Chapter 10 Filling the Funnel with Content Marketing • What are their job responsibilities and what decisions can they make? • How do they measure success? • What are they reading, watching, and downloading? • How do they use social media? Which social networks do they favor? Once you have a more complete picture of your target audience, you can begin to make decisions around the best type of content to create, where to publish that content, and how to promote it. These are all factors that can either significantly improve or decrease the impact content has on your brand. Getting Started with Content Creation Great content marketing does not require a team of content experts, big budgets, journalists, or editors. Successful content marketing addresses the pain points of customers and prospects, and can be handled with minimal resources. Start by strategically creating content that can be adapted and distributed across a variety of mediums. Pre-planning and repurposing content pieces saves on creative costs and increases search engine traffic. Begin with a lead-driving piece of content, such an e-book or a webinar. These assets not only generate leads, but they have legs to become many other forms of content in the future, such as a blog post series, an online course, or a video. Creating Content from Scratch Producing your first e-book can take time, but the amount of content you’ll generate from it will last months, if not the entire year. Consider selecting a subject in advance, and breaking it down into chapters. If your chapters are in the 600–800 word range, each one can first be written and published as a blog post. Then, by combining about eight posts, you can create an e-book of reasonable length. In terms of timing, if you set a goal of writing one post each week, it will take eight weeks to write your e-book. Then, budget a week to write your introduction, conclusion, combine all the content together, and edit it. Add another two to three weeks to work with a graphic designer to format your e-book, and that brings you to about the 12-