Auto news on Youtube Jun 27 2018

Before we begin, let's take a moment to revisit the buyer's

journey. The buyer's journey has a similar corresponding

marketing funnel, and when both are used side-by-side, I like to

call them the "marketing machine." The marketing

machine relates each buyer's journey stage to a corresponding

marketing funnel stage; the awareness stage relates to visit

and lead, the consideration stage relates to marketing

qualified lead, or MQL, and sales qualified lead, or SQL,

and the decision stage relates to opportunity and customer.

These funnels are designed to help you visualize and guide a

prospect through the stages of the buyer's journey so that

you can effectively measure your funnel and provide a tailored

message to that prospect at their particular stage in the

buyer's journey. It's important to understand the

relationship between both funnels because they're

working toward the same goal; attracting your prospects,

converting them into leads, closing them into customers, and

eventually delighting them, turning them into evangelists. A

marketing machine is not developed overnight. It takes a

lot of time and planning to build. This is where long-term

content planning comes in. So what's involved in developing

a long-term content plan? There are three steps you must take to

create a long-term content plan; setting marketing goals,

auditing or assessing your organization's initiatives and

assets, and identifying the buyer's journey for your buyer

personas. The ultimate objective here is to have a unifying

document you can use to keep track of your long-term content

marketing initiatives. First, let's talk about setting your

marketing goals. By setting marketing goals, you can develop

a long-term vision and short-term motivation. Goals

help you organize your time and resources so you can make the

most of your content creation efforts. Each piece of content

created for a marketing initiative should be tied to a

goal that's also directly related to the overarching goals

of the organization. This will help you stay laser-focused with

the content creation process. Let's take a second to think

about this. If your company's quarterly customer goal is 15

new customers and you know the number of leads needed to

generate 15 customers is 50 leads, and if you know the

number of website visits needed to generate 50 leads is 1,000

visits, then you need to take into consideration the content

needed to hit your visits goal. Each goal you set should be a

SMART goal. That is specific, measurable, attainable,

relevant, and timely. A potential SMART goal example

could be increase quarterly site visits by 20%. That's 5,000

per quarter to 6,000 per quarter by the end of the year. The

second step in creating a long-term content plan is

auditing or assessing your organization's initiatives and

assets. Your audit is going to consist of two parts. First,

auditing your content assets, and second, auditing your

event-based priorities. Let's begin with the content audit.

Your goal with the content audit is to identify all of the

marketing assets you have at your disposal and potentially

identify gaps or opportunities in your content strategy. There

comes a point for every marketer who has been generating content

for a while when they realize they have no idea where all of

their content is or how much they actually have. Content has

likely been created by you, your predecessors, or other

individuals in the marketing department, including subject

matter experts from other departments, and is scattered

just about everywhere. By doing your content audit, you'll be

able to identify resources that you already have, which could

save you hours of content creation time in the future. No

use in duplicating your efforts. When it comes to documenting a

content audit, there should be a place for you to insert all of

your assets and properly categorize them based on content

title, buyer's journey stage, marketing funnel stage, format

or type of content, which buyer persona this is targeting, and

any additional notes that provide value or context. Now,

it's time to do some digging for content assets, such as

guides, worksheets, or sales collateral. I'd recommend

systematically combing through the following dark corners where

content can typically be hiding, like that old file manager or

marketing folder on your computer. Ask your sales team

what type of collateral they use. Check in with the more

tenured employees (you'll be surprised at the wealth of

knowledge here). Pore through your customer relationship

management system, also known as a CRM, and your content

management system, also known as a CMS. Okay, I think you get the

picture here. Let's take a look at a content audit from a

HubSpot customer by the name of Maren Schmidt. Maren offers

advice and resources backed by more than 30 years of experience

working with young children. Notice how Maren already has

content spanning the awareness, consideration, and decision

stages of the buyer's journey for multiple buyer personas, and

each piece of content corresponds to a specific

lifecycle stage. Additionally, Maren has many different types

of content formats to offer her buyer personas, like an ebook, a

study guide, and a webinar. Note how Maren uses the "Notes"

field to explain the contents of her content offer, though she

may not need this for each piece of content in her audit. Now

that Maren has documented her assets, she'll be able to

refer to this audit in the future to pinpoint what content

she already has and how it can help with future content

creation initiatives. The second part to completing your audit is

to conduct an audit on your event-based initiatives. What I

mean by this is you'll need to take into account any upcoming

projects, priorities, or events that might involve content

creation. Doing this exercise will help you identify content

that could support each initiative, but also, and more

importantly, it can give you an opportunity to see how you can

connect this content back to the buyer's journey through an

inbound marketing campaign. An event-based audit should be

organized by the following areas: upcoming priorities by

month, initiative overview, theme, prospective blog post

topics based on buyer personas, and an inbound marketing

campaign that ties together your efforts. Take a look at what

Maren did for her event-based audit. You can see that Maren

has a few events and workshops that she might need content for.

You can also see that the content is grouped into an

overall theme for the next three months with associated blog

topics that integrate with an inbound marketing campaign

called "Preparing Your Home the Montessori Way," which is

an ebook. Try and imagine for a minute if Maren only planned the

month, initiative overview, and theme without keywords and blog

post topics that associate with a relevant inbound marketing

campaign. Yes, she would have noted that there are a series of

events coming up in the next few months, but she would have

missed out on the opportunity to tie everything together with a

series of blog posts that could lead to a relevant content offer

that would provide value to her marketing machine. Simply adding

these two columns maximizes your content potential and forces you

to think bigger than just the events at hand. There's one

last important step needed to create a sustainable long-term

content plan and that's identifying the buyer's

journey for your buyer personas. Remember, you're creating

content that's meant to attract and pull your buyer

personas through every stage of the buyer's journey: from the

awareness stage where it's more problem-based, through the

consideration stage where you're discussing a solution,

and ending in the decision stage where you're recommending next

steps. Simply identifying this content will give you ideas to

work with in the future. But before you can identify the

buyer's journey, you first need to know your buyer

personas. Keeping this in mind, let's take a look at one of

Maren's buyer persona's, Montessori Mom Meena. Here's

an overview of Meena as a buyer persona. Meena's a devoted

mother, a working professional, and married with at least one

child under the age of six. Meena wants to understand child

development and do what's best for her children, understand how

to set limits for behavior, and have effective communication

tools to use with her children. Meena's challenges are her

children won't listen and she has to deal with tantrums, all

of which overwhelm her as a parent. Maren knows that Meena

uses Google to find answers to problems she's looking to

solve. Great. Now that you know who Meena is, let's take

a look at what the buyer's journey might look like for her

in more detail. To start, you know it's important for Meena

to do what's best for her children, so what about an

awareness stage ebook that lists parenting problems you can

avoid. This is something that would bring value to Meena's

search. Then, once Meena's been educated on parenting

problems to avoid, what about following up with consideration

stage information like a questionnaire regarding family

needs to help her understand a possible solution - in this

case, Montessori. The questionnaire outlines both the

needs of the child as well as the parent. But maybe Meena

needs a little more information that will lead her to the

decision stage, something that educates her more on how to best

prepare for Montessori. What about a free consideration stage

workshop that explains how to prepare your home the Montessori

way? That could do the trick. And now that Meena has found a

solution to her problem, she's ready to make a decision. What

about offering Meena a one-hour strategy consultation to discuss

next steps for her child and Montessori? Sounds about right.

That's an example of a complete buyer's journey. A

buyer's journey is ever-evolving. The more you

learn about your buyer personas, the more you'll be able to

refine the buyer's journey and grow it over time. But it starts

with first identifying the content needed to complete the

buyer's journey, which you can then plan over the course of a

year to keep your content creation sustainable.