by Sarah Kelleher 
Content marketing is an effective tool companies can use to promote themselves as experts and lead prospects through the buying cycle.
To plan out a killer content strategy, you need to focus on two vital components:
- Timing – your content needs to reach prospects at the right time to match their stage in the buying cycle. Aim for softer, more exploratory content during the discovery phase and business benefits and more sale-led content towards the evaluation stage.
- Medium – some people like the detail of a whitepaper whilst others prefer to scan the key facts in an infographic or short blog post. Be sure to re-purpose your content into multiple formats to reach your maximum potential audience.
It goes without saying that the topic of the content should be engaging. But planning out your communication cadence and delivering content in the right formats is essential in ensuring your content performs.
If you truly want to enhance your business development efforts with content marketing and automation, you must create content that guides prospects step-by-step through the buying cycle.
Creating a variety of content for each stage of the process is an important part of connecting your content marketing and business development efforts. Marketing automation then becomes a scalable way for you to deliver those resources and drive prospects towards a decision.