There are three basic steps to inbound marketing: getting found, converting visitors to leads, and measuring performance so you can improve your approach. One of the most important parts of inbound marketing is generating valuable content that attracts visitors to your website and landing pages.
Once you've determined your target audience and a plan for connecting with them, it's time to create useful content optimized for search and for social sharing. If you're reading this blog, chances are it's your job to create or share useful content to help your organization get found.
You also probably have a bunch of other responsibilities. Creating content takes time. Try to maximize your efficiency by stretching that content as far as possible without making it stale. You can do this by presenting it in different ways at different times on different channels. For example, you may want to share an image on Facebook on Saturday morning with text that includes a link to your blog post. But on LinkedIn, you may want to simply share a link with the associated metadata description that auto-populates and share this at 7:30 a.m. on Tuesday.
1. Plan Your Image Dimensions to be as Universal as Possible
Your assets such as graphic design images or stock photos should be brand-consistent and sized properly for the channels where they'll appear. This may mean creating different versions of the same image in different dimensions for your blog, for email marketing, or for social channels. But consider ways to create the fewest images possible to save time.
For example, you may have an automatic RSS-fed email newsletter on email service provider MailChimp that pulls your blog posts. Images display well in certain dimensions in such a newsletter. To avoid creating two images, you may want to adjust the dimensions of the images created for your blog so they'll display well both in email and in your blog post. One image created. Less time.
2. Create Multiple Images for the Same Post
If you're writing a post with five tips to do something, you may as well distill those tips into five different images. For example, you could make them Facebook-friendly images (403×403 pixels) with your company's branding as the background and the simple, one-line sentence for each tip. You could also take those five tips and create one, long infographic that will be great for Pinterest.
For Facebook, you could then take those images and schedule them across a week or two with text that links back to the original post. This way, you'll get maximum exposure for your original content without scheduling the same, tired post multiple times. Also, you never know which tips or quotes will resonate with different users. Maybe you discover that tip #3 is popular and you can then create more content around that.
3. Where Else Can You Use it?
Once you've created visual assets to support your inbound marketing campaign, consider how else you can leverage that material. Perhaps images you created for Facebook will also work for Instagram or Flickr. Maybe you can submit your infographic to sites specializing in infographics. Perhaps the graphics become part of a presentation pitch for your company on your expertise or services. Also, be sure to encourage forward-facing members of your organization to share your original content on their accounts, especially LinkedIn and Twitter where professional-related content is embraced.
And don't forget to go back and revisit your older content to share it. Maybe you had a popular blog post that's a few months old. It's ok to tweet that again with a new message, especially if it's content that supports your current inbound marketing campaign.