Six Ways to Create Original Inbound Marketing Content

• What should we write about?
• Who will write it?
• How much content do we need to publish?

6 Close-to-Home Resources for Developing New Inbound Marketing Content

1. Your Own Customers

Ask yourself: what kinds of questions do you seem to hear from customers over and over?

These are the questions that your inbound marketing content should answer. If there are topics that seem to resurface with every phone call to a potential customer, you might consider creating blog posts around them. Remember that the questions your customers have tend to align with questions other potential customers-- who are in the buying process-- may rely on to make purchasing decisions.

Related Read: How to Turn Customers into Business Drivers

2. Your own Salespeople

Long gone are the days of underestimating the salespeople who work for us-- your salespeople are constantly out in the field and on the phone talking to potential buyers. If you don't recognize the opportunity this presents, you may want to look a little harder.

The questions that salespeople address tend to be different from those that you might receive from existing customers. This grants a unique window into your audience's desires-- one that your current customers can't always offer.

You should seek feedback from your salespeople. Use their experiences and opinions to create simple, effective resources like checklists, eBooks, and blog posts. Your salespeople-- and the potential clients that they talk to-- can help you market to buyers throughout their buyer journeys.

3. Your Website's Live Chat and Chatbot Results

More and more companies are running chatbot and/or live chat to help customers and potential buyers while they're on your website. These conversations are recorded in a thread that you can read. You can also see which chatbot actions were most popular. If you see some trends, make sure you have content on your website that supports what people are looking for. Odds are good, other people are looking too! 

Thinking about adding a chatbot and live chat? You might be interested in reading: Live Chat Vs. Bots: Which Should You Use?

4. Industry News

News regulations, certifications, research findings, and new technologies directly influence how businesses market and conduct business. If you want to attract a broad audience, consider addressing these breakthroughs as they occur. It positions you as an authority figure to lend clarity on complex new ideas-- and it's a great way to fit timely content into your site, too.

If you jump on top of these opportunities quickly enough, you can avoid looking like a part of a "bandwagon" that will focus on the same development after time goes by. 

5. Your Personal Experiences

Many of us underestimate the validity and usefulness of our own personal experiences; but have you ever solved a problem for a client and been hit with an idea for a blog post that addressed the problem and how to solve it?

This is a perfect example of how businesses and content creators can use their own personal experiences to create enticing inbound marketing content. Take some time to think about what you've been working on lately-- is there any sort of useful information that you can pull from it to create helpful resources? Is there a case study that you can create from your most recent project? Or a how-to blog post or video?

If you've solved problems that others could experience, that's an opportunity to teach your audience. Odds are good that you can create a resource that would make a great content that people would be willing to download in exchange for their email address.

6. Content Experts in Your Organization

It's easy to rely solely on your sales and marketing teams to create inbound content. There's no doubt that these team members are knowledgeable about your product or service's key features and benefits, but can they lend you niche advice or information? 

Look to the breadth of knowledge in your operations department-- especially if you're in a specialized industry.

For example: We have clients in the like the healthcare B2B sector. In this case, there are clinicians who can address issues that another clinician would have and be able to word it in a way that speaks to their colleagues. While you don't want to get too technical and deep in jargon, they can give you ideas and key phrases that are important for that target audience.

Another thing: in our experience, content experts don't have the time to write blogs. They typically need to focus their attention elsewhere. However, they are usually up for reviewing a blog that you write on their behalf, based on the information they provided. Conduct an interview and record it so that the writer can pull out the information and turn it into website content. Another option: Video record the expert and turn that into a video or two on the topic they're addressing.

Other Steps to Improve Inbound Marketing Content

Companies can take a wide variety of steps to improve the quality of their content which should result in more website traffic. Think about these things as you choose what to write about:

Topic Research 

You probably have a few key topics that you can write a lot about. Break that down into a diagram and understand what kind of content you have already and what you can add to show a topic cluster to Google. There is software that offers this feature, as well as a few other services that will help you understand which topics and phrases are most commonly searched. Construct your content about what people want to know, and what you have to offer. For more on topic clusters, read: Topic Clusters: What You Need to Know.

Focus on Creating evergreen content

Evergreen content is so-named because it's like an evergreen tree: useful and present year-round. All of your website marketing content doesn't need to be evergreen, especially when you're talking about industry news or the latest technology. But choose a few things that can be lasting then write about those, and rewrite occasionally too. Make updates as appropriate a few times a year (just like we did to this blog originally posted in 2016 with several updates over the years).

Also, check out your blog stats over time. You might be surprised to see which content is really drawing in visitors months or even years after you've written it. Expand in that direction. Create downloadable content and start leading those visitors to the next step: becoming a lead.

Create content for all phases of the buyer's journey

You will have some potential buyer who are just getting started researching. Others have made some decisions and they're in the process of narrowing down their selection.  

This means that you may have some content that seems elementary to some.... because they've already finished that part of the buyer's journey. And, that's fine because you should also have some content that seems advanced to others that are not that far long in the buyer's journey yet.

Both types of content are good. Both are needed to help people grow that trust with your organization regardless of how far along they are.

Keep on Tracking and Trucking

Create a content calendar and get a plan in place as soon as you can so that you have a steady flow of new and updated website content. Your visibility in Google depends on this. And your sales team needs you to drive in more visitors so that you can create more leads.

There's no time to waste! If you are running an inbound marketing program and would like to get things done faster you might be interested in our guide on how to get things done in HubSpot. 

Originally published June 2016. Revised July 2020.