Content Marketing Made Simple with Bucket Marketing

One of the top statements that are made to us when consulting with new prospects is:

“We do not have a content strategy.”

In fact, they typically go on to say…

“We’re not clear on what we should be talking about to bring in qualified new business opportunities.“

This is also very indicative of the challenges a new business start-up faces. As a mentor at Arizona State University’s Entrepreneurship and Innovation Group, some of the top companies coming out of this accelerator program have the same type of content challenge. These businesses are either cash strapped or resource-strapped and do not see online marketing or even content marketing with social media as a top priority. They don’t have the resources and knowledge to dedicate time to it. The start-ups are typically asking:

“Where is the low hanging fruit?”

“What is the easiest way to go about content marketing to get the best results for bringing in new opportunities.”

Our recommendation is to think in terms of a bucket. Who are your top three prospects/buyer personas? Who are the ideal customers that you’re looking to attract?

Bucket Marketing
Develop content for the three buckets that represent your top three prospects. You can target your prospects by job title, industry type, demographic make-up, etc. The type of content you develop to attract new opportunities should point back to one of these three prospect types (your buyer personas). Ask these questions about each of your top prospects:

• What are the top five challenges or pains that this prospect experiences?
• What are the success factors that this buyer persona is looking to experience?

Develop a list of the top five successes that each buyer persona is moving towards. Once completed, you will have identified the most important opportunities for securing new business with your prospects. Direct your product, service, and business offerings towards these success factors and away from the pain points.

We recommend reaching out to your customer base. Do you have customers that emulate these buyer personas? If so, let’s validate the success factors and pain point assumptions for the three prospects/buyer personas. Now take these five success factors and five pain points and weave them into stories.

Interview your customers and validate if your customers are experiencing these same types of successes and if your company did, in fact, alleviate the pain points you identified. Get them to share their story and put these stories in their respective marketing buckets.

Now that we have these buckets full of marketing content, how do we get the word out? Take the approach of putting a scent on top of these stories. Personalizing your marketing message specifically for each buyer prospect helps to create a scent that will get engagement.

The next step is to sprinkle these stories into your online marketing channels and social networks; video sites, blog platforms, photo sharing sites, articles, press releases, you name it. These stories will resonate with your prospects, especially when you break it down into multi-media marketing campaigns.

Use all of your social networks. Start sprinkling your content to your marketing channels. Think of each story you have captured as an ongoing campaign of 2 months or more. Attracting new prospects and tracking each campaign’s success will follow if you think of this as an ongoing event vs. a single, one-time publishing experience. Pay close attention to:

• What media is getting the most engagement?
• What’s marketing channels are driving people to your site?
• What is your overall conversion rate overall?

Ultimately, there should be a good call to action page for each campaign with three strong call-to-action. One call-to-action is getting inbound phone calls. If you don’t want people to call you, make sure you have a simple form capture on your landing page. If prospects are not quite ready to contact you, have an email capture as a way for them to give you some piece of communication so you can follow up with them.

This simplified approach to marketing, which we call bucket marketing, can help grow inbound opportunities through a more personalized marketing message to your targeted buyer personas.

Good luck. Have fun. Get great results!