Utilizing an inbound marketing strategy is a smart choice for any business. Inbound marketing allows you to reach multiple customer bases without exhausting your resources or sales staff.

Depending on your business model and available resources, there are many content driven campaign models that can work well for your company’s lead generation, but choosing the correct ones is imperative. Too many companies have focused heavily on brand driven content without considering conversion goals or where the lead may be in the sales funnel, which in turn depletes their marketing budgets and does not give them the quality leads they need.

Blogs

One of the standard practices of any inbound strategy is a company blog. Blogs allow you an affordable and focused content stream that can easily be posted and shared on multiple platforms. More importantly, blogs allow you to focus on specific aspects of your sales funnel and long tail search terms, allowing you to target broad terms and more niche lead groups.

The inevitable question that eventually gets asked by all companies is “well, what do we right about?”. This question can come after months or years of blog writing or even before the first word is ever written.

The concern normally lies in businesses not feeling that their business is interesting enough to be worth writing about but this could not be further from the truth. Your leads like to do there research and a quality blog can be what separate you from your competition. Not only will it give your lead much needed insight, but it also presents you as an industry leader and voice.

If you are looking into starting a company blog, start by making a list of common sales questions you receive and your responses, as well as reviewing your sales funnel to see opportunities for written content at each stage. Also remember, you can always touch up old blogs with new titles and graphics and re-release them in the future.

Infographics

Many business have a strong issue with conveying large amounts of data to their customer base in a way that effectively conveys their message without losing their attention. In more traditional sales settings like presentations, this can be accomplished, but proves to be a difficult task with inbound leads.

Infographics can be the perfect solution for this issue by offering your leads the data they need in an interesting and well organized fashion. Infographics, much like blogs, can also be a vital source for shareable content as well as a strong tool for SEO. If your business has any in-house graphic designers with any knowledge of Adobe illustrator/photoshop, many infographics can be done cheaply and efficiently, and you also have the option of visiting sites like Graphic River or Venngage to purchase templates for next to nothing.

What you should keep in mind with your infographics is to not overload any graphic with too much information. Keep them clean and focused to hold your leads attention, and choose a template or layout that can easily be altered and edited for different info and future data.

Video

Having a strong blog section on your company’s website in most cases won’t be enough. Depending on your level of competition or the size of your customer base, you may need something else to set you apart and attract new leads.

Video is a great content option, especially if done with a high level of insight and creativity. Be it live action or motion graphic based, utilizing video to bring attention to your site or social media pages can garner a lot of strong attention to your inbound campaign.

The largest concern that comes with considering adding video to your current inbound strategy is the level of commitment you need to allow to maximize its effectiveness. Most companies do not have the internal resources to self produce video content and outside firms can get spendy. Many businesses will invest in a strong front page video, but may lose focus of its conversion goal, or will not allocate funds for more video content down the road.

If you are considering adding video content to your inbound process, consider a plan that utilizes short video segments that have strong calls to action that can accompany a blog or landing page. Also, do some research into what you can accomplish yourself before investing in a production company. Many business have had success using a quality smartphone camera with decent natural lighting to create their videos, and with a little knowledge of editing software like Apple’s iMovie, you can create a polished video that doesn’t break your budget.

Conclusion

Of course these are only a few content options you can utilize in your inbound marketing campaign and you should always be on the lookout for new opportunities, but these three options will allow you to create a solid foundation to build upon in the future. Not every company has an unlimited marketing budget or hours available in the day to research and come up with the best converting content strategies, but large gains can be made with small efforts.

What’s important to keep in mind is to focus on a content strategy that does not paint you into a corner and can easily be built upon in the future. Once you have done some testing and have started to see positive results, start applying new content ideas into your inbound campaign.