Skip to content
FREE Marketing Grade Comprehensive report with actionable insights
x
Buzzy-chat
Ask AI Buzzy
close chat
fullscreen chat
Buzzy-chat

Buzzy AI Assistant

Human Chat
Buzzy-chat

I'm HIVE's AI assistant and I'm here to add a dash of nectar-sweet fun to your day! Whether you're navigating just for information or looking for a partner with your marketing needs, I'll be your guide on this whimsical journey. So let's make a beeline to adventure and turn your experience into the bee's knees! 🐝✨

Today
- AI: Hi there! I'm Buzzy!
- AI: How can I help you today?
Buzzy-chat
buzzin for answers
How would you like to interact with Buzzy?
Speak
Text
microphone ai
Speaking to Buzzy Sending message Buzzy is responding
** Buzzy might make mistakes occasionally. It's always a good idea to double-check important information with HIVE.
close chat
Let Buzzy ...
HIVE_Inbound_Methodology.png

Great Content: How To Sell Through Education


Dustin Brackett
October 31, 2017

Trying to decide which CMS is right for your website?

View CMS Comparison
Read Time:
Don't have time? Download Now as a PDF

Marketing has changed. The sales process has changed. Consumers have changed. In order to reach your potential customers and really get them into your funnel so that you can nurture them into customers, intrusive outbound marketing just doesn't work anymore.

Marketing and the perception of marketing has completely changed, as we outlined in How Marketing Has Changed: Inbound vs Outbound Marketing. Consumers are no longer interested in "being sold" and are relying more and more on search engines to do their own research. They have less need for salespeople and we, as a society, are responding less and less to traditional outbound marketing.

So, with such a dramatic shift from how we've always done it, how do we continue to reach our prospects and keep our sales moving in the right direction? The key is great educational content.

As we've talked about before, 57% of the sales cycle is complete before a prospect ever reaches out to a salesperson. What this means is that consumers are becoming more educated and they're willing and able to educate themselves about almost any product or service that they need or want. Can you remember the last major purchase that you made without at least doing some sort of research on your own? Probably not.

So, where that leaves us as marketers and business owners, is in a situation where we have to become educators. We have to help our consumers do their own research by providing the information that they're looking for.

Great content is no longer defined by just great design, fun animations, or catchy headlines. It's defined by being helpful, informational, educational, and most of all, useful for our consumers. So how can you go about being more helpful and start creating great content that gets noticed and used by your prospects? Here are 4 steps to do just that...

Create Your Personas

There are few things as important to your marketing success as really, truly understanding who your target personas are. Your target personas are semi-fictional representations of your ideal customers and they should be heavily researched and continuously developed to give you and your team an always improving understanding of who they are, what they're interested in, how they like to do their research, and which format resonates best with them.

Nothing should be done before you have a handle on your target personas. If you haven't already developed your personas, download our free Buyer Persona Worksheet!

Download Your Free Buyer Persona Worksheet

Audit Your Funnel

It's so easy for every business to want to focus all of their attention on the bottom of the funnel, but by doing that, you're also failing to be the source of education that prospects look to when they're doing their research.

Before you start developing a new piece of content, go through every single piece of content that you've shared. That includes blog posts, checklists, eBooks, white papers, infographics, and any other content that you may have available to your prospects. Determine which part of the sales funnel that it falls into and which stage of the inbound methodology that it falls into. By doing this you'll easily spot holes in your content and identify where you need to spend extra time developing new content. We'd bet that it's likely in the top and/or middle of the funnel.

HIVE_Inbound_Methodology.png

Start with Your FAQs

One of the easiest sources of content, for any stage of the funnel, are the questions that you continuously get from your prospects and customers. If one person asks a question, it's likely that many more have the same question, but they just haven't asked it. Start with your frequently asked questions and develop content around each one. 

PRO TIP: Be sure to actually answer the questions and give away the information that your prospects need. Holding back information or only giving half answers is a great way to lose trust with your prospects. Remember, your focus is on becoming an educational resource.

Create & Understand Your Sequence

The next step in your journey to great content is understanding the "what's next?" question. Starting to put together not only how you will follow up with a prospect, but also what other content they may be interested in is very important. Start to think about what the next piece of content that a specific contact may be interested in if they've downloaded or read a specific piece of your content. Doing so will give you a better idea of what other content to promote to each prospect and will help you move your prospects through the funnel.

The landscape of great content has completely changed over the last few years. For content to truly be great, it's got to be helpful, not salesy. All great content starts with a great strategy. The HIVE GrowthPlan is a fully customized, detailed, and executable strategy for all of your digital marketing campaigns. Check out what should be in your digital strategy!

GrowthPlan

Latest Blog Posts

Recover Stronger: SaaS Marketing Strategies for Rebuilding Trust After a Data Breach
Feb 11, 2025

Data Breach Recovery: SaaS Marketing Strategies That Work

Desiree Landa
SaaS Marketing, Data

Data breaches are every SaaS company’s worst nightmare – and for good reason. In 2024 alone, breaches surged by 490%, impacting over a billion individuals globally in the first half of the year. These incidents don’t just compromise data; they...

How A Comprehensive Email Marketing Strategy Increased Engagement
Jan 29, 2025

How A Comprehensive Email Marketing Strategy Increased Engagement

Desiree Landa
Case Study, healthcare

When PaySpan approached HIVE Strategy in 2022, they had a clear challenge: their email marketing efforts weren’t delivering the results they needed. Despite being a leader in healthcare financial transactions, PaySpan’s Patient Financial Engagement...

7 UX-Driven Website Design Trends to Watch Right Now
Jan 27, 2025

7 UX-Driven Website Design Trends to Watch Right Now

Desiree Landa

We’ve all been to that website—the one that instantly makes you want to leave. You can’t find what you’re looking for, the navigation is a mess, and the graphics (hello, 1996 sparkle effects) feel like they belong in a museum exhibit about the early...

HIVE Hexagon
HIVE Hexagon
HIVE Hexagon
HIVE Hexagon
HIVE Hexagon
HIVE Hexagon