HubSpot Content Marketing Strategies Made Easy

Often businesses know they need content creation, but most do not know where to begin. They aren’t sure who they're marketing to or how to market to their target audience. This can lead to a disorganized mix of blogs, guides, social media posts, email marketing, and videos--none of which are strategically designed to pull readers in or create value.

Why should your business’s content provide value? Content marketing is a form of inbound marketing, which encourages users to visit your website through useful information, tailored to their needs.

Knowing how to curate content that meets the needs of your potential customers can be tricky, however. Especially since creating content is time-consuming (and the last thing you need to do is waste time). This makes defining your buyer’s persona and their interests related to your business a top priority. Therefore this is the first step in utilizing HubSpot for content marketing.

Identifying Your Target Audience

Understanding your target demographic can inform your content strategy. Once you identify your demographic, you can narrow your efforts with laser focus. This allows you to

• Create content that appeals to potential customers
• Increase your social media following
• Plan content clusters for future blogs, posts, and more

In other words, knowing your audience multiplies the effectiveness of your content marketing.

Studying your audience allows you to develop what's called a "buyer's persona" on HubSpot. This phrase refers to a profile of characteristics that define your business's “fictional” average customer.

Many businesses find their customers fall into multiple demographics, so they create multiple buyer personas.

For example, if your products appeal to mostly women between the ages of 17 and 30, you may want to develop a buyer persona that reflects the 17 to 21 age range, one that embodies the 22 to 25 age range, and one that represents your buyers that are 26 to 30.

To form a profile of your buyer persona, in HubSpot, use the setting icon, followed by Properties, then search for “Persona.” This will bring you to where you can click Persona on the right side of the screen and edit the profile. You can even add multiple personas on HubSpot.

Use HubSpot’s Democratic Segmentation to mark trends of your visitors’ ages, language, and location. You can also look at their common interests for clues about your buyer persona's personality.

Once you've identified your buyer personas, use them to develop your brand identity, including the tone of your content, topics, and writing style.
 

Using Knowledge of Your Target Audience to Create Content

Your buyer personas allow you to concentrate your energy on what appeals to your buyers most. This results in your content reaching a higher concentration of potential buyers.

For instance, your buyer persona that is in the 26 to 30-year-old demographic is more likely to read content on LinkedIn or attend a training webinar on your products. While your buyer persona that is in the 17 to 21-year age range is likely to identify more with influencer marketing and video marketing.

Over time, you will reach more of your target audience and increase your brand awareness.
 

Determine Your Business Goals

Why did you decide to create a content marketing strategy? Was it to boost sales or gain brand recognition? Answering these questions and recording your precise business goals allows you to measure the progress of your content marketing efforts as you implement your content strategy.

You can enter these goals into HubSpot by clicking the settings icon, then Tracking & Analytics, followed by Goals. From there, click Create.
 

Map Out Your Buyer's Journey

Putting yourself in your buyer's footsteps can help determine if your strategy and user experience is working. Navigate through your website from landing pages all the way through your sales funnel. Using user experience (UX) testing can help troubleshoot hang-ups and issues throughout your sales funnel.

HubSpot has many customer journey map templates which can help you organize and rearrange your website.
 

Identify Your Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Keywords

HubSpot has several tools to help you identify keywords that potential customers may use to find your site or similar e-commerce stores.

Keywords form the foundation of a successful content marketing strategy. As the nucleus of your content, keywords allow you to create pillar pages and then generate topic clusters, centered on those pillar pages. This structure easily transfers to a content marketing calendar and strategy.

With keywords, you can align your social media content, blog content, videos, and landing pages. You can even create blog templates and social media templates to streamline the content creation process, increasing the productivity of your content marketers.

Once your pillar pages reflect your primary keywords, your website will receive increased organic traffic and improved conversion rates.

After you've identified your keywords, goals, and target audience, you and your content marketing team can begin producing high-quality, valuable content that appeals to potential customers.

An excellent way to deepen your content library is by using the HubSpot Blog or Article Ideas Generator. All you have to do is enter a keyword and the generator will produce topic ideas. Select the most engaging, unique, and relevant ideas for the most effective content. Then decide what form of content you are going to produce.

It's important to use a variety of channels and content types that appeal to all of your buyer personas, but when you first begin, focus on your primary buyer persona.

Content types you can consider include:

• Blogs
• Ultimate Guides
• Articles
• Newsletters
• Videos
• Ebooks
• Webinars
• Infographics
• Case Studies
• White Papers
• Ads

The form of content you produce the most should reflect your target audience's interests and always be consistent in style. Consistency lets followers know what to expect and develops greater trust in your business’s brand over time.

Each content form can be used for a different purpose. When combined, all formats of content create a well-formed inbound methodology that will pull users directly to your landing pages and sales funnels.

Always use a call to action (CTA) at the end of your pieces of content. Writing something along the lines of "Discover more ways to improve your conversion rates" with a link to a blog post keeps your audience around longer, increasing the reach of your inbound marketing.

Repurposing Existing Content

If you began creating content before you had a clear strategy--that's ok. You can use your keywords and repurpose the content you already have to fit your new strategy. This will also expedite the content creation process so you can build a repertoire of valuable blogs and articles quickly.

To repurpose videos, consider changing the descriptions and video titles by adding primary keywords in those spots.
 

Create a Content Calendar and Social Media Post Schedule

After creating several pieces of content, you can begin to schedule them using HubSpot's Content Management tool. Use your traffic analytics and conversion analytics to determine which day of the week and time works best for posting new content. Select times just before you see an increase in traffic.

When publishing content, track your traffic to measure its effectiveness.

You can also test the effectiveness of each social media channel using their Facebook, Instagram, Google, and LinkedIn ad tools.
 

Give It Time

One of the biggest mistakes businesses make is to give up on blogging and social media marketing before they have a large enough collection of content pieces to be truly useful for effective inbound marketing.

Rome wasn't built in a day and neither is a captive audience of loyal followers. The best content marketing strategies gain momentum over time, fueled by social media shares and increased brand recognition.