Attempting to tackle your entire content marketing to-do list in one day could be overwhelming. Actually, it would be VERY overwhelming. But if you can commit to doing one thing each day over the next 12 days leading up to Christmas, you'll be on the road to improving your overall content marketing efforts that will have you ringing in the New Year on the right foot!

It's Thanksgiving week, which is a time to reflect on all of the things that make you happy, contribute to your success, and help you to grow. So in true Thanksgiving week fashion, we're reflecting on why we're thankful for inbound marketing. 

We believe that a solid inbound marketing strategy paired with sales performance is the key to results, and inbound marketing is the ideal approach to quality lead generation that aligns with a sales team's strategy to deliver the results a company needs for success. Below are just three reasons we're thankful for inbound marketing, and why we believe in, and stand behind, this methodology and the work that we do with our clients. 

Have you been churning out quality content for years for your business and industry? Does traffic to your blog still come from old posts? Are ebooks published three years ago still converting? You're not alone.

"I have no idea how to get Millennials to _______________"
-Every client that I've spoken to in the last 16 years.

Ever since 2002, business owners have struggled to attract the Millennial generation, those born between 1981 and 1996. Millennials are quite different than the Boomers and Gen X who I worked with during my tenure at my advertising agency in the 2000's. And it has taken the marketing world, especially the small- and medium-sized businesses a long time to figure them out (if they have at all).

But to be honest, that's not important right now.  

Your company brand is more than your logo and website. Your brand is your company’s identity. It’s how others perceive you. You can’t buy one, borrow one or steal one. You have to build it. You earn your brand over time. Your brand can be built by maintaining consistent one-to-one message communication and value delivery to your prospects and clients over an extended period of time. But if you rely on this alone, the progress of building and establishing your brand will be slow.

Is a blog a marketing tool or a sales tactic? The answer is yes. A blog that’s a forum for educational content that resonates with your target personas is both. Blogging has long been identified as a productive marketing tool. Blogging supports marketing’s objectives when its' content attracts new visitors to your website and helps convert those visitors to leads. However, if that’s the only function of your blog, then you’re missing out.      

Content creation can be a robust process depending on the amount of content you are publishing during a set timeframe. To keep your process organized and strategic (and to keep marketers sane), we’ve found a detailed content calendar is key. This post lists a few benefits of using a content calendar and a few items we think should be included on every content calendar to make it most efficient and beneficial.

Creating compelling B2B content is only half the battle when it comes to a solid content marketing strategy for your business. While your content must be grammatically correct, educational, formatted properly, and a good representation of your brand, it must also be strategically created following proven best practices that most inbound marketers follow. These tactics are what help ensure your content isn’t just interesting or nice to read, but ultimately driving prospects closer to doing business with you and taking some kind of action or next step.

When it comes to developing a strategic marketing plan or sales process, one of the first things we recommend any company to do is to get a clear and accurate understanding of their customers and prospects. What’s key here is that this profile (commonly called a Target or Buyer Persona) is based on research, not assumptions. Which means you’ll need to conduct some actual research (or hire a company like LeadG2 to do it for you). The most effective way of doing this is with a mix of online surveys and live interviews. The surveys allow for a large sampling size, while the interviews allow for a deeper dive and further understanding. You can dive a little deeper into what that target persona survey process might look like here, but for the sake of this article we’ll be focusing on what it is exactly that your Target Persona should tell you about your B2B prospects so that you can have better and smarter marketing, content, and sales conversations.

Here’s a question that we've received a few times from regular readers of our blog:

What would you say is the right number of blog posts a business should post each week?