’re able to spend time with your customers, you can only make assumptions about what they want and the solutions they require. This session will take you through the process of characterising your customer step by step until you feel confident about what they want to achieve.

If you don’t get to talk to your customers directly, we have several strategies to help you find the answers to these questions, before starting to develop Buyer Personas of your own.

We will cover:

• Exploring the customer journey
• Customer data versus customer insight
• The value of developing buyer personas
• Applying buyer personas to your content marketing plans

The workbook that accompanies this session, How to Target Customers with Content Marketing, takes you through each stage of buyer persona development.

2. Get Ready: From ‘top of mind’ to ‘top of preference’: how to become the clear choice for customers.

This session will help you discover how you are unique. As Sainsburys said: “Our Values Make Us Different”. It’s as true for businesses, charities, agencies, corporations and sole traders as it is for us as people. Each has a personality and identity. But it is how you apply your values and deliver the benefit of them to your customers that is unique.

If you can turn your values into the value they deliver to your customers, then you’re really onto something. It’s time to show them what you do and why only you can do it.

We will cover:

• Exploring the value in your brand
• Reviewing your organisational values
• Developing your mission statement
• Defining what makes you different
• Clarifying your value proposition

The workbook that accompanies this session, Get Ready, where we look more closely at what makes you stand out from the crowd.

3. The Inventory: How to design a Content Marketing plan that keeps you sane.

If you have been marketing your business, products and services for some time, you will have a back-catalogue to harvest for content ideas and online content to share more widely.

This includes any digital content assets, but may also include offline, traditional marketing materials – even old brochures and reports. The efficient content marketer will look for opportunities to re-use and repurpose older content, or ‘hero’ assets like video, podcasts, webinars, online events and e-books.

We will cover:

• The inbound or content marketing funnel
• Different content goals: ‘hub, hero and hygiene’ and ‘evergreen’
• Which content works for the different stages of the funnel
• Content marketing metrics – where to look for data
• How much you can achieve with an inventory of past and current content

The workbook that accompanies this session, The Inventory, will help you to conduct a content audit and map out the different stages and types of content required for successful content marketing.

Course Leaders