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How do I create good content offers?

Content offers are information transactions between contacts and a company. Depending on the content offered, the company offers inbound content in exchange for personal data from the contact, such as their name, email, phone, or other details.

Content offer materials are available on request for the prospects and contacts. They are used to attract interest, engage with possible clients, turn prospects into leads and leads into clients. The content offered must be helpful to the audience as it aims to encourage audiences to download them and submit some personal information to access the content. Thus, the content offered must be suitable for the company’s customer personas and offer value during each stage of their buyer’s journey.

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Content offers are highly effective lead generation and lead nurturing tools. They help build trust in your brand and boost credibility by showcasing that you are an expert in your field as you teach your audience about it; showing that you have mastered the topic and skills associated with it. It also helps build awareness by engaging with audiences, which fuels the relationship-building process between the company and its contacts. Furthermore, site traffic benefits from content offers as they help your company be discovered online and boost traffic if the content is optimised according to the SEO strategy. By effectively communicating and educating audiences about their goals or problems and how they can achieve or solve them, content offers increase customer satisfaction and enables them to form realistic and focused expectations as customers.

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Content offers are created according to the customer personas and the stage of the buyer’s journey they target. In the awareness stage, audiences search for educational content to understand, articulate, and solve their challenges, so guides, videos, and templates are great content offers. In the consideration stage, prospects become aware of their goals and challenges, and they want to delve deeper into the subject, so webinars, case studies or comparison charts and reports are great content offers for this phase. Lastly, in the decision stage, prospects are ready to make a decision to achieve their goal or solve their problems, so demos, consultations or discounts are great content offers for this stage. Providing compelling content offers requires five main phases:

  • Building content offers
  • Optimising landing pages
  • Creating website forms
  • Developing content-based lead nurturing emails
  • Building lead nurturing workflows and CTAs

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1. Building content offers

The company must create content offers that are valuable to the targeted segments, offering exciting and helpful content that the audience will want to download. The content in question should not be a solo piece but rather part of an inbound marketing strategy that employs a variety of elements specifically designed to nurture leads and move clients along the buyer’s journey stages. A content strategy should be made for each buyer personas, analysing target keywords, topics and tactics for every stage to provide content pieces at every step and link them together to maximise impact.

The content offers must be visually rich, making them more appealing via design elements such as photos, icons or branding elements. The content offers should also be formatted efficiently, featuring headers or bullet lists so that readers can skim the material. Other elements such as relevant links and CTAs should be featured at the end of each piece so that audiences know what to do next. Relevant content offers and some specific examples for them would be:

  • A prospectus for a school, college or university
  • eBooks or Guides evaluating education types: all boys vs all girls, private vs independent
  • Guides or worksheets for parenting: preparing your child for boarding

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2. Optimising landing pages

Landing pages are a vital element of an inbound marketing strategy and the central place where audiences can find, request and sign up for content. Thus, they are the key channel for turning viewers into leads and registering them in your company’s database for the first time. Landing pages can be created and easily managed via HubSpot’s marketing tools, as they do not require any development experience, and they provide a rich template library as well as the option to build your own templates. Landing pages are also perfect locations to feature and promote content offers, drawing the viewer’s attention to exclusive content they can get if they complete a form or take action. When building landing pages, a few tips to keep in mind would be:

  • Keeping the viewers focused on the conversion point by removing navigation
  • Feature graphics such as photos to let users know what is discussed or offered
  • Feature forms and CTAs to guide viewers to content offers and encourage action

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3. Creating website forms

Providing content offers requires a transaction between company and prospect; the prospect offers personal information in exchange for valuable content. Forms represent a specialised and coherent method of recording the audience’s data, storing it and providing the requested content via automated processes available through HubSpot. Landing pages usually include a form when content offers are present, and completing a form converts prospecting visitors to leads ready to be enrolled in the company’s automated marketing processes.

The number of form fields should be carefully considered, as the more fields required, the less likely it is for conversions to occur; especially if applied too early in the funnel. For example, a prospective parent who wishes to learn more about the school would be discouraged if the prospectus download pop-up form had 20 fields that required elements such as their address, phone or child’s name. Whereas these elements are necessary for a school application form, they are not for a pop up form for a prospectus. Thus, a form should only require fields featuring essential information for your team during that particular stage of the buyer’s journey or that specific content offer. Forms featured in the awareness stage should feature minimal fields such as the prospect’s first and last names and email while forms featured in the consideration and decision stages can enquire much more information, as long as it is relevant and vital for the sales and marketing teams. When building forms, a few tips to keep in mind would be:

  • Use appropriate field types for easier submission and segmentation
  • Use progressive fields for additional information and to keep the form tidy
  • Use branding elements in forms and create a content-specific ‘submit’ buttons

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4. Developing content-based lead nurturing emails

Once the forms are submitted, the prospects need to receive their content delivery email, which allows easy access to the content offer requested whenever they need it. Delivering content offers via email is helpful as not only does it store the content in a convenient place where the prospect can easily find, reference or forward it as needed, but also it increases your company’s lead engagement level.

After the first point of contact where the prospect submitted their first form, the company can track what content they are interested in and enrol them in appropriate active or static lists. Lists can be used in the lead nurturing workflows to register contacts into the proper workflows and keep the audience engaged, supported and guided through their customer journey. Automated workflows can be set up in HubSpot via the automation menu. They can be set up to complete a wide variety of tasks, for example, to deliver emails that engage or re-engage leads and update contacts’ information or status or prompt the sales teams when a lead is sales-qualified.

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5. Developing lead nurturing workflows and CTAs

Call-to-action buttons, or CTAs, help your company guide visitors and prospects through the buyer’s journey stages and impact the lead and conversion rates. They usually take the shape of a button embedded on a page, blog, email or social media post that draws the audience’s attention and prompts them to take various actions such as signing for a newsletter, downloading a prospectus or signing up for events. Thus, CTAs are a great way to prompt visitors to sign up and access specialised content and provide further content offers for leads and prospects. When creating CTAs, a few valuable tips would be:

  • Use colours that stand out, make the CTAs easily noticeable
  • Use directional cues and action-oriented language
  • Use designs and graphics that align with your brand and the content offered