Almost three years ago I shifted from Wordpress to Hubspot and embraced an inbound marketing strategy.

Why? Primarily to consolidate a number of different technologies I was using at that time - and secondly to change our marketing and sales efforts to the Inbound Methodology.

Originally I had a wordpress hosted website with a plethora of plugins and integrations to handle forms, newsletters, landing pages, keywords, SEO etc. 

Feed the beast

During the vendor selection stage I interviewed customers of different marketing platforms and one existing Hubspot customer told me to remember to: “Feed the beast.“

Blogging is obviously one of the cornerstones of adapting the Inbound Marketing strategy. And when you are a startup you need to create a lot of great content to constantly “feed the beast”.

What I wish I’d known three years ago.

I found myself re-inventing the wheel and sliced bread every week. “I need new content.” “I need a new blog-post”. What should I write about this week? Skipping this week’s blog-post is suddenly becoming the better alternative for a lot of other things going on in a tech startup - when you do not have the clear picture of what to write about and to whom.

Here’s my advice to companies who want to embrace the Inbound Marketing technology with limited resources. 

What to write about and to whom?

Before anything else - who is your audience and what can you offer? What results do you deliver?

Buyer profile

First of - define your ideal buyer profile. What type of company? Size, industry?

Buyer Persona

Who in the company (buyer profile) should you address? VP Sales, HR director, CxO,? There may very well be more than one.

Challenges/Goals

What challenges do the buyer personas within the buyer profile face that you can solve with your solution or services?

Add structure to your content creation

Create a Matrix and start filling out the blanks. (besides there’s nothing more fulfilling than to see those blanks being replaced with great content you can use later on in your Inbound Sales efforts. Remember great content never expires).

Instead of starting from scratch every Monday morning take a look at the calendar. Divide it into quarters. Decide and determine your primary challenge you can help customers solve with your service and/or solutions. For each quarter you decide what MAIN challenge you want to own.

Create a main piece of content. (This could very well be from existing content you already have).

If you are very early startup - consider starting with the blog posts and within a few weeks the blog posts will be a great foundation for your first ebook - but keep it consistent toward the buyer persona. If your Buyer Profile A is Tech Industry with less than 1.000 employees and your number 1 persona is the VP Sales the headline of your ebook almost writes itself: How to effectively reduce [PROBLEM YOU CAN SOLVE] as a [BUYER PERSONA] in [BUYER PROFILE]

Example: How to effectively reduce Pipeline and Forecast inaccuracies as a VP Sales in the Manufacturing industry.

Consistent cadence is key

Around this piece of content there are numerous blog posts hidden and these should be published at a consistent cadence. Depending on your resources start with one per week.

When you’ve written one blog post that addresses a specific challenge at a specific buyer persona it doesn’t take much to tweak the content to fit another specific buyer persona. (a.k.a. you don’t have to reinvent the wheel every Monday morning).

Every blog post should of course end with a clear Call-to-action: Download the “How to effectively reduce [PROBLEM YOU CAN SOLVE] as a [BUYER PERSONA] in [BUYER PROFILE]”

Getting started checklist

If I could give myself a checklist to follow 2,5 years ago it would look like this:

• Define buyer profile
• Define buyer persona
• Describe the challenges you solve
• Create 1 blog post per week around the persona/challenge matrix
• Create 1 main piece of content (an eBook or similar) every quarter around a specific challenge you solve. Own this topic!
• Be consistent!

Stick to the program - don’t skip a beat. Be consistent. Your efforts WILL pay off.

If you have any additions to my "getting started plan" please use the comments below.