Inbound Marketing: What content should you publish to generate awareness?

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According to Adweek, 81% of consumers research online before making a purchase . Businesses that want to take advantage of this sales opportunity should focus their efforts on generating inbound marketing content based on the buyer's journey and a deep understanding of their Buyer Persona.

Buyer's Journey Stages and Content Types

The buyer 's journey is the active research process that marketing with stockholder database people go through before making a purchase. It is divided into four stages . In all of them, content is essential:

Discovery (awareness): This is the point at which the buyer is looking for content that helps them solve general problems and get answers on specific topics. Therefore, everything published in this phase should be characterized by being completely educational, not talking about specific solutions and, much less, mentioning your product or service. It is about establishing yourself as an authoritative and reliable source in the sector.
Consideration: This is the phase where people research the different solutions that exist to solve a problem or satisfy a need. Therefore, the content should focus on this.
Decision: This is the stage where prospects are willing to hear about specific products and services, where they look for content and resources that help them choose between one offer or another.
Evaluation of the product or service purchased: this is the opinion of customers regarding the entire previous process and their experience as users.
Contents to generate awareness

Clearly, the type of content to offer in each of the first three stages of the journey is completely different. For the Awareness phase , it has to be educational and answer the questions your target audience is asking about general problems. The formats that are best suited to achieve this goal are:

Analyst reports.
Research reports.
eBooks.
Editorial content (articles, interviews, columns, essays, practical advice, etc.)
Informative infographics.
Interviews.
Whitepapers.
List type articles.
Tutorials (video or written).
Courses.
Content examples for the awareness phase

Imagine that you have a pet shop and you want to sell dog planning pills. An educational content on this subject, which does not yet talk about specific solutions, could be:

An eBook that talks about canine heat, pregnancy and the entire motherhood process.
A list of symptoms that occur in female dogs when they are in heat.
An interview with a veterinarian about heat and the reproductive process in dogs.
A video showing the physical and psychological changes in a dog when she goes into heat.
The idea is to teach your prospects everything about this phenomenon. Then comes the content with the different solutions (consideration phase), and the one that talks specifically about your product and its advantages over the competition's (decision stage).

Another example of content for Inbound Marketing designed specifically for the awareness phase is Postedin's eBooks , which cover topics on Inbound Marketing, content strategies, and SEO positioning, among others of interest to companies that want to have a presence on the web and increase their sales.

A consideration on formats

The formats mentioned above, although ideal for generating awareness , may vary according to the characteristics of your Buyer Persona . In addition, their use alone does not guarantee positive results. As is the rule in the Inbound methodology, each piece to be published has to be optimized for SEO and truly respond to the needs of your target audience.