Buy Cycle Link Building: A Content Marketing Guide for Link Strategists
How content marketers and link builders can play nicely together to build referral traffic by creating informative, high quality, or purchase-inducing content.
How content marketers and link builders can play nicely together to build referral traffic by creating informative, high quality, or purchase-inducing content.
Content marketers know that informative, high-utility content converts readers into customers along a distinct buy cycle. Link strategists know that promoting informative, high-utility content can earn links that drive SERP rankings. Let’s look at some ways that content marketers and link builders can play nicely together.
At the beginning of the buy cycle your prospective customer has just “stepped in the mud.” They have recognized (or suspect, or accepted) that they have a need, a pain, a problem, a disease, an issue, a concern, a dirty shoe, etc. Many will go online — to social networks and search engines — to learn more about their newly discovered need.
Address this stage on and off site with self diagnosis-oriented content that educates prospects on effectively understanding the scope of their issue and provides them with tools for deeper, more precise analysis.
Following from the “stepped in the mud” metaphor, let’s imagine our company sells shoe cleaning supplies for consumers. You’d guide the prospect toward asking questions such as:
Next, we create some high-utility content such as PDF guides to identifying types of mud, as well as some guides to identifying the most common shoe materials. We also create a worst-case scenario infographic that educates people on identifying edge-case gunk such as oil, gum and worse.
Lastly, we interview industry experts and niche celebrities who have “stepped in mud” and ask them questions surrounding their needs-recognition moment.
Measure the number and type of mentions earned along with direct referral traffic conversions at the top of your funnel.
Once the prospective customer has “self-diagnosed” their need, they often begin looking for a solution. Again, many people (think of them as researchers at this stage) turn to social networks and search engines to learn how to solve their problem.
Your job is to make sure that your solution-oriented content contains language used by your targeted researchers, and that it’s awesome enough to get shared on its merit alone (though you will definitely be promoting it). So it’s time to begin building out content around the various solutions to the problem.
Let’s continue with our “stepped in the mud” company. Now we’re creating downloadable PDFs on effectively and safely cleaning the different materials shoes are made of.
We made a shoe cleaning checklist that includes product suggestions for an emergency cleaning kit. We’re recommending techniques and tactics for getting great deals on shoes, assuming they are ruined. We conducted a group interview with shoe bloggers asking them their techniques. We’ve even make some membership-only videos that demonstrate how to get shoes “clean enough” without any products at all.
Measure the number and type of mentions earned along with direct referral traffic conversions one rung down your funnel. Now you’re potentially turning visitors into subscribers, and capturing email addresses with your incredibly tempting PDFs and membership-only content.
In the course of needs and solution research, your prospective customers received a number of recommendations both directly and indirectly. They know about your brand now because you created great content and promoted it to niche media publishers, forums, and Q&A sites all along the early stages of the buy cycle. They know about your competitors too though and now they’re starting to do some comparisons.
Now we’re going to start seeing a bit more brand questions and queries from our prospective audience. Searches like: [Your Brand Name”, [Brand Name review”, [how does Brand Name work”, [Brand Name vs. Brand Name”, and [solution category A vs. solution category B”.
There are a number of ways to intersect with queries at this stage using content that enables consideration and comparison.
Obviously any off site content will ideally have your brand name in it — stuff like product/service reviews and subject-matter expert interviews so that your brand SERPs look great and demonstrate a high level of involvement with your niche media.
On site, we’re looking for content such as category solution comparisons — for “Stepped in the Mud, LLC” this could be comparisons between chemicals and cleaning methods. For more linkability/shareability onsite, look for ways to engage with your niche celebrities by asking them about their preferred solutions.
By now your prospects have diagnosed their problems, understand their next steps, and compared options with your branded content. They’ve gotten the education required to deeply understand the value of what you sell. Nice work, “Stepped in the Mud, LLC!”
Now it’s time to seal the deal with a purchase. Your site is already a conversion steel trap, right? So your conversion rate optimizer should definitely be involved at this point and let you know the main pages on your site that seem to turn visitors into customers.
Some fantastic purchase-driving content includes items such as testimonials, reviews, niche celebrity how-tos that focus on your products and (with extreme caution) coupons.
We’re building referral traffic to content that educates prospects all along your buy cycle. The content for each stage must lead to and enable conversions such as links, shares/tweets, email address capture, new member sign ups, Twitter follows, Facebook likes, PDF downloads, webinar sign ups and more, all of which lead up to the purchase and continued customer engagement.
Now, go get ’em!