Getting Started with Lead Nurturing: Make Your Content Strategy

Content is the fuel that drives lead nurturing campaigns. However, it can’t be just any content but pertinent, remarkable content, which clicks with your target audience. And to create such content you need a sound content strategy.

Here are 4 steps to a proven lead nurturing content strategy.

1. Create Buyer Personas:

Buyer personas help you understand your customers better. They allow you to think of all the possible uses of product (service) and help identify what will click with your real audience. Apart from demographics, you also need to know your prospects’ biggest concerns, their decision-making process and influencers, their preferred source of content, their favorite places online etc.

2. Map Content to Buying Cycle:

Identify which content will work for which stage in the buying cycle.

• Top of the funnel (TOFU): This audience is being acquainted with your brand or has a need that your service may possibly fulfill.
• Middle of the Funnel (MOFU): this audience shows interest in knowing your product more.
• Bottom of the Funnel (BOFU) : this audience knows that your product addresses their requirement/challenge and are evaluating options.

For more details on content mapping and funnel management, check out our infographic, Demystifying the leads funnel.

3. Conduct Content Audit:

Evaluate your current content assets to identify what type of content you have (white papers, demos, webinars…); and how many of these pieces are reusable, and how many need to be refurbished, or retired.

• Identify Gaps: you should also be able to identify gaps in your current content stock to prepare a list of content assets, which need to be created.

4. Create Editorial Calendar:

This is your roadmap to creating new content with directions on what needs to be created, for which audience and by when it needs to be published to get best results from your nurture campaign.

• Repurpose Content: Lead Nurturing needs content – and lots of it. But you can’t turn into a content churning machine and you can’t wait months to get the content volumes to start your campaign. Ideal is to create valuable pieces of content and repurpose them.

Go ahead and create your strategy and I will prepare my next post on content best practices for lead nurturing.